How do mayors get elected? The causal effects of pre-electoral coalitions on mayoral election outcomes in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

What determines the election of mayors? The extent to which pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) influence mayoral election outcomes has not yet been subject to empirical analysis, despite the question’s fundamental theoretical and practical relevance. This note uses regression discontinuity methods to identify the causal effects of PECs on mayoral election results in Indonesia. The study finds that candidates backed by PECs comprising political parties that control council seat shares exceeding first-round mayoral electoral vote thresholds are 14–18 percentage points more likely to win those elections than their counterparts supported by smaller-sized PECs. The analysis determines that PECs are especially helpful in getting non-incumbent candidates elected, although they have no apparent impact on incumbents’ electoral success. PECs can assist candidates in gaining office, therefore, but they are established under corrupt conditions. Ultimately, governance issues surrounding the formation and functioning of PECs impose significant constraints on the development of local democracy in Indonesia.

KEYWORDS:

• Local government
• mayoral elections
• pre-electoral coalitions
• corruption
• regression discontinuity
• Indonesia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. In somewhat related work, Gendźwiłł and Żółtak (2017) argue that a change in electoral rules, specifically the introduction of single-member voting districts, strengthens the position of mayors among political parties on the council in Polish municipalities.

2. Gandhi and Reuter (2013) provide evidence to suggest that electoral repression and political party stability are important determinants of the establishment of PECs in non-democratic countries.

3. Office benefits do not exist for political parties at the local level in Indonesia as executive branch administrative positions are staffed by civil servants and not used by mayors as a means of rewarding local councilors or their political parties that join PECs.

4. Districts and provinces are not allowed to form their own political parties, except in Aceh. So the parties that operate at the local level are the same as those at the national level.

5. See most recently Law 10 of 2016, which outlines the rules related to the election of governors and mayors. The law revises previous legislation on subnational elections but did not amend articles pertaining to the illegality of reward-based PEC formation and sanctions associated with breaking the law, as outlined in the text.

6. Apart from missing data, for several elections the share of seats held by candidates’ PECs summed to a number considerably greater than 100. Those elections were dropped from the sample.

7. Nationwide, about 93 percent of local executive elections were finalized in the first round during the period of study here.

8. The exception to this rule is candidates that run as independents and do not seek to form PECs. Nationwide, independent candidates became allowed to stand for election for the first time in 2008. (Independent candidates were permitted to run for election in the province of Aceh starting in 2006.) Just fewer than 20 percent of mayoral candidates in our sample ran as independents. The results presented here do not change if independent candidates are deleted from the analysis.

9. The high-density bar on the far left of the figure represents independent candidates who do not form PECs.

10. I estimate treatment effects in this paper using the Stata command ‘rdrobust’. See Calonico et al. (2017) for development of the procedures and a discussion.

11. For a classic analysis of incumbency effects in US legislative elections see Lee and Lemieux (2010). More recently, Eggers et al. (2015) have examined incumbency advantage in more than 40,000 close elections across various countries of the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Blane D. Lewis

Blane D. Lewis is senior fellow in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. He is the Director of the Indonesia Project and Lead Editor of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. His research focuses on intergovernmental fiscal relations, local public finance and political economy, and service delivery in Indonesia. He is widely published on these topics. He has worked for many years as a policy advisor in Indonesia with international agencies such as the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Research Triangle Institute, and the World Bank.