Edmund Malesky: Understanding Politics in Asia

As a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, political scientist and Southeast Asia scholar Edmund Malesky regularly gets the opportunity to interact with and learn from top policy-makers.

These days, however, Malesky's looking forward to interacting with and learning from Duke students. He's returned to his alma mater, where he earned his master's degree in political science, as an associate professor of political science.

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On a sunny afternoon in his tower office above Perkins Library, looking out over West Campus' criss-crossed paths and Duke Chapel, the new faculty member says he's yearning to get back out on the Al Buehler trail for a morning run. He's kind of interested in catching a show at DPAC. And he wouldn't mind reintegrating back into life in Durham with some Q-Shack barbecue.

"I love North Carolina barbecue," he says.

This spring he will teach an undergraduate core class on political research, evaluating surveys and polls and how samples are drawn, helping Duke students develop research skills. "They are so smart and motivated. The onus is on me, as a professor to pique their curiosity," says Malesky who served as a teaching assistant while he pursued his master's degree at Duke.

Malesky is a comparative politics field researcher with a focus on authoritarian institutions, a subfield that is currently attracting strong new interest. His annual US-AID Provincial Competitiveness Index, ranking provinces for their investment potential, has received a lot of attention.

When he began studying Vietnam in 1996, 70 percent of that country lived under the poverty line. Today, only 13 percent are in poverty, says Malesky, who previously taught at the University of California, San Diego.

"It's an economic miracle of historic proportions," Malesky says, because of domestic economic reforms that propelled the private sector along with openness to international trade through the bilateral trade agreement signed in 2000 with the United States and 2006 entry into the WTO. Still, very few scholars have studied it.

"The U.S. is among Vietnam's top foreign investors and the leading export market for Vietnamese products. There's even Ford factory there. People don't realize the extent of our commercial relations with Vietnam, but investors knew it was a hot market. In the development community, the story of Vietnam is well known."

The trade agreement was a landmark for two countries whose relationship remains haunted by what the Vietnamese refer to as the "American War." Nowadays, the Vietnamese are genuinely curious about America, Malesky says. He cites the nearly 90 percent literacy rate, youthful population and rapid economic growth. When he first began to visit Hanoi in the '90s, his American-ness was an advantage. Locals asked him about Britney Spears.

"People don't realize what a beautiful country it is, with beautiful beaches and mountains," says Malesky who speaks fluent Vietnamese. "Now, there are a lot of Vietnamese Americans in the U.S. who lost everything and hate the regime. But Vietnam has changed for the better."

Malesky says scholars are increasingly interested in Vietnam because it can serve as a model for understanding how the United States can positively engage an authoritarian regime.

"The move in standard literature has been to blackbox authoritarian countries," Malesky says. "For example, we don't have very many rules to understand Malaysia or Venezuela, but the U.S. has to deal with these countries on the international scene. We tend to focus on leaders, but the leader is not as important as the institutional structure in which they operate."

China, another of Malesky's research interests, is a more prominent example. China is a rising world power, but outsiders still don't have a clear understanding of how leaders are selected and held accountable. 

Instead of dismissing party and grassroots elections in China, Malesky seeks to understand what they can tell United States leaders about China's future. "The conventional reading is that it's for show, but it has to be achieving some other goal. China has managed to make a lot of smart economic decisions."

Because of the organization of Duke's political science department, Malesky says he is able collaborate with other scholars on political institutions and other topics, meeting bi-weekly across specialties to share scholarship.

"Usually people covering American politics, theory, and comparative politics, are separated and this is inhibits research. The barriers of the discipline keep us from talking to each other," Malesky says.

"I study political economy but I'm also interested in international finance, international relations and comparative politics. I have always been at the border of the divisions within the field and feel comfortable in many camps," he says. "I like the way it is organized here."