Abstract
In the analysis of protest claims in Chapter 5, a basic distinction is made between regime-related political demands and all other demands. The former type has been found to be, in large parts, responsible for the escalation of protest, as observed in democratizing Korea and Indonesia: before major political concessions in the democratization process are made by the power holders, general claims against the authoritarian government and demands for the extension of political rights are particularly prominent among protesters. Also important for the overall mobilization, but highly contingent on the specific context, are calls for more civil liberties. In Thailand, where overall levels of protest are steadier, different types of protest claims are more evenly distributed over time; we do not observe the spreading of contention from one issue area to another, as is the case in Korea and Indonesia.
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Notes
- 1.
The development of protest claims is often studied in close association with forms of action. Snow and Moss (2014) highlight the role of spontaneity in protest, of which the spontaneous (re-)formulation of claims constitutes one aspect.
- 2.
Korea holds this position together with North Korea and Japan.
- 3.
Alesina et al. (2003), who have provided another well-known indicator of ethnic fractionalization, calculate Thailand’s ethnic fractionalization as 0.634. The indicator’s values for Korea (0.002) and Indonesia (0.735) are more similar to Fearon’s.
- 4.
From 1965 to 1995, Korea experienced an annual real per capita income growth rate of 7.5%. The annual growth rates of per capita income in Thailand and Indonesia were 7 and 5.7%, respectively (UNESCAP 2002, pp. 7–9). The massive crisis came unexpectedly (ILO 1998, p. 12). It shook the economies of a whole region. The countries most hit by the crisis were the three countries under investigation: they were most strongly affected in terms of real per capita income contraction and rise of unemployment. For an account of the politics of the Asian Economic Crisis, see Pempel (1999).
- 5.
(Socio-)economic conditions in the countries are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
- 6.
Political is here defined in a broad sense referring to the existence of a public dimension.
- 7.
Adjustments were made in consideration of the conditions present in the countries and period under investigation. Goal categories were changed to be less detailed regarding New Social Movement issues (such as the peace or international solidarity movements) and more detailed regarding civil and political rights, considered to be important during the democratization process. First adjustments were made before the coding process started based on preliminary knowledge of the countries. In the first phase of coding, coders discussed problems with the categorization of goals to make additional adjustments where necessary. Later on when an event was clearly a protest event, but none of the suggested goals fit, a category “new/other” was at the coders’ disposition. Once the coding was completed, the validity of the predefined goals was again examined. Certain goal categories had remained (almost) empty. In order to integrate the “new/other” category and to improve the overall categorization of the goals, the categories were further adjusted. These changes were made based on the titles of the protest if information was sufficient or otherwise in re-consultation of the newspaper article.
- 8.
The international dimension is particularly important in the case of Korea.
- 9.
Compared to other democracy indicators, such as the indicators of Polity IV or the Economist Intelligence Unit, measures of Freedom House take a clear demand-side perspective to politics, which is useful for the analysis of protest goals in democratizing context. Moreover, Freedom House provides concise information on how to operationalize individual elements of composite measures of democracy.
Details on the methodology are available at: https://freedomhouse.org/report/methodology-freedom-world-2019. For a comparison of the different democracy indicators, see the codebook for Teorell et al. (2011).
- 10.
In Thailand, as much as 7% of protests during regime change targeted regime-related issues more broadly defined, including mobilization against corruption or mobilization in favor of minority or women’s rights (see Sect. 5.2.1). This type of protest is also subsumed under “All other demands”.
- 11.
Formerly: Irian Jaya.
- 12.
Counter-mobilization, i.e., against regional interests, also constituted more than 1%.
- 13.
In the most recent years, the country experienced a democratic downturn, also negatively affecting stateness issues (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018a).
- 14.
“Ambiguous boundaries, numerous minority ethnicities and religions, and a complicated citizenship process have made identity building in Thailand complicated” (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2012, p. 5).
- 15.
Stateness is also an issue with hill tribe people in the north of the country, constituting an ethno-political group of its own. They face discriminatory policies and often lack citizenship.
- 16.
“(A)ttempts at ‘Thaification’ (have) produced over a century of violence between southern Malay-Muslims of Thai citizenship and the government” (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2014b, p. 6).
- 17.
Today, government policy is still influenced by this threat to stateness emanating from pro-North Korea left-leaning activism. NGOs assessing Korea’s democracy progress criticize the 1948 national security law and its strict interpretation (Freedom House 2013, 2019). This mostly affects civil liberties (freedom of media, organization of labor), but can also have an effect on political rights going as far as to disbanding political parties (Choe 2014). “Minor radical splinter groups continue to pay allegiance to North Korea” (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018b, p. 6). Their demands, however, were more mainstream during the transition period.
- 18.
Not surprisingly, the radicalness in goals and forms of protest are linked: a significant proportion of people raising stateness issues do resort to violent actions (not shown here).
- 19.
Vorrath et al. (2007, p. 9) convincingly show how the process of democratization can lead to shifts in government capacity, i.e., from high to low capacity, and trigger conflict by providing “certain incentives and opportunities for political actors that can have a destabilizing impact”.
- 20.
Issues were manifold. Early during political liberalization, Korean students mobilized against the campus stabilization act and against military campus training and conscription. In Indonesia, the closure of the weekly news magazine Tempo was a major cause for mobilization. Violence and crackdowns on labor organizations and activists motivated people to mobilize in all three democratizing countries.
- 21.
This is what could be observed when coding protest events reported in the Bangkok Post.
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Maduz, L. (2020). What Are They Shouting About? Protest Demands During Regime Change. In: Contention and Regime Change in Asia. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49220-5_5
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