The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Thirkell-White, Ben

The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia. By Erik Martinez Kuhonta. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Hardcover: 352pp.

Southeast Asia's "miracle" growth was both rapid and relatively equitable. Much work has been done to analyse the causes of growth and the development of a capitalist class in Southeast Asia, but far less attention has been paid to understanding how lower income groups came to benefit from this process. In this book, Erik Martinez Kuhonta asks how the politics of Southeast Asian countries can account for differing outcomes in poverty reduction and equity across the region. His answer is that poverty reduction requires appropriate institutions, particularly political parties.

Kuhonta provides us with an in depth comparison of the political economy of growth in Malaysia (equitable) and Thailand (less so) and a shorter extension of these findings to Vietnam (equitable) and the Philippines (less so). He argues that in the success cases the poor achieved significant institutional representation in political parties embodying a broad-based social coalition. The breadth of coalition ensured that parties were "pragmatic" in the sense that they rarely pursued poverty reduction at the expense of social stability and growth. At the same time, to secure an important rural support base, parties created institutions that penetrated the local level in rural areas. These institutional structures sustained political support and provided channels for rural concerns to be fed upwards from the local level to relatively receptive central policy-makers.

In the less equitable cases, the poor were represented by civil society organizations (CSOs) but they failed to find an institutional place in the party system, which remained elite dominated, despite constitutional democracy. In both the Philippines and Thailand, elite-dominated parties in fragmented party systems tended to obtain rural support through vote-buying and patronage. CSOs were sometimes able to influence the policy agenda to overthrow particular groups of elites or affect specific policy areas but this success was not institutionalized into sustained political influence.

Kuhonta argues that institutional analysis tells us more than explanations based on democratization, class alliances or the interethnic balance of power. Democracy can fail to represent the poor where they remain excluded from party systems. Different historical...