Reflections on Dan Slater's Ordering Power

Slater, Dan. 2010. Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia. Cambridge UP.

In this memo, I provide a brief summary of the theoretical arguments advanced by Slater (2010), highlight important contributions of the book, and identify potential analytical weaknesses.

Slater begins with the premise that elites are fragmented and, in the face of severe threats to their livelihood, property and privileged positions in society, these elites coalesce in what Slater calls a "protection pact" which he defines as "broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as institutional bulwarks against continued or renewed mass unrest" (Slater, 5-6). Drawing on several cases in Southeast Asia, Slater aims to specify the historical conditions as well as the sociopolitical factors that would be conducive to the creation of protection pacts. In doing so, he also attempts to spell out the mechanisms through which protection pacts were created, in cases such as Singapore and Malaysia, or not created, in cases such as Thailand and the Philippines. His theoretical arguments can be broadly summarized as follows.

The type (endemic vs episodic, manageable vs unmanageable) and timing (before or after the birth of Authoritarian Leviathans) of contentious politics explain the divergence in the institutional patterns of elite coalitions as well as their durability. Only when contentious politics is perceived to be both endemic and unmanageable do elites have incentives to partake in the creation and maintenance of protection pacts, whereby elite groups contribute strategic resources to, rather than extract from, the political institutions of the Authoritarian Leviathan, "regimes that seek to use the full force of the state apparatus to subjugate society into a hierarchical, command-centered body politic on a presumptively permanent basis" (14). This domination pathway occurred in Singapore and Malaysia, where class conflict took on both a communal and urban character, resulting in party-states. In Thailand, Philippines and South Vietnam, where class conflict lacked communal and urban implications and took shape after some form of authoritarian regimes, the perceptions of threat were insufficient to prompt an end to the fragmentation of elites. In these cases, we often observe provision pacts rather than protection pacts. Lastly, in Indonesia and Burma, where contentious politics took on a regional character, militarization was adopted as an institutional solution, although without the support from non-military elite groups. These different pathways have important consequences for authoritarian durability.

Beyond providing a nuanced, historically grounded explanation for the striking institutional variations in Southeast Asia, Slater's framework also generates several noteworthy theoretical insights. First, Slater's theory could be read as an alternative theory of state building, to be contrasted with the process of European state-building which is centered on the role of war making (Tilly, 1975). Internal contention can make states, but only a specific type of contentious politics can generate a stable and durable state. This alternative account emphasizes the remarkable affinity between state infrastructural capacity and authoritarian rule and looks to counterrevolution by elites as a powerful impetus for state building. Second, related to the first, Slater's analysis shows that nations with prior deficits in nationalism or national integration can establish strong states. Third, Slater's conceptual treatment of threat as "perceived threat" distinguishes his theoretical formulation from conventional materialist analyses that simply view political and institutional outcomes as mere reflections or responses to struggles between economic classes. His framework enables the incorporation of other potentially relevant factors such as communal, regional or urban pattern of contention as well as the temporal and sequential characteristics of conflicts. Fourth, Slater's conceptual distinction between protection pacts and provision pacts suggest that the perception of threat has a more significant effect on elite cohesion than the perception of benefits—the former may be shared by all elite groups, whereas the latter has a zero-sum quality. This provides one possible explanation as to why patronage-reliant regimes may be less integrated and more fragmented.

In addition to refining these existing theoretical debates, Slater's book also offers valuable methodological and empirical contributions. First, Slater attends to a previously understudied region of the world as well as provides one of the most powerful justifications for selecting countries in Southeast Asia as cases. Southeast Asia, according to Slater, is characterized by a striking "variation in state capacity, party strength, military cohesion, and authoritarian durability that rivals the political variation of the postcolonial world writ large" (Slater, 6-7). This provides an ideal context for building theories that are potentially generalizable to other regions of the world. Second, Slater improves upon the method of controlled comparison by brilliantly incorporating the logic of comparative historical analyses and, more specifically, the role of antecedent conditions. The goal is not to hold these conditions constant to the point of doing violence to actual empirical differences between cases but to trace how pre-existing, causally relevant conditions give shape to critical, historically important moments to are thought to "do the causal work".

While successful in its overall theoretical and empirical objectives, Slater's analytical framework nonetheless suffers from several issues. First, elites are ill-defined in Slater's account. This is a problem given that, throughout the book, Slater imputes elite behavior based on the assumption that elites are fragmented in their composition, yet are unified in their interest to protect their privileges, property or positions in society. What constitutes an elite? What are the sources of their contention with one another? Nowhere does he provide clear evidence or theoretical argument as to why it is elites' tendency to compete rather than to coorporate. Moreover, Slater's analysis assumes a certain degree of insulation between elites and the masses when in reality elites are often co-exist with the masses or interact in vertically organized relationships. Hence, mobilization of the masses through the development of broad-based, grassroots parties provides one avenue through which elites compete with one another rather than to protect themselves from the masses. Slater's framework does not adequately deal with such possibility as non-elites only enter into his analysis as threats to elites, no more, no less.

Second, Slater's emphasis seems to be on the creation rather than the maintenance of protection pacts. In other words, it is unclear why, once created, protection pacts are more durable than other forms of elite settlement. Explicitly spelling out the mechanisms through which protection pacts are renewed or maintained would add to his compelling framework.

Third, Slater's core argument treats the perception of threat as a necessary condition for solving elite collective action. Only when this condition is in place do elites have incentivesto cooperate with one another. What about costs? Protection pact, presumably, entails costly organizational investment by elite actors. What explains the capacity of different elite groups to shoulder these costs? A more complete explanation for the supply side of the equation would better explain why some elites ultimately prefer alternative options or short term solutions to protection pacts. Slater should thus be able to show not only that protection pacts are desirable or vital but also that they are available to elites as an option in a given scenario of contentious politics.

Fourth, it is unclear whether protection pact is being operationalized dichotomously or whether it is a matter of degree. The intermediate cases of Burma and Indonesia, perhaps, suggest that protection pacts can have varying qualities.

Fifth, what other forms of elite coalition would qualify as protection pacts? It seems that Slater privileges the party-state as a form of protection pact yet does not specify in detail what other possible forms protection pacts can take.

Lastly, Slater's attempt to move away from class-centric analysis is ultimately troubled by the fact that class conflict remains dominant in explaining the divergences in outcomes. It would seem that most of his cases, except for Burma, the presence of class cleavages mattered. While Slater argues that class conflicts are not sufficient for generating endemic and unmanageable threat, class nevertheless remains a powerful explanatory device in his analysis. The development of class sentiments or identities is another potential cognitive or cultural mechanism that Slater does not pay enough attention to. Rather than the urban or communal implications of class conflicts, perhaps it is the formation of class sentiments that mattered in mediating the perception of threat. Hence, what distinguished the cases of Singapore and Malaysia from cases such as Thailand, Philippines and South Vietnam could be the difference in the degree to which class sentiments took shape in these societies rather than the fact that class conflicts had urban or communal implications. For example, Malaysia and Singapore, arguably, were able to quickly develop class cleavages and sentiments due to British colonial rule. Burma, while also a former British colony, did not develop the same degree of class sentiments due to the different style of colonialism that was practiced (more similar to India). On the other hand, class cleavages existed in countries such as Thailand, Philippines and South Vietnam, but it is also possible that class sentiments failed to take root in these societies due to different experiences with colonial encounters. The effects of European colonial rule must have mattered for all cases yet it is unclear why it did not receive the same degree of attention as the Japanese invasion.