Does a new democracy or electoral authoritarianism better allow legislatures to check the executive? This study examines accountability and legislative power in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore. While legislatures are weaker under electoral authoritarian regimes than in new democracies, they define the opposition better. Opposition members try to use their limited powers to check executive abuses. However, this tends to strengthen authoritarian rule by giving it greater legitimacy.
Indonesia and the Philippines are new democracies in which legislatures are formed through competitive elections. In Malaysia, however, civil liberties are restricted and legislative elections, although competitive, are manipulated in a variety of ways. Cambodia and Singapore also have electoral authoritarian regimes with elections that are even less competitive.
As in most developing countries, state power offers the surest means to the accumulation of personal wealth. In new democracies, businesspeople and professionals regularly seek election to the legislature. Therefore, although legislatures may be powerful, members are less motivated to check the executive than to capture state patronage.
After gaining entry, their pursuits may be ordered by networking elites as in Indonesia or the Philippines. Alternatively, relations may be strained by rival elites, whether grounded in a two-party system or an amorphous array of multiple parties (as in Thailand before and after Thaksin Shinawatra).
In both presidential systems, such as Indonesia or the Philippines, and parliamentary systems, such in Thailand, legislatures have failed to check the executive effectively:
- Whether accommodative or fractious, members of legislatures in new democracies have consistently prioritised patronage over horizontal accountability. In rare instances where they have imposed accountability, they sought principally to wring additional patronage from the executive.
- Executives in new democracies gain legitimacy through popular election but then avoid accountability in the legislature.
- Where legislatures are powerful, members often join in executive abuses.
- High rankings on the Parliamentary Power Indices do not equate with greater levels of accountability.
- Weakly endowed legislatures have tried more consistently to check the executive.
What matters most for imposing accountability is a legislature that features a sharply demarcated and motivated opposition. Further implications include the following:
- In structuring supportive dynamics between the executive and legislature, overarching institutional design counts for little.
- Actual legislative powers, measurable by the Parliamentary Powers Index, are no more important than institutional design.
- Regime type more than institutional design or legislative power is crucial for holding the executive accountable.
- Under electoral authoritarianism legislators can better impose accountability in part because the executive may insist on it.
- As markets become more active, legislatures will shrink as attractive sites of personal enrichment.
- Casual party-hopping and promiscuous clientelism can be restrained by electoral authoritarianism.
