Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. ix, 297 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$39.95, paper; free ebook. ISBN 978047203886.
Opposition forces to autocrats are not always united and such opposition disunity may protract the process of democratization, to the despair of democracy supporters. Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies by Elvin Ong tackles this very question of under what conditions opposition parties form an alliance against authoritarian incumbents. With two comparative studies of the Philippines and South Korea in the 1980s and of Malaysia and Singapore in the 1990s and 2010s, the book highlights the importance of opposition perceptions of regime vulnerability and of mutual dependence for the formation of pre-electoral alliances.
There are multiple obstacles to forming and sustaining unity among opposition parties, such as intra-ideological differences, divisive calculations due to electoral systems, and autocrats’ interference and repression. Under these circumstances, opposition politicians are always tempted to turn against the commitment they made to unity, and the enforcement of pre-electoral compromises for post-election power sharing often remains uncertain. These obstacles to the making of a working opposition alliance, the author argues, can be overcome only when there is ample ex ante information about the nearing ending of autocrats and about the possibility of opposition’s winning by staying together.
Following the theoretical set up in chapters 1 and 2, the book examines opposition unity in the Philippines and its failure in South Korea during presidential elections in the late 1980s (chapters 4 and 5). The author finds that despite plenty of information about the authoritarian regime’s weakening in 1987 South Korea, there was little information available about mutual dependency between two opposition rivals, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam. In the Philippines, in contrast, two kinds of information were available to opposition politicians and thus sustained the alliance between Corazon Aquino and Salvador Laurel in 1985.
Another comparison point between Malaysia and Singapore is extensively discussed in chapters 6 through 8. These two countries are representative examples of electoral autocracies where the incumbent party exercises various methods to control political opposition and civil society. Despite these repressive conditions, opposition parties in Malaysia experimented with alliance building over several elections and this incremental experience reinforced their mutual dependence and thus undergirded their electoral unity and strength in 2018. In Singapore, which represents the best negative case in this comparative examination, opposition parties failed to form any credible alliance due to the persistent dominance of the ruling party and uncertainty over whether an opposition coalition would in fact provide a benefit.
Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies is a welcome addition to the scholarship on hybrid regimes, political parties, and democracy, with its in-depth examination of East and Southeast Asian cases. It addresses theoretically and empirically important questions about the possibility of opposition unity and its electoral rise under electoral autocracies and its findings contribute to our renewed understanding of the durability and vulnerability of authoritarian incumbents. It also enriches our knowledge on party politics and democratization in Asia, which remains quite thin compared to that in other regions.
Yet, the book also leaves some questions half-addressed or unanswered. First, pro-democracy movements and oppositional civil society are largely erased in the political picture of opposition to autocratic regimes drawn by Opposing Power. What role do social movements and popular uprisings for democratization play in shaping politicians’ perceptions and calculations about a particular autocrat’s crumbling? Political elites, either the incumbents, challengers, or those in Washington, DC, and their perceptions and decisions during the critical moment of potential regime change are definitely influenced by the extent and strength of citizen revolt against incumbent autocrats. When this central actor is left out from theorizing, the author is repeating the same omission error made by earlier scholars of democracy and democratization. The elite pact argument widely discussed in democratic transition studies in the 1980s and 1990s was criticized for its elite-centric orientation at the expense of removing the weight of pro-democracy movements, a crucial force that interacts with and shapes political elites.
Another crucial condition for elites’ perceptions and calculations that the book leaves unexamined is the effect of institutional variations, such as presidential versus parliamentary systems. Presidentialism is known for its “winner take all” nature of electoral competition. Especially when there is no vice president, presidential elections bestow enormous power to one single politician. So, an alternative explanation for the failure of opposition unity in South Korea before the presidential election in 1987 in comparison to the Philippines could be the absence of the vice-presidency in the electoral system. Such an institutional device could have changed Korean opposition leaders’ perception of their mutual dependency and eventually sustained their commitment to pre-electoral unity.
The last concern the book leaves with readers is about its broader implications. The author states that “opposition alliances do not guarantee incumbent defeat or democratization” (7). South Korea democratized and stayed a stable democracy despite elite division during the critical presidential election in 1987, whereas the Philippines (despite its democratic transition in the 1980s), Malaysia, and Singapore continue to fall short of democracy to various degrees as of the 2020s. What, then, is the usefulness and significance of learning about the conditions of opposition unity when its impact on democratization is mixed or dubious?
Yoonkyung Lee
University of Toronto, Toronto