Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Southeast Asian Politics Has Arrived: Evidence from APSA 2013

    Political scientists who work on Southeast Asia have historically felt marginalized from the mainstream of political science. Indeed, some the most well-known scholars of Southeast Asian politics (in particular, Benedict Anderson and James Scott) are also known as critics of political science as practiced in most U.S. political science departments.

    Viewed against that background, this list is rather amazing. It contains the Division Chairs for the 2013 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Each “division” represents a subgrouping of political scientists doing research in a particular subfield of political science. These are the people who have been vested by the discipline with primary responsibility for deciding which papers will appear at APSA’s 2013 annual meeting: the main event of the main professional organization in political science.

    And if you are familiar with the names, you will find that Southeast Asianists feature prominently in this list. Not just people who have been to Southeast Asia or who have written about the region in some loose way, but people who have made their careers at least in part through extensive field research in Southeast Asia and who can conduct primary research in the region’s languages. The five in which Southeast Asianists are represented include

    • Comparative Politics
    • Comparative Politics of Developing Countries
    • New Political Science
    • Political Economy
    • Representation and Electoral Systems

    In fact, these five are among the subfields that are most centrally important contemporary Southeast Asian political studies (although we are missing Conflict Processes, Women and Politics, Race and Ethnic Politics, and several others).

    This is really meaningful. It should be taken as prima facie evidence that is no longer true (if ever it were true) that field work and primary research in Southeast Asia is incompatible with professional success in an American political science department. And to be clear, there is nothing like a policy of positive discrimination in favor of Southeast Asianists in APSA. Rather, this happened naturally—or at least, as naturally as these things ever happen in any professional organization.

    (Another interpretation you might have is that scholars of Southeast Asian politics have been brainwashed by their discipline, falling into line like good little foot soldiers. If you know any of these people like I do, you’ll know that this isn’t even close to accurate.)

    Southeast Asian politics, in other words, has arrived. Doing research on Southeast Asia is no less a part of mainstream political science than is doing research on any other part of the world. Moreover, despite what some may believe, cross-national quantitative research does not appear to be the Great Tradition in modern comparative politics (although most of the scholars listed above have done at least some such research in their careers).

    There is still a way to go: the population of Latin America is about the same as the population of Southeast Asia, yet Southeast Asianists remain much less common than Latin Americanists in American political science departments. But this is good news for Southeast Asian politics and for the interdisciplinary field of Southeast Asian studies. If I have anything to say about it, the next step should be bringing political science back into the Association for Asian Studies.

  • 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.