Regional Authority in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand from 1950 to 2010

Abstract

Democratization has often gone hand in hand with decentralization, but how do the two processes relate to each other? To answer such questions one needs fine-grained data on decentralization, and these have been hard to come by in South East Asia. This paper provides a careful estimation of the formal authority of regional governments in five Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand – on an annual basis from 1950 to 2010. We estimate nine dimensions of subnational authority and find wide variation both across countries and across time. We detect a close temporal relationship between democratization and decentralization.