Jari John

Vita

Jari John (CV) studied at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg where he received a diploma (Dipl.pol.) in political science in 2013. From 2011 to 2013 he worked as student assistant at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. In 2016 he worked as a Research Consultant for the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Southeast Asia, Bangkok, before becoming a Doctoral Student at University of Heidelberg in July 2017. From 2018 to 2022 he held a scholarship from Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V. Jari’s research has been focussed on International and Comparative Political Economy in the Asia-Pacific. He wrote his diploma thesis on the emergence of East Asian regional institutions as an opportunistic response by the members of ASEAN to regional power competition in the Asia-Pacific. His doctoral research is concerned with the role of the gap between de jure and de facto power in political and economic development in Southeast Asia.

Doctoral research

Working Title: Political and Economic Development in Southeast Asia: An Access Order Approach

The research project analyzes the political and economic transitions of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia (ASEAN-3). The three countries vary considerably with regard the level of economic development and the stability and democratic quality of their political regimes. To understand what forces shaped these differences, the study develops a theoretical framework that marries two influential approaches in the study of the conjunction of political and economic development: the Access Order Framework (North et. al 2009) and the Political Settlements Framework (Khan 2010). The merged framework discusses how the different structures of societal coalitions and the resulting de facto distributions of power affect development. It further elaborates on doorstep conditions that need to be met for the gap between the de facto distribution of power and the de jure distribution of power to remain sufficiently small as countries introduce formal democratic and market institutions. Each doorstep condition specifies features of the dominant coalition’s organizational structure and how they change as part of the transition to open access. In three case studies the research project traces the historical trajectories of the ASEAN-3 from the failure of their first democratic projects in the late 1960s and 1970s until the 2010s. In addition, a data set of 13 Asian countries was compiled that locates the state of political and economic development of the ASEAN-3 within a larger population.