Expectations run high when colonial regimes collapse, dictators fall, and countries make successful transitions to democracy. But what democracy actually delivers tends to fall depressingly short of the hopes and promises people associate with the term. An end to authoritarianism and militarism? Yes and no. Dictators get deposed, militaries get pushed back to the barracks, and officers give up their claims to executive and legislative roles. But avoiding punishment for past abuses is often part of the bargain for getting these dangerous actors to retreat with a minimum of bloodshed. One consequence of these deals and compromises is that dictators and their families usually keep most of their hidden klepto-fortunes. Once the political dust has settled, these resources, combined with old crony networks, prove useful for staging political comebacks, including the expensive game of running for high office in the new democracies.
Militaries that retreat on their own terms often harbour ruling ambitions that resurface when democratic politics falter or create dissatisfaction across a population. And the literature on subnational authoritarianism shows that a country can be formally democratic at the national level while armed groups and actors rule the roost at the provincial or local level. Subnational thugs and oligarchs not only commandeer local elections to maintain their dynasties; they also serve as useful coalition partners delivering votes to national actors and parties trying to win elections across multiple regions.
The rule of law is another source of disappointment. In most people’s minds— and in the literature on democratic transitions—democracy and the rule of law are viewed as a sort of package deal. Theories developed from the history of Western Europe suggest that the two are supposed to arise in tandem or, at a minimum, that one ought to soon follow the other. And yet scores of cases from the 20th century onwards demonstrate that adopting a system of free and competitive elections is much easier than building strong and reliable legal institutions. There is no necessary (and certainly no automatic) connection between procedural democracy and the rule of law. Indeed, the most preponderant form seen across most of the post-colonial world is democracy without law—an arrangement that can persist for decades. Democratic theorists have framed the rule of law as a ‘quality of democracy’ problem, instead of grasping that the power dynamics at the heart of the rule of law are distinct from those at the centre of replacing authoritarianism with competitive elections. This framing appears to be more a matter of hope and ideology than of critical analysis.
The disappointments of democracy are not limited to the poorer countries of the world. A host of richer democracies maintain large segments of their societies under conditions of exclusion and marginalisation, despite centuries of democratic government. The domination of people of colour in the United States continues despite civil-rights struggles and victories, and economic stratification has grown more extreme across all capitalist democracies during the past 200 years as the wealth of tiny minorities has increased relative to the median citizen.
What matters in all these examples is that democracy—but especially the radically equal arrangement of one person, one vote—is overlaid on top of systems, structures, networks, relations, distributions, and actors that are radically unequal in ways far too numerous to list. The expectation is that democracy will reshape the various imbalances of societal power and privilege in a more equal direction. Economic, racial, gender, ethnic, regional, and group inequality are supposed to decrease as democracy increases. But, far more often, these myriad inequalities find expression in the practices and outcomes of democracy itself. When there is change, it is glacially slow compared with how rapidly democracy replaces whatever exclusionary governing form preceded it.
Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia provides abundant confirmation of what happens when a society marked by extremes of inequality, and by a long history of patronage and clientelism, suddenly gives all citizens one vote each. I salute the editors, Edward Aspinall and Mada Sukmajati, for not using the word ‘democracy’ in their title; ‘electoral dynamics’ is a far more honest description of what has really been unfolding in Indonesia since 1998. But a word of caution: before sitting down to digest this sobering study, be sure to have plenty of your opioid of choice near to hand.
The book consists of an introduction, written by the editors, followed by 22 case chapters, 20 of which were produced by Indonesian lecturers and researchers. Regrettably, there is no conclusion. Aspinall translated all but four of the chapters from an Indonesian version of the study published by Gadjah Mada University in 2014.
During fieldwork for the study, 50 researchers fanned out across 20 Indonesian provinces during the month leading up to the national legislative election held on 9 April 2014. Their shared objective was to document the strategies and tactics Indonesian politicians used to try to get themselves elected. Not all of their studies made it into the volume, but the ones that were included offer a richly detailed snapshot of electoral competition, Indonesia-style. Taking on research of this magnitude is daunting and impressive.
The editors set the stage with a concise overview of how Indonesia’s legislative elections are organised. Multiple candidates from multiple parties run in each district. It is a hybrid system in which parties compete by putting forward slates of candidates, but candidates from the same party also compete individually against each other. There are no primaries, so the winners all get sorted out on the same day.
Because Indonesia’s political system lacks clear ideological divisions, all candidates end up making the same claims and promises. They say they want to end corruption, move the country’s development forward, create employment, open up access to education, and make Indonesia prosperous and safe. If there is any salient division, it is between the more secularist candidates who market their professionalism and experience in getting things done, and the more supernaturalist types who invoke God’s role in shaping outcomes.
It is easy to see why none of this is of much use to Indonesian voters trying to decide among the candidates. Vision and mission statements are empty platitudes, and voters know from experience that little of it is going to get carried out anyway. Indonesians quite reasonably set aside things like track records from the past and promises for the future, and focus instead on the only concrete thing they can be sure to get from the elections: direct material pay-offs. The goal is to get as much as possible (and in as many forms as possible) from the candidates— to yank whatever they can from the politicians’ hands, pockets, and wallets or to snag some of the government goodies they might control.
If one thinks of Indonesian politics and economics as a grand wealth-extraction enterprise, then elections are a fleeting but highly focused moment for the country’s scores of millions of poor citizens to get a modest piece of the pie. Yet by the time the electoral funds and goodies have trickled down to the neighbourhoods and villages, the sums that actually reach the hands of voters are modest. For this redistribution to make a real difference in people’s lives, elections would have to be carried out monthly, if not weekly. Instead, they occur on a five-year cycle that is gradually being reformed (for obvious cost reasons—both formal and informal) to occur on the same day everywhere.
The central finding of Electoral Dynamics is that the nexus between candidates and voters is occupied overwhelmingly by ‘money politics’. The more interesting, secondary question is how the money politics are organised. This is where patronage and clientelism enter the picture. Candidates desperately need to have their pay-offs converted into reliable votes or vote-counting—which is hard when ballots are secret and there are sometimes observers keeping watch at the polls. Intermediaries of various kinds—ranging from neighbourhood and village officials or respected persons, to ‘success teams’, to figures from the local mosque or church—operate as distributing-delivering intermediaries between candidates and voters. Voters almost uniformly expect candidates to give them something tangible, and candidates who do not play the money politics game generally lose.
If multiple candidates are giving pay-offs, how do voters decide whom to vote for? One of the best treatments of this problem is Noor Rahman’s chapter focusing on the ‘meanings’ of vote-buying from the voters’ perspective in Pati, Central Java. At the individual level, some voters ended up supporting the candidate who gave them the largest amount of money. At the household level, a common response to receiving multiple pay-offs was to talk it over within the family and divide votes among the candidates who made payments. ‘Others believed that they should vote for the candidate who gave them money first’, Rahman writes, while some voters ‘determined their choice on the basis of their relations not with the candidate, but with the person who gave them the cash on his or her behalf, for example, voting for a candidate whose success team member was a relative’ (pp. 245–46).
Rahman found that many voters avoided reciprocal interpretations of the money they received, complicating matters for the vote buyers. Some voters preferred seeing the funds as nothing more than rejeki (fortuitous blessings or luck), or felt they had to accept the money to be polite, but did not feel obligated beyond offering an appreciative smile and saying thank you. Giving money to some of the more pious Muslim voters ran the risk of having them view it as syubhat, a grey zone between things sanctioned and forbidden. They felt unbound to give a vote in return, and instead used the money to buy external things like telephone credits or cooking fuel rather than food or drink that would enter their bodies. And, finally, some voters interpreted accepting payments, particularly from incumbents, as clawing back some of the public’s funds that had been stolen by government officials (pp. 246–47).
These gems and many more are scattered throughout this very accessible volume. There are enough cases available to be able to make comparisons across regions, local cultures, areas that are more or less religious, and even districts where industrial workers and unions are concentrated.
This raises the question of the theoretical contributions of the book. Aspinall’s and Sukmajati’s opening chapter offers some starting points by defining money politics, patronage, and clientelism. They do a nice job of distinguishing the various forms that money politics assumes in the Indonesian context. It is clear from how the volume is pitched that theoretical analyses and interpretation were not really the central goal; the editors note that everyone knows and writes about patronage politics in Indonesia, but that few offer many details about the mechanisms through which patronage and clientelism work. Fair enough. But this is rather like saying that everyone knows and complains about Jakarta’s traffic jams, but that few people tell us precisely which streets jam up first, at what points in the day, or how much time is spent at a standstill.
The editors report that there is a pandemic of money and patronage politics in Indonesia. If there are major comparative distinctions across the archipelago in how this plays out, and theoretical insights to be drawn from varying patterns, it is mostly up to the reader to tease them out of the mountain of information contained in this book. In defence of the editors, it should be said that this volume is the second instalment in a four-part series looking at electoral money politics in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Malaysia and Indonesia are now complete, and presumably Thailand and the Philippines are in the pipeline. Assuming the team of investigators wants to hold off on theorising the project until all four country studies are completed, it might be useful to pose here some of the fundamental issues this broader project must address if it is to move from being encyclopaedic to influential.
Why are we seeing these kinds of money politics, patronage politics, and clientelism within Southeast Asian democracies? This takes us back to the points raised earlier in this review about what democracy changes and what pre-existing relations or practices it merely absorbs, adapts to, or reflects. This is especially important if those relations and practices are highly hierarchical or exclusionary, and thus inimical to democracy’s ethos and purpose. Although money politics unfolds via relatively free and competitive elections, the game appears to have very little to do with democratic representation. So what is at its core? What does it tell us about the candidates and their motivations, and what do we learn about the people and what the system means to them?
For this research to have lasting value, it must move beyond electoral dynamics to the underlying power dynamics. If running for office is incredibly costly at all levels, and involves major investments of money and other goodies even at the local level (and almost all of it unreported and of questionable legality), what does this tell us about the interplay between wealth power and participation power in the cases studied? Electoral Dynamics points out in chapter after chapter that candidates with access to tremendous financial resources are far more likely to win contests of electoral money politics than those who will not or cannot compete materially.
This suggests there are prior accumulations of treasure that vary in scale at different jurisdictional levels. These wealth resources get deployed every few years by candidates whose primary objective is to gain or regain office. Winning office connects back to accumulating treasure, which begins with recouping campaign expenditures and takes off from there. Meanwhile, whatever other expectations ordinary Indonesians may harbour about the promise of democracy, they seem to be fairly unmystified about how the political economy of democracy works in practice and are willing to take what little bites they can from the carcass of the beast whenever the opportunity arises.