Regional Authority in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand from 1950 to 2010
33 Pages Posted: 13 Jul 2012 Last revised: 29 Aug 2012
Date Written: August 19, 2012
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.
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