ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the alternative patterns, or "styles", of political leadership that emerged as the foundational leaders inevitably gave way to more institutionally constrained successors. It makes a comparative assessment of the legacies of the Asian strongmen. It reveals the quality of, and prospects for, democracy in East and Southeast Asia, with the almost unanswerable question of whether some alternative political system is more likely to prevail here, and if so what kind. The chapter concerns differentiating between the eight cases, and attempting to group them in accordance with an interpretive typology that connects the recent experiences of forceful political leadership in this region with more general conceptions of political autocracy, succession and democratization. Nevertheless, there are some inferences that can be drawn from the way the chapter has characterized the strengths and weaknesses of strongman's rule in general. There are some further possibilities that can be derived from studying different types of strong personalist rule.
