6 - East Asia as a Testing Field

Summary

Chapter 6 intends to familiarize the reader with the empirical material that is used in the book. The chapter argues that East Asia’s diversity of autocratic experiences since the end of World War II makes it a well-suited testing ground for the theoretical expectation of the two logics of autocratic rule. It proposes that “casing” is an active endeavor to create the units of analysis. As such, it discusses the spatiotemporal coverage of the empirical analysis and identifies forty-five autocratic regime episodes in thirteen East Asian countries. The countries that are covered are Cambodia, PR China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, North Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Lastly, the chapter provides an overview of the sources for the Autocratic Regimes in East Asia (AREA) dataset, highlighting the methodological procedure of the book to combine available quantitative indicators with qualitative assessments and condense this information into individual case narratives.