This book provides a survey of political change in Southeast Asian countries, from independence to the twenty-first century. Any such book makes choices regarding the approach, historical material and nature of the analysis. I present an analytical framework that invites the reader to think about the role of several factors that can be compared across cases, and that frequently have been raised as broad explanations for political change. I also emphasize some of the concepts that specialists of Southeast Asia have introduced to explain more unique aspects of political change, its absence, or the character and quality of the region's political regimes. At the same time, the book remains sensitive to history. The chapters present narratives of political change in each country, in order to both assess the explanatory value of comparative factors, as well as specific historical circumstances that have influenced political trajectories in significant ways. The book's challenge is to provide a relatively cohesive, yet sufficiently complex, explanation that allows for comparison across different countries, while offering a broad historical survey. Southeast Asia is a vast, diverse and complex region that is composed of eleven countries. The book covers all of these except the small country of Brunei. By covering such a broad range of countries, in the exposition of political change I necessarily stress a more specific set of questions and issues that I carry from one country to the next.

The book is therefore by no means exhaustive. I chose to focus on changes in regime type, basic political institutions, as well as governments where they introduced significantly new directions. The presence or absence of democracy determines a terrain that allows or restricts other groups from advancing their interests or pursuing their goals. I view the right of political association and participation, restrictions on political organizations, the ability to express dissent, types of representation, and other such characteristics as basic parameters that define a space in which citizens and groups can operate.