earticle

영어

This paper examines the relevance and utility of Lipset and Rokkan’s party-cleavage thesis as it relates to party politics in Southeast Asia’s new democracies. I argue that, in contrast to Lipset and Rokkan’s approach to party system formation, the notion of cleavage in Southeast Asia’s party systems depends on political agency, which can create social identities, polarize or diffuse potential social conflicts, and even alter the nature of social conflicts through the adoption of specific government policies. The structure of the party system is deeply affected by specific political legacies of the authoritarian period. Southeast Asian societies still have a powerful democratic-authoritarian cleavage that resulted from previous non-democratic regimes.