Although quite a few third-wave democracies in Southern and Central Europe became consolidated within a decade of their origin, all of those in East Asia are still fragile and fledgling. Ever since South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines embarked on democratic transition or restoration more than a decade ago, elections have been regularly held, and democratic competition is widely considered the only path to power. Rough edges remain, however. Rules are stretched, even bent. Political stalemate tends to delay, if not prevent, timely policy action. And public cynicism toward underperforming, if not malfunctioning, democracy in these four polities is so pervasive and unnerving that pundits warn against a crisis of governance in East Asia's new democracies.

New democracies face the arduous task of determining how to deal with gross human rights violations committed during their authoritarian pasts, or the “torturer problem,” to quote Samuel P. Huntington (1991). A new democracy can enhance its legitimacy if it brings human rights violators to justice, thus demonstrating the supremacy of democratic values, including the rule of law. By ensuring that no wrongdoer will go unpunished, the democratic regime prevents the danger of a future military coup d'état and future human rights abuses. Equally critical, it strengthens the power base of democratic forces by delegitimizing or even occasioning a purge of key authoritarian leaders, who often wield influence within the institutions of power, including the military, even after democratic transition. Punishing past wrongdoings constitutes an act of preempting a democratic reversal. In this sense, the question of the past becomes a struggle over power with today's authoritarian forces and for the future of third-wave democracy.

People are subject to a variety of psychological factors that distort their reasoning. Emotions such as anger, fear, greed, and envy are examples of “hot” impulses that can cause such distortions. As well, motivations such as conformity and competition are another common source of judgmental errors. This paper, however, addresses a number of “cold” impulses that can also contribute to biased judgment. The focus is therefore on the cognitive rather than affective dimensions of judgment under uncertainty, and on situational rather than personality explanations, seeking to account for departures from rational decisionmaking.

Factionalism is a dimension of informal politics that is hardly unique to China, but it has become well entrenched there for several reasons. We know from available survey data that Chinese political culture is relatively low in trust, and the faction provides a particularly useful refuge from the tiger world of politics, organized as it is around that culturally sanctioned dimension of trust known as guanxi (connections) (Shi 2001 and 1997; Pye 1981). From an individual perspective, although this has been changing more swiftly in society at large via marketization, the institutional landscape of elite politics is still dominated by the looming presence of a single monolithic party-state, to which all auxiliary organizations are subordinated in a corporatist hierarchy; any smaller and more personally useful organizations must be formed sub rosa on a self-help basis. From a structural-functional perspective, the faction serves several functions neglected by party-state corporatism: it services individual careers, in both a defensive and an offensive capacity (i.e., to protect against damaging criticism or purge, and to mobilize support for upward mobility); it provides a way of mobilizing minimal coalitions in policy conflicts; and it may even provide a microcosmic unit beyond the family for social identity and solidarity. Factions have always been rampant in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics, but precisely because of the universally acknowledged propensity for factionalism, they are formally proscribed by the Leninist rules of innerparty life and hence exist only semiclandestinely, looming more clearly when the central leadership weakens or is in dispute (as, for example, during a succession crisis). Factions are assembled on the basis of a combination of one's formal and informal “bases” (zhengzhi jichu), the formal consisting of trusted colleagues and subordinates in one's current work unit, the informal consisting of ties made during one's previous socialization or career and carefully cultivated thereafter. Factional activities may most easily be understood according to realist or realpolitik methodological assumptions, but as we shall see, they need not operate in an ideological vacuum. Inasmuch as factions exist tacitly and become politically operational opportunistically, the precise affiliation of a given political actor may change over time depending on the issue at stake and other circumstances; hence faction membership can never be tabulated with certainty, even by faction leaders. A given political actor may have at his or her disposal a range of connections that varies in chronological depth (i.e., spanning x generations) and institutional breadth (i.e., spanning x organizational hierarchies). At a given time and place, the actor may need these categories to define him- or herself factionally. On such occasions, a strong factional network (i.e., one that has been assiduously cultivated over time) is useful and perhaps even indispensable to the actor's survival and highly useful for the pursuit of future political ambitions.

Since 1997, following the twin transformations of economic meltdown and comprehensive constitutional changes, practically every area of Thailand's public sphere has undergone significant reordering. New checks and balances have been created, new institutions established, old institutions abolished and merged, and new rules of the electoral game put into place. A major new political party has emerged that currently dominates the parliament, civil society is flourishing, and dozens of mass protests are thriving all over the country. Yet beneath this veneer of change, the old Thailand is recognizably intact. Politicians of doubtful integrity still flourish; social cleavages are as evident as before; corruption is endemic and accountability weak; election results are contested and contentious; and the military, though lying low, retains an inordinate number of privileges. Despite the reform process, the Thai political system remains in a feeble state; new institutions designed to improve the functioning of the parliamentary and party political orders have thus far failed to change the rules of the game.