Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely than expected. The result has been what I call party cartelization, Indonesian-style. This differs significantly from canonical cases of party cartelization in Europe. Yet it exhibits the same troubling outcome for democratic accountability: the stunted development of a clearly identifiable party opposition. Since the advent of direct presidential elections in 2004, Indonesian democratic competition has unsurprisingly assumed somewhat more of a government vs. opposition cast. But this shift has arisen more from contingent failures of elite bargaining than from any decisive change in the power-sharing game. So long as Indonesia's presidents consider it strategically advantageous to share power with any party that declares its support, opposition will remain difficult to identify and vulnerable to being extinguished entirely in the world's largest emerging democracy.

Patterns of party switching in Taiwan have played an important role in the development and relative stability of its party system. In this study I aim to track key patterns of how politicians switched their partisan affiliation during the critical periods of party system change. I examine the level of party switching, where party switching was most prevalent, when switching was most common, and the most common types of switching since the advent of multiparty politics in Taiwan. Party switching is an important phenomenon in the development of party politics in Taiwan but thus far it has received surprisingly little systematic attention. This is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle this understudied topic.

Formally institutionalized party organization is usually considered a prerequisite for the development of programmatic linkages between parties and voters. However, in this article I show that political parties in South Korea have succeeded in stabilizing interparty competition through programmatic linkages without making any significant efforts to build a formal organizational base. In fact, it could be argued that South Korea is a “partyless” democracy, as political parties get easily captured by the interests of ambitious politicians, thus failing to establish themselves as independent actors. I therefore make a more general argument about the concept of party system institutionalization: we need to rethink the current practice of aggregating the different attributes of party system institutionalization into a single scale, as these attributes do not seem to be connected in a linear fashion.

The directly elected representatives to Hong Kong's Legislative Council are chosen by list proportional representation (PR) using the Hare Quota and Largest Remainders (HQLR) formula. This formula rewards political alliances of small to moderate size and discourages broader unions. Hong Kong's political leaders have responded to those incentives by fragmenting their electoral alliances rather than expanding them. The level of list fragmentation observed in Hong Kong is not inherent to PR elections. Alternative PR formulas would generate incentives to form broader, more encompassing alliances. Indeed, most countries that use PR employ such formulas, and the most commonly used PR formula would generate incentives opposite to HQLR's, rewarding broader electoral alliances rather than divisions.

In this article I analyze the extent and causes of party system fragmentation in Indonesia's provincial and district parliaments. Focusing on the results of the first three post-Suharto elections in 1999, 2004, and 2009, I first highlight that local-level fragmentation is not only generally higher than national-level fragmentation but also that it has consistently increased over the three elections and that fragmentation has been particularly high in Eastern Indonesia. I then explain these three trends as a result of three main factors: First, electoral institutions applied between 1999 and 2009 facilitated fragmentation and poor party system institutionalization, mainly due to the introduction of an open list system in 2009 and the absence of a parliamentary threshold at the local level. Second, low levels of party institutionalization progressively individualized local party politics and made it normal for candidates to switch to smaller parties if it suited their interests, thereby exacerbating fragmentation. Third, electoral campaigning for local parliaments has been dominated by traditional methods based on personal relationships and networks rather than lavish public relations campaigns with expensive TV ads, further reinforcing the effects of the first two factors.

In the aftermath of the 2006 and 2014 Thai coups, observers declared the resurrection of the bureaucratic polity. Bureaucrats, though, remained influential even during the period of 1992–2006, when elected politicians were thought to command the Thai state. Bureaucratic involvement in politics poses a challenge for dominant political science theories of politician–bureaucrat relationships, which draw heavily from principal–agent frameworks. I apply agency theory to Thailand, testing three different hypotheses derived from the theory. Examining legislative productivity and control over bureaucratic career trajectories, I find that elected politicians increasingly acted as principals of the Thai state from 1992 through 2006, and to a lesser degree from 2008 to 2013. Thai bureaucrats, though, have frequently engaged in the political sphere, blunting political oversight and expanding their independence vis-à-vis politicians. This suggests that the principal–agent model overlooks the range of resources that bureaucracies can bring to bear in developing countries, granting them greater autonomy than anticipated. As such, theories of the politician–bureaucrat relationship in developing states need to better account for the mechanisms through which bureaucrats exercise policy discretion and political influence.

In this article I explore how the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules contributed to the failure of ethnic compromise during the democratic period (1948–1962) in Myanmar by encouraging extremist parties, hardening ethnic divisions, and causing political deadlock, ironically the same charges the centripetal school lays against proportional representation (PR). This puzzle of “PR outcomes” under FPTP is explained using geographic information systems techniques that map the country's 2010 electoral districts onto an ethnic population map. It shows that ethnic party success in the 2010 election closely follows the distribution of ethnic groups in Myanmar and that given the high level of ethno-geographic segregation in Myanmar the representation of ethnic parties would be similar under PR and the alternative vote to the current FPTP. I conclude by discussing Indonesia's electoral rules as a possible solution for Myanmar. The general theoretic contribution is that, although past scholars have generally argued that FPTP is bad for ethnically divided societies, their mechanisms are incorrect for ethno-geographically segregated societies.

Among the most interesting questions in Thai politics today is how to account for the rise and (until recently) the success of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party. This article describes and analyzes some of the factors that contributed to the rise and success of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai, arguing that neither Thaksin's personal assets nor the effects of the crisis are enough to explain Thai Rak Thai's rise and success. It focuses instead on the 1997 changes to Thailand's constitution. These institutional reforms were crucial because they altered Thailand's political-institutional landscape in fundamental ways. The reforms provided new opportunities and incentives for political actors that Thaksin and his party adeptly took advantage of. The argument presented is that the key reforms that helped pave the way for the rise of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai were those reforms that helped reduce the number of political parties and that increased the power of the prime minister relative to coalition partners and intraparty factions.