Authoritarianism, Developmental States, and Systemic Vulnerability
A scholarly perspective on a controversy over a Thai PBS article
Every once in a while, I’m going to want to write a piece that is more academic than usual, and this is one of them. I will try to put everything in a way that’s easy to digest for a non-political science audience, but I also completely understand if this isn’t quite your cup of tea.
Last week, Thai PBS retracted an article called “Dictatorship Builds Nations: the People Miss Strong Leaders and Growing Economies” (เผด็จการสร้างชาติ” ประชาชน “อาวรณ์” ผู้นำเข้มแข็ง-เศรษฐกิจรุ่ง). The original article, which was published without a byline, has been pulled down from the Thai PBS website. But it was re-published on LINE Today and for now that remains online. So what did the article say that brought it so much heat? For one, it argued that “the nation developed and income streamed in massive amounts mostly during the eras of dictatorship and authoritarianism.” To add fuel to the fire, at one point it states: “the more dictatorial or authoritarian a country, the more economic development will surely increase.”
In addition to that foundational assumption, the article makes three key arguments:
Many people in Thailand desire the return of former prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha (who launched a military coup in 2014 and left office in 2023)
Following Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie, and Dan Slater (2005)’s theory of “systemic vulnerability,” Thailand is not currently facing external threats, which has stunted growth and led to the country living “too comfortably”
Drawing on Sanhoon Kim-Leffingwell (2024)’s work, at times people may not care about whether or not a leader is destroying democracy if they have authoritarian nostalgia and wish to bring back the prosperity of authoritarian times
Thai PBS explained that the article was retracted because they felt it was “not offering a sufficiently well-rounded perspective, may cause misunderstanding, and may lead to debate and its use as a political tool without that being the original intention of Thai PBS.” I suspect the agency probably simply concluded the article was far more trouble than it was worth. Indeed, the piece was widely panned; Professor Parinya Thewanarumitkul fretted that it might “create an atmosphere where people would reminisce about dictatorships,” while the commentator Sirote Klampaiboon called the article “unforgivably terrible.”1
First things first: there is one fatal flaw in the Thai PBS article. For some reason, it cites a fair bit of literature but chooses not to investigate whether political scientists have actually investigated the relationship between dictatorship and development. Some research would reveal that Adam Przeworski (2000) et al. argued through their statistical analyses that “there is no trade-off between democracy and development, not even in poor countries…There is little difference in favor of dictatorships in the observed rates of growth” (pg. 178). Of course, we can quibble about the specific causal mechanisms and theories; you could go with Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and Jim Robinson’s Nobel-prize winning theory of how inclusive institutions foster growth and I’ll point to Yuen Yuen Ang’s recent critique. But the point still stands: it is difficult, with even a cursory knowledge of the relevant research, to sustain the claim that ceteris paribus as authoritarianism increases, economic development must also increase.
Developmental states and systemic vulnerability
I do want to take some time to dig a little deeper into this piece, however, because of its extensive use of political science scholarship — rare for any journalistic work, let alone for a Thai article.
Where I find the Thai PBS article most interesting is through its integration of the concept of the developmental state and systemic vulnerability. Let’s take the former first. The article draws on work by Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie, and Dan Slater (2005), “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of the Developmental States” as one of the key scholarly planks of the argument. But in trying to draw on this piece to define the developmental state, the article somehow immediately flubs its definition. They say that Doner, Ritchie and Slater argue that “the best form of economic development is associated with strong regimes…which cannot escape dictatorship and authoritarianism, or what is called the developmental state in the scholarly literature.”
That is certainly not what Doner, Ritchie, and Slater argue, and it is also certainly not how the vast majority of political scientists would define the developmental state. The actual definition the three co-authors use — and one which I believe to track much more closely to the actual scholarly consensus — is “organizational complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation” (pg. 327). Note that the definition is very much regime-blind, which would make the article very disjointed. Precisely because developmental states aren’t dependent on regime type — Japan, the case used by Chalmers Johnson which propelled all of this later work, is very much a democracy — the rest of the argument doesn’t really follow.
The author then goes on to cite the authors’ theory of systemic vulnerability. In short, Doner, Ritchie, and Slater argue that external threats and severe resource constraints restrict the ability of regimes to deliver “side payments” to the broad popular coalitions that sustain them. To raise revenues that can sustain high defense spending and satisfy supporters, elites in such places build effective developmental institutions that create economic growth. Without the constraints, leaders would prefer to just focus on using revenue directly for patronage. Thailand, the three argue, became an “intermediate state” because of mild systemic vulnerability.
Because systemic vulnerability affects dictatorships and democracies alike, I’m again actually not sure why the Thai PBS article brought this theory in at all. The article notes the frenzy of infrastructure building that occurred during Thailand’s Cold War dictatorships, but those conditions aren’t exactly something you can choose. But I was actually glad to see mention of systemic vulnerability in Thailand’s popular press. Too often we discuss the ills plaguing the Thai economy and how it has languished in the middle income trap without a full discussion of its political causes beyond vague discussion of “political will” or dislike towards whoever is currently in power; even among policy experts I have rarely seen systemic vulnerability mentioned2.
Envisioning a new developmental model
Overall, the discussion on whether Thailand needs a dictatorship to return to its developmental highs in the late 20th century is particularly unfruitful. For one, Thailand was never the best exemplar of a developmental state anyway. Rather, the question should turn to what a 21st century developmental state could look like, when even the original examples par excellence like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have struggled in recent decades to continue this model.
As Joseph Wong argued in his 2011 book Betting on Biotech, the model of the developmental state was great at catch-up industrialization but much more difficult to use in developing new industries where innovative success is not a certainty. We already saw that the challenges under Prayut of reviving technocrat-led economic policy3. While I think it’s dangerous to underestimate the role the state can play in facilitating innovation, the arrangements that worked under leaders like Sarit Thanarat and Prem Tinsulanonda are not going to achieve anywhere near similar success today. The role that the Thai state should be taking in industrial policy, especially absent the structural conditions that facilitate effective state-led industrial development, is a topic worthy of discussion. Rainer Kattel et al. (2022), for example, have argued that what modern states really need to foster entrepreneurail states is “agile stability”: a balance of dynamic bureaucracies that can search for new ways of doing things, while expert organizations bring stability. How would Thailand create that?
To move Thailand forward, therefore, requires us to ask the right questions. Questions about whether democracy or authoritarianism will drive the economy forward are far too simplistic. There are plenty of examples of economies that have failed under both; we can make the case for democracy due to its many other merits. The Thai economy will continue to flounder without the right policies and the right institutions. It will not be able to escape the middle income trap without strategic thinking that is both careful and creative in its assessment of Thailand’s many weaknesses and many opportunities. Unfortunately, so little of our current political discussion revolves around these issues. Perhaps it’s proof after all that we really don’t have enough systemic vulnerability.
My own stance is Thai PBS should have left the article up but invited rebuttal pieces from experts in political science. Taking it down also invited criticism of censorship, and I think it is a legitimate debate to have and one that would be healthy for Thais to see and settle.
I always recommend Richard Doner’s book The Politics of Uneven Development, which dives even deeper into systemic vulnerability and Thailand, to everyone.
This article is a rare beacon of intellectual clarity amidst the morass of historical illiteracy that continues to plague Thai political discourse. The Thai PBS article you so deftly dismantle is not merely mistaken—it is an affront to serious scholarship, a clumsy pastiche of misread academic literature woven together in service of a crude, authoritarian apologia.
That its author could, with a straight face, suggest that dictatorship is a precondition for economic development is testament to an almost heroic ignorance of the field. As you correctly point out, Przeworski et al. (2000) settled this debate long ago, demonstrating empirically that there is no inherent trade-off between democracy and development. Had the Thai PBS article’s author bothered to engage with the literature beyond cherry-picking citations to support their flimsy thesis, they might have spared themselves this intellectual embarrassment.
Your exposition of developmental states and systemic vulnerability is particularly commendable, not least because it exhibits the kind of analytical rigor so conspicuously absent from the article you critique. The notion that developmental states are inherently authoritarian is not merely incorrect—it is laughably so. That the Thai PBS piece invokes Doner, Ritchie, and Slater without grasping that systemic vulnerability applies equally to democracies and dictatorships alike only underscores the depths of its conceptual confusion.
Most importantly, you elevate the discussion beyond the jejune and tiresome democracy-versus-autocracy debate, directing attention to the real question: what form of developmental state is viable in Thailand today? Your engagement with Wong (2011) and Kattel et al. (2022) provides precisely the kind of nuanced, forward-thinking analysis that is so desperately lacking in public discourse.
In short, your article is an invaluable corrective to the rank amateurism that continues to masquerade as political analysis. One can only hope that those who peddle such intellectual detritus will, at some point, summon the humility to engage with real scholarship—or failing that, have the decency to remain silent.
Excellent piece, as always, Ken. I think that no one can disagree that Thailand’s economic advancement depends less on regime type and more on the creation of effective, inclusive, and adaptive institutions. The debate should focus on how to foster sustainable development in a way that addresses Thailand's unique challenges—rather than indulging in authoritarian nostalgia. Well, *some people* may disagree !!