ABSTRACT
Within conflict research it is widely held that democracies are by and large unaffected by violent internal conflicts. In contrast, political systems which combine elements of authoritarianism with democratic features – also known as ‘semi-democracies’ – are thought to be more prone to violent internal conflicts due to their incoherent institutional make-up. The quantitative findings presented here challenge this view for Southeast Asia. Whereas the region’s semi-democratic regimes, especially Malaysia and Singapore, did not experience violent conflicts over the past decades, democracies like Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand were highly affected by endemic political violence during the period between 1990 and 2007. A qualitative perspective on the region’s democracies and semi-democracies shows, first, that the ‘democratic domestic peace’ hypothesis, which views democratic rule as a genuine method of conflict management, hinges on the requirement that the democratic system in question is a liberal democracy, safeguarding electoral responsiveness, constitutional limitations on executive power and integrative decision-making procedures. Southeast Asia’s democracies, in contrast, have serious deficits in all of these respects. Second, the qualitative analysis shows that the region’s semi-democracies are not as ‘incoherent’ as they might appear, but have developed sophisticated institutions of inter-ethnic elite accommodation and power sharing, which enable them to manage political conflicts in a way their ‘defective’ and ‘illiberal’ democratic neighbours cannot.
