Stephan Haggard 425but under stable macroeconomic policies. This regime of “stabilizing development”
was achieved following a painful devaluation in 1954. The government was
able to withstand short-term protests to this crucial reform because of the special
relationship it enjoyed with state-sanctioned unions. Not until the early 1970s
did deepening social problems and the populist political strategy of President
Luis Echeverría combine to break the pattern of stable monetary and fiscal policies.
Nonetheless, Mexico still managed to pursue more “orthodox” stabilization
policies in the 1980s under Presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas
than either of the other two large Latin American countries, Brazil and Argentina.
This is due in large part to the PRI’s continuing ability to engineer political
compromises and exercise discipline over urban workers.
Even when populist forces surfaced in East and Southeast Asian countries,
they never succeeded in gaining a political foothold. A larger proportion of the
population remained outside the framework of urban interest group politics
altogether than in Latin America, and patterns of political organization also differed.
Broad, anticolonial movements muted class and sectoral conflicts. Generally, the
most serious political challenges came not from the urban areas, but from rural
insurgencies. When and where urban working-class politics did emerge, it was
either assimilated into corporatist structures or suppressed.
In the Philippines, two diffuse political machines dominated the electoral
system before the announcement of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.
Pork-barrel conflicts were more important than programmatic differences, but
elite domination of the political system resulted in extremely low levels of taxation.
Beginning in the late 1960s, urban-based leftist organizations grew, but they
were crushed following the declaration of martial law. Even when political
liberalization provided new opportunities for the left to organize, its influence
was counterbalanced by that of the old political machines and the new middle-
class democratic political movement, headed finally by Corazon Aquino, which
owed little to the left.
In Malaysia, politics was dominated by a single nationalist party and its minor
coalition partners, but class and sectoral conflicts were secondary to ethnic
rivalries. Indonesia remains a single-party system, with very limited pluralism.
Thailand, despite periodic democratic openings, has shown a continuity in
economic policy thanks to the central role of the bureaucracy and the continuing
influence of the military.
South Korea and Taiwan once again provide sharp contrasts to the Latin American
cases. Until the transition toward more pluralist politics in the two countries in
the mid-1980s, both South Korea and Taiwan (beginning in 1972 and 1949,
respectively) were ruled by strong, anticommunist, authoritarian regimes that limited
the possibilities for interest group organization. Taiwan’s one-party system
effectively organized and controlled the unions and disallowed opposition parties.
The South Korean government combined informal penetration of the unions and
periodic repression to keep labor and urban-based opposition forces in check.
The recurrence of urban-based opposition among students and workers may explain
the Korean government’s greater tolerance for an expansionist macroeconomic
policy, but the opportunity for open political organization and populist appeals