Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective Why do some authoritarian regimes topple during financial crises, whereas others steer through financial crises relatively unscathed? In this book, Thomas B. Pepinsky uses the experiences of Indonesia and Malaysia and the analytical tools of open economy macroeconomics to answer this question. Focusing on the economic interests of authoritar- ian regimes’ supporters, Pepinsky shows that differences in cross-border asset specificity produce dramatically different outcomes in regimes facing financial crises. When supporters are divided by the mobility of their capital assets, as in Indonesia, they desire mutually incompat- ible adjustment policies, yielding incoherent adjustment policy fol- lowed by regime collapse. When coalitions are not divided by the mobility of their assets, as in Malaysia, regimes adopt radical adjust- ment measures that enable them to survive financial crises. Combining rich qualitative evidence from Southeast Asia with cross-national time- series data and comparative case studies of Latin American autocracies, Pepinsky reveals the power of coalitions and capital mobility to explain how financial crises produce regime change. Thomas B. Pepinsky is Assistant Professor of Government and a faculty affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. His research appears in World Politics, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy , Studies in Comparative International Development, and several edited vol- umes. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 2007 to 2008. He held a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship in Indonesia and Malaysia from 2004 to 2005. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76793-4 - Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective Thomas B. Pepinsky Frontmatter More information