![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The article compares the political trajectories of authoritarian diasporas in Indonesia and the Philippines, namely the subset of former regime officials that disperse across the electoral space after a regime transition. The main finding is that after the Suharto and Marcos dictatorships collapsed in 1998 and 1986 respectively, Indonesia's authoritarian successor party (ASP) fared better than the ASP in the Philippines. However, the authoritarian diaspora did better in the Philippines than in Indonesia. Engaging with existing scholarship on authoritarian successor parties and authoritarian diasporas, the article argues that the two variables shaping defection calculi are the prevailing levels of party institutionalization of both the authoritarian successor party and alternative parties as well as the type of reversionary clientelistic network available to elites in post-transition politics.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Cristina Regina Bonoan, Sheila Coronel, James Loxton, Scott Mainwaring, Marcus Mietzner, Masaaki Okamoto, Timothy Power, Rizky Ridho Pratomo, John T. Sidel, Dirk Tomsa and two anonymous reviewers for their research assistance and helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Grzymala-Busse, Consequences; Loxton and Mainwaring, Life; Mickey, Paths; Stepan et al., Rethinking.
2 However, we checked whether members of the authoritarian cohort won posts as governors, district heads and mayors (see Appendices 1& 2).
3 Holtzappel et al., Decentralization, 52.
4 Landé, Post, 123.
5 Kessler, Politics, 1211.
6 Cullinane, Patron, 180.
7 Timberman, A changeless land, 94.
8 Drawing on Levitsky we understand party institutionalization as the routinization of rules and procedures within political parties (Levitsky, Transforming, 15). Drawing on Mainwaring, we defined party system institutionalization as stability in inter-party competition and therefore predictability for both candidates and voters regarding the number and type of parties that constitute the system (Mainwaring, Party systems, 23).
9 Tomsa, Party, 253.
10 Liddle, The Islamic, 620.
11 Magenda, The Surviving.
12 Malley, Resources, 165.
13 Slater, Ordering, 8.
14 Ibid., 165.
15 Sidel, Macet.
16 Villegas, The Philippines, 127.
17 Crouch, Patrimonialism, 44.
18 Coronel et al., The Rulemakers.
19 Aspinall and Hicken, Guns; See Sidel, Capital, 140–54 for an earlier version of this argument.
20 Ibid.
21 McMann, Economic; Buehler, The Ephemeral.
22 Scott, Corruption.
23 Rist et al., The Livelihood, 1112.
24 Pincus, Class Power; Hart, Power, 192–212.
25 Aspinall, Small-Scale. One of the anonymous reviewers pointed out that our findings are a “striking negation of modernization theory.” However, it is not so much the presence or absence of industrialization but whether or not the type of economic development lends itself to monopolization (one-factory towns) or not (many small- and medium sized enterprises) that determines whether political elites gain political leverage over local electorates.
26 Anderson, Cacique.
27 Sidel, Capital.
28 Sidel, Economic, 179.
29 Hale, Explaining, 229.
30 Magaloni’s concept of “punishment regimes”, namely the resources available to politicians to prevent voter defection, is a potentially promising avenue to compare voter behavior in Indonesia and the Philippines in future research. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out to us. See Magaloni, Voting.
31 Mietzner, Money, 197.
32 Sidel, Macet, 172–3.
33 Mietzner, Money, 138.
34 Tomsa, Party.
35 Faizal and Syam, Switching, 4819.
36 Mietzner, Money, 197.
37 The same dynamics may explain why party switchers irrespective of whether or not they are members of the authoritarian cohort have a low success rate in Indonesian legislative elections. See Buehler and Nataatmadja, A research agenda, 10.
38 Mietzner, Money, 65.
39 Mietzner, Military, 102.
40 Ibid., 103.
41 Ibid., 107.
42 King, The 1999, 98.
43 Tomsa, Party.
44 Kessler, Politics, 1219.
45 Ibid., 1220
46 Villegas, The Philippines, 202–3.
47 Hazan and Rahat, Democracy, 80–3.
48 Quimpo, The Philippines.
49 Riedl, Authoritarian, 184; LeBas The Survival, 208.
50 Riedl, Authoritarian, 186.
51 Ibid., 176–8.
52 LeBas, The Survival, 208.
53 Aspinall, Democratization. Indonesia and the Philippines are two of the most ethnolinguistically diverse countries in the world, with more than 700 languages spoken in Indonesia and 170 in the Philippines.
54 The expression is borrowed from Steffen, The Shame, 75 who used it to describe unstable political machines in nineteenth century America.
55 Tomsa, Party, 67.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Michael Buehler
Michael Buehler is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at SOAS, University of London, UK.
Ronnie Nataatmadja
Ronnie Nataatmadja is an Institutional Effectiveness Analyst in the Institutional Effectiveness and Outcomes Assessment Department at Harper College in Illinois, USA.