A crackdown on the opposition, followed by sham parliamentary elections in July 2018, has deepened and extended the decades-long personalist dictatorship of Hun Sen.
Democratization is never easy, smooth, or linear, but as Indonesia’s experience in building a multiparty and multiethnic democracy shows, it can succeed even under difficult and initially unpromising conditions.
Juan Linz’s 1990 critique of presidentialism in these pages was based largely on the Latin American experience. In the last few years, however, four new Asian democracies have encountered presidential…
