Liberalism and illiberalism in Myanmar’s National League for Democracy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The National League for Democracy (NLD) was largely synonymous with Myanmar’s semi-democratic intermezzo in 2016–21. For 2 years after the military coup in 2021, it resumed the role of major opposition party performed from 1988 to 2015. Although it was dissolved by the military junta in 2023, it remains a dominant political force inside the country. This article examines the commitment of NLD leaders and voters to liberal agendas. It reviews existing literature, draws on our dataset of Facebook posts by NLD members of parliament, analyses our 2017 survey, and triangulates it with 2020 World Values Survey data. It argues that the NLD was a relatively liberal force in Myanmar’s democratisation in the 2010s, though its liberal commitments were coupled with rising illiberal values. It is thus possible that even if the NLD were reconstituted and re-elected under a future democratic settlement, that democracy would not be liberal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it