• About ICIS       
  • Executive Director
  • Mission & Strategic Plan
  • Staff & Divisions of ICIS
  • Organizational Structure
  • Map & Location
• Events & Publications
  • Announcements
  • Calendar of Events
  • Newsletter
  • Recent ICIS Events
• Research & Funding
  • Seminar Program
  • Faculty Funding
  • Post-doctoral Fellowship
  • Graduate Fellowships
  • Undergraduate Funding
• Area Studies at Emory
  • African Studies
  • Asian Studies
  • East Asian Studies
  • Emory Tibet Partnership
  • Latin American & Caribbean Studies
  • Mid-East & South Asian Studies
  • Russian & East European Studies
• Study Abroad       
  • About CIPA
  • CIPA Home
• Language Center

Political Science

Richard Doner
Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective

Richard F. Doner, Department of Political Science, Emory University
Bryan K. Ritchie, James Madison College, Michigan State Univ.
Dan Slater, Department of Political Science, Emory University

Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements. This essay introduces and assesses a new political explanation for the origins of "developmental states" - organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation. Conventional wisdom holds that developmental states in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore result from "state autonomy," especially from popular pressures. Yet we argue that these states' impressive capacities actually emerged from the challenges of delivering side payments to restive popular sectors under conditions of extreme geopolitical insecurity and severe resource constraints. Such an interactive condition of "systemic vulnerability" never confronted ruling elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or Thailand - allowing them to uphold political coalitions, and hence to retain power, with much less ambitious state-building efforts.

Politics and Institutions in Industrial Upgrading: The Case of the Thai Textile Complex

Richard F. Doner, Department of Political Science, Emory University
Ansil Ramsay, Dept. of Government, St. Lawrence University

How has the Thai textile industry outperformed many countries but found it difficult to compete with others? How have Thai firms done so well in expanding exports but faltered at upgrading their own products and processes? Existing explanations for such variation have fallen short because they have been inadequately attentive to the fact that divergent development outcomes imply divergence in the fulfillment of specific development tasks. Igniting growth based on existing factor endowments poses different kinds of difficulties than does diversification for structural change; and the challenges of structural change are not the same as those confronting economies attempting to upgrade. In this article, we assess a two-part explanation for different growth outcomes. At the most proximate level of causation, we argue that development divergences are first and foremost a function of differences in the fit between institutional capacities and the particular difficulties of different development tasks. Our first argument thus poses institutional capacities to accomplish specific tasks as causal factors; development outcomes are phenomena to be explained. The second part of our explanation puts differences in institutional capacities themselves under the microscope. Rather than the result of technical searches for efficiency gains or of the autonomy of political elites, we argue that institutional strengths result from specific sets of domestic and external pressures and constraints on political elites.