Populism in Southeast AsiaAuthor :
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Published : Thursday 29 November 2018
Description
Populism is a political strategy through which charismatic leaders establish links with unattached mass constituencies. Identifying all cases of populism in Southeast Asia's democracies, this Element shows that populist mobilization thrives because parties are so weak. This weakness is caused by institutional and political economic factors.
Conceiving of populism as the charismatic mobilization of a mass movement in pursuit of political power, this Element theorizes that populists thrive where ties between voters and either bureaucratic or clientelistic parties do not exist or have decayed. This is because populists' ability to mobilize electoral support directly is made much more likely by voters not being deeply embedded in existing party networks. This model is used to explain the prevalence of populism across the major states in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. It extracts lessons from these Southeast Asian cases for the study of populism.
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