Theorizing the Politics of Participation: Confronting the Reality of Rodrigo Duterte - A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte's Early Presidency and Participation without Democracy: Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia

Two books on enduring questions about democracy and authoritarianism offer insight into new political realities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Why has President Rodrigo Duterte succeeded at eroding the post-dictatorship democratic regime? Why do avenues for policy feedback effectively contain political contestation in authoritarian regimes like Singapore but not in Malaysia? When A Duterte Reader was first published in 2017 (by the Ateneo de Manila University Press in the Philippines in addition to Cornell University Press), the collection of sixteen essays edited by Nicole Curato was eagerly anticipated because it would help make sense of profound changes in Philippine politics wrought in President Duterte's first year in office. Meanwhile, Participation without Democracy was published before author Garry Rodan could make anything but cursory references to this new and curious phenomenon. Even without reference to recent events, it is a novel study of political representation in the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia....