Violent Origins of Authoritarian Variation: Rebellion Type and Regime Type in Cold War Southeast Asia

Abstract

Dictatorships are every bit as institutionally diverse as democracies, but where does this variation come from? This article argues that different types of internal rebellion influence the emergence of different types of authoritarian regimes. The critical question is whether rebel forces primarily seek to seize state power or to escape it. Regional rebellions seeking to escape the state raise the probability of a military-dominated authoritarian regime, since they are especially likely to unify the military while heightening friction between civilian and military elites. Leftist rebellions seeking to seize the state are more likely to give rise to civilian-dominated dictatorships by inspiring ‘joint projects’ in which military elites willingly support party-led authoritarian rule. Historical case studies of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam illustrate the theory, elaborating how different types of violent conflict helped produce different types of dictatorships across the breadth of mainland and island Southeast Asia during the Cold War era.

War Makes the Regime: Regional Rebellions and Political Militarization Worldwide

“…Our argument is rooted in Cold War Southeast Asia (Slater 2010; Slater 2018). Although virtually all Southeast Asian countries experienced severe internal warfare after World War II, they differed sharply in the predominant type of conflict.…”

“…The key distinction to emerge from this new wave of research is the contrast between authoritarian regimes in which power rests in a ruling party and those in which it rests in the military – a recurrent variation that remains to be systematically explained. Building on Slater's (2018) recent work, this article argues that a productive way to tackle this puzzle is to focus on the gap in the literature on the macro-level political consequences of war.…”

“…Our case material builds on a convenience sample and is only meant to serve as an empirical illustration, not a systematic test, of the mechanisms. As the causal mechanisms go beyond Slater (2018), the empirical material used to illustrate the mechanisms is new, although drawn from some of the same cases. The main point of this section is to theoretically motivate our general expectation that regional wars are more likely to lead to militarization – the core hypothesis and empirical focus of this article.…”

“…Regional rebellions – where rebels seek separation or autonomy from the political center, not its conquest – are associated with transitions to militarized regimes. Building on Slater (2010) and Slater (2018), this article furnishes a deductively grounded theory for this association between a distinctive type of war – regional rebellions – and one particular type of authoritarian regime: militarized regimes . To explain the link, we emphasize two causal mechanisms: (1) the disalignment of preferences between civilian and military leaders and (2) the military's autonomous operational experience in fighting regional wars.…”

“… 5 For the argument and further evidence that leftist, center-seeking rebellions spawned durable and civilianized authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, see Slater (2010), Slater (2018), and Slater and Smith (2016). …”