Making Mainland Southeast Asia Safe for Autocracy

Leaders of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand at the 2018 Mekong River Commission Summit, Siem Reap | Photo: Vietnam National Mekong Commission

In an article by New Mandala, Gregory Raymond asserts the importance of the mutual influence of Mainland Southeast Asia’s authoritarian regimes on each other—and their cooperation in repressing dissident forces.

While there is variation in how to characterise that decline, and how serious it is in historical terms, a turn away from liberal democratic forms of governance worldwide is one of the major contemporary trends in international politics. The decline comprises both a deterioration in democratic institutions and governance in established democracies and in what limited democratic practice exists in autocracies. These parallel trends are reflected in falling scores across a range of democracy rating indices such as the Freedom House Index, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. This decline is thought to have begun around 2006.

The decline of democracy has been significantly more serious in mainland Southeast Asia, compared with the maritime states. Between 2005 and 2023, the average score for among significant maritime Southeast Asian states (the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia) on V-Dem’s Deliberative Democracy Index declined by 9%.  Over the same period, average scores across five mainland Southeast Asian states fell by 46%.  A comparable maritime–mainland gap can be found in the democracy scores of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index: between 2006 to 2022 maritime Southeast Asian states slipped by 5%, while the analogous scores for the mainland states fell by 9%.

Looking more deeply into the trend data reveals that the scores for the two formal communist party-states, Laos and Vietnam, have remained relatively constant, albeit low. The states which have produced the falling regional-average scores are Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar. As the figure below shows, Thailand and Cambodia especially have evinced the greatest downward shifts, moving back towards the consistently low scores of their one-party neighbours since 2005.