Chapter Three - Parliaments and Regime Change

Summary

The preceding historical account has shown that political development in the five countries studied in this volume has been by no means linear. Rather, it has been characterized by ruptures and changes between authoritarian and democratic forms of government. The exception is India, which — apart from the short emergency rule period under Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977 — has been a democracy ever since its independence in 1947. While in Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand, democratic forms of government marked only short breaks in an otherwise authoritarian past, in the presidential democracy of the Philippines, the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship (1972–86) were an aberration. The literature is more or less unanimous in its conclusion that the legislatures in these authoritarian regimes — as far as they existed at all — were little more than rubber-stamp bodies providing the regimes with a façade of democratic legitimacy. In Michael L. Mezey's terms, all these legislatures were scarcely more than the “marginal” or “minimal” type (Mezey 1979).

It has thus become conventional wisdom to argue that the legislatures have played no — or at best only a subordinate — role in the process of bringing down authoritarian regimes. This phase preceding the collapse of the authoritarian regime and its ultimate replacement by a democratic order has been termed “liberalization” in the transition literature. Liberalization refers to a process by which the regime — in response to external pressure or rifts within the elite — softens repression and gives greater recognition to rights protecting individuals and social groups from arbitrary or illegal state action. These political concessions open political space and reduce — real or imagined — costs of individual expression and collective political action and thus encourage more people and more groups to register their dissent with the regime (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, p. 7).