Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • Malaysians Buy American

    The recent story about the Malaysian government paying conservative pundits to attack Anwar Ibrahim is fascinating from many angles. From the U.S. perspective, it’s a little dash of intrigue for debates about partisanship and media capture. For a student of Asia, though, it’s much more interesting. The Barisan Nasional regime thinks that it has to attack Anwar in the U.S. media!

    Is this a reasonable fear on the BN’s part? I think so—just imagine a world in which global pro-democracy advocates are made just a little bit more skeptical about Anwar and what he represents by reading about Anwar’s dirty laundry. (Anwar has plenty, having had a long career both in and out of the ruling party, and it is not my purpose here to defend him or attack him.) In all, it seems a rather inexpensive way to tarnish Anwar’s global image among possible fellow travelers abroad.

    Many observers may not know, though, that there is also an interesting parallel with the BN regime’s willingness to embrace liberal U.S. academics when doing so is politically expedient. I’m thinking here of none other than Mahathir Mohamad and Paul Krugman.

    Let’s go back to 1998 and the Asian Financial Crisis. In what was at the time considered a radical move, Malaysia broke the rules for adjusting to the crisis, imposing temporary capital controls in order to simultaneously stimulate the domestic economy and stabilize the ringgit. It turns out that several months before this, Paul Krugman began arguing in fairly standard economic terms about why Malaysia’s policies might be a good idea (his famous essay “Saving Asia: It’s Time to Get Radical” was in the September 7, 1998 edition of Forbes, and Mahathir’s radical policies when into effect on September 1, 1998). It’s clear that the real motivation for Malaysia’s adjustment strategy was actually political, not economic—I wrote a whole book about this. But it does happen to be the case that Malaysia’s adjustment strategy had the economic consequences that Krugman and other more heterodox economists had anticipated. In other words, the capital controls worked.

    If you go down the memory hole that is the internet, you can find a Slate essay by Krugman entitled “Capital Control Freaks,” in which he discusses being flown to Malaysia to have a dialogue with Mahathir. He’s well aware of what’s motivating the trip: “to provide a veneer of respectability to a regime that has lately developed the habit of putting inconvenient people in jail.” But clearly, Mahathir was happy to use Krugman to help him score political points.

    The larger message is that Malaysia’s embrace of influential conservative U.S. pundits is not essentially partisan in nature. More likely, their choice to embrace Josh Trevino and the conservative pundits in recent years is that they (perhaps unlike someone like Krugman) would not be so forthright as to divulge their financial interest in saying things that help the BN.

  • Institutions, Authoritarianism, and Field Research

    I am part of a neat collective discussion of authoritarian legislatures over at Nate Jensen‘s blog. Nate emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I knew any good research on legislatures and policy outputs in Malaysia or Indonesia (during the authoritarian New Order period). I responded something along the lines of “no, because that’s not who makes policy,” which generated further discussion of what these things are for, and so on. Go read the post: it’s fascinating, with contributions from Courtenay Conrad, Scott Desposato, Barbara Geddes, Victor Menaldo, Thomas Remington, Ora John Reuter, Milan Svolik, Rory Truex, and Joe Wright in addition to yours truly.

    I written a bit about institutions under authoritarianism; in particular, on why scholars of authoritarianism need to be skeptical—or at least careful—about attributing causal power to them. It is the central point in a forthcoming review essay on the institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism, and it also shows up in my book. I can sum up my general views with a quote from the review essay:

    There are few theories that can link authoritarian institutions to anything beyond regime survival and general public policies. But authoritarian regimes do many things besides grow/stagnate and survive/collapse. They decide to murder their subjects or not; to favor certain ethnic groups or not; to integrate with the global economy in various ways; to mobilize, ignore, or “reeducate” their citizens; to respond to domestic challenges with repression, concessions, or both; to insulate their bureaucracies from executive interference or not; to delegate various ruling functions to security forces, mercenaries or criminal syndicates, or subnational political units; and to structure economies in various ways that might support their rule. Authoritarian institutions will tell us little about these outcomes, and if we are to explain variation in these factors across regimes and across time, close attention to other variables will be necessary.

    Why I am so skeptical of institutional approaches to authoritarianism? I think that it comes down to my field experience in Southeast Asia, which was in the end animated around the question of where policies come from (a “dependent variable first” approach) rather than a desire to theorize institutions and estimate their causal effects (an “independent variable first” approach) in two very different authoritarian contexts. This orientation led me to look for the drivers of policy rather than the effects of institutions, so when I see various general claims about the effects of institutions, I filter them through my own country knowledge.

    (I also might just be a contrarian by disposition, but let’s leave that aside for now.)

    This issue—the role of field work in multi-method disciplines like political science—is an interesting topic for further reflection. I hope to produce at least one more post on it soon. Suffice it to say, the field experience that I just described would be considered by many to be old fashioned area studies rather than proper modern comparative politics, which recalls my always popular OMFG Exogenous Variation post from last December.