Speakers: Dan Slater (Michigan) and Joe Wong (Toronto)
Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become more democratic as they have grown richer, while others—most notably China—haven’t? In From Development to Democracy, Dan Slater and Joseph Wong reject the conventional expectation that authoritarian regimes concede democratization only as a last resort, during times of weakness. Instead, Asian dictators have pursued democratic reforms as a proactive strategy to revitalize their power from a position of strength. Of central importance is whether authoritarians are confident of victory and stability. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan these factors fostered democracy through strength, while democratic experiments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar were less successful and more reversible. At the same time, resistance to democratic reforms has proven intractable in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Reconsidering China’s 1989 crackdown, Slater and Wong argue that it was the action of a regime too weak to concede, not too strong to fail.
Dan Slater (@SlaterPolitics) is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan (@umichDemocracy). He specializes in the politics and history of democracy and authoritarianism, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His books include From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton 2022, with Joseph Wong); Coercive Distribution (Cambridge 2018, with Michael Albertus and Sofia Fenner); and Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge 2010). He has recently served as a consultant and nonresidential fellow at policy organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Freedom House, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Joseph Wong is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the Department of the Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is also the Vice-President, International, for the UofT. Professor Wong previously held the Canada Research Chair in Development, Democracy and Health (from 2004-2014) and was the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation of the Munk School (from 2013-2023). In addition to articles in leading political science and social policy journals, Wong is the author of four monographs, including most recently From Development to Democracy: the Transformations of Modern Asia (with Dan Slate), Princeton University Press in 2022, and the Welfare State in East Asia, forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press Element Series. His previous two books, Healthy Democracies(2004) and Betting on Biotech (2011), were both published by Cornell University Press.
