Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective Book

The author puts forth an interesting and simple argument that when faced with an economic crisis, authoritarian regimes (although I suppose democratic regimes can also be included) abide by the "political logic" of implementing adjustment policies to retain the support of their core supporters, be they fixed capital, mobile capital or labour. But when a regime's core supporters consist of different factions and are divided on what policies they prefer, the regime will not be able to satisfy its core supporters (or at least a part of them), start to lose support and possibly collapse.

It is perhaps evident that this book is intended as academic literature, in view of how several parts of it are on the author's research methodology and logic. In fact, one chapter actually discussed in some detail on how the author did a regressive analysis to get more generalised findings!

However, if one skips through the academic language, this book is still quite readable for a general public audience.