ASEAN - a case of illiberal regional democracy

The chapter analyses how and why ASEAN regulates participatory processes of non-state actors in regional decision-making and what this means for the quality of regional democracy. It briefly reviews major theoretical strands in this research field, which are rare and, where they exist, are dominated by political economy approaches and constructivist scholarship. The remainder of the chapter empirically traces participatory processes and examines the impact of business organisations, the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA), think tanks and the academe as well as civil society organisations (CSOs) on regional decision-making. The chapter advances the argument that ASEAN has regionalised domestic ideational traditions of organic state theory and authoritarian corporatism to organise and control participatory processes at the regional level. Participatory channels provided by ASEAN basically serve legitimating processes, help to maintain international respectability and to ward off internal criticism against its elitism and state-centeredness. Participation is limited to “participation in implementation,” that is, generating people’s support for the status quo and ASEAN’s model of state-driven development.