ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the sets of elites and social coalitions for analyzing democracy's collapse or persistence in Southeast Asia. A notion of populism can aid in understanding democracy's breakdown in Southeast Asia. A populist trajectory stemming from class affiliation and redistributive pressures only unfolds in the absence of countervailing sentiments. Homogenous social structures are susceptible to class affiliations and populist mobilizing. Fractionalized social structures, especially in bi-polar settings unalleviated by religious cross-cuttingness and geographic segmentation, grow vulnerable to ethnic identification and mobilizing. In Thailand, ethnic fractionalization, though significant, is much lower than in Indonesia. It thus poses fewer barriers to class-based affiliations. Finding congenial soil, Thaksin, an ambitious elite, vigorously sowed the populist appeals. Accordingly, only after triggering democracy's breakdown might elites gain cohesion and build their Leviathan. However, this is founded less in any pact of protection than in the stark elimination of defectors.
