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ABSTRACT
The National League for Democracy secured an astonishing electoral victory in Myanmar’s 2015 general elections after nearly three decades of repression of the party. Despite this victory, there are conflicting accounts on whether the NLD was a strong or a weak party leading into these elections. Appealing to data from an original survey and extensive qualitative field research, this article measures the NLD’s strength in 2015 and explores the mechanisms behind it. When operationalized as reported contact with voters, the NLD appears to have been a very strong party, but this strength can be explained by the same widespread enthusiasm for change, for democracy, and for Aung San Suu Kyi that existing scholarship appeals to in explaining the party’s victory in general. This finding has important implications for the NLD in the 2020 and future elections, as well as for our understanding of the dynamics of party strength in transitional regimes and new democracies more generally. Most importantly, the strategies parties have employed in transitions are unlikely to be successful in subsequent elections, as widespread enthusiasm and momentum gives way to everyday politics, but newly governing parties are likely to keep appealing to them precisely because they were so successful.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Zsuzsa Csergo, Olga Talal, and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. The author is also grateful to the Yangon School of Political Science for their assistance with this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Cox, Making Votes Count.
2 Aldrich, Why Parties?; Hale, Why Not Parties in Russia?.
3 Bizzarro et al., “Party Strength and Economic Growth”; Tavits, Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization.
4 Tavits, “Organizing for Success.”
5 Duverger, Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity.
6 Tavits, Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization.
7 Boix and Stokes, “The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics”; Cox, Making Votes Count.
8 Miller, “Don’t Call It a Comeback.”
9 Beyens, Lucardie, and Deschouwer, “The Life and Death of New Political Parties.”
10 Bolleyer and Bytzek, “New Party Performance after Breakthrough.”
11 Ibid.; Harmel and Svåsand, “Party Leadership and Party Institutionalisation.”
12 Carothers, Confronting the Weakest Link.
13 Ibid.
14 Burnell and Ware, Funding Democratization.
15 Hicken, Building Party Systems in Developing Democracies.
16 Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation.”
17 Egreteau, “Myanmar: Transition, Praetorian Politics, and the Prospects for Change.”
18 Jones, “Explaining Myanmar’s Regime Transition.”
19 Wong, “Chinese Influence, U.S. Linkages, or Neither?.”
20 Barany, “Burma: Suu Kyi’s Missteps”; Bünte, “Perilous Presidentialism or Precarious Power-Sharing?”; Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation”; Wells, “Narrative and Elucidating the Concept of Democracy.”
21 Roewer, “Three Faces of Party Organisation.”
22 Ibid.; Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation.”
23 Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation.”
24 Barany, “Moving Toward Democracy”; Kim, “The 2015 Parliamentary and 2016 Presidential Elections in Myanmar”; Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation”; Roewer, “Three Faces of Party Organisation”; Than, “Myanmar’s General Election 2015”; Thawnghmung, “The Myanmar Elections 2015.”
25 Than, “Myanmar’s 2012 By-Elections.”
26 Barany, “Moving Toward Democracy.”
27 Kim, “The 2015 Parliamentary and 2016 Presidential Elections in Myanmar.”
28 Than, “Myanmar’s General Election 2015.”
29 Cutts and Johnston, “Constituency Campaigning Intensity.”
30 André and Depauw, “The Electoral Impact of Grassroots Activity”; Cutts and Johnston, “Constituency Campaigning Intensity.”
31 Bizzarro et al., “Party Strength and Economic Growth”; Coppedge et al., “V-Dem Country-Year/Country-Date Dataset V10.” I have recreated this index because there are many stretches of missing values in the series, for example for Myanmar, without explanation, i.e. the component variables are not missing values. The primary difference between this index and the one used by Bizzarro et al. is the exclusion of a measure of party switching, which Varieties of Democracy no longer measures, and the inclusion of a measure for distinct and available party platforms, which Varieties of Democracy includes in their “party institutionalization index.”
32 For more information on this index and its component measures see Varieties of Democracy.
33 This is the median for all country-years for Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Brunei is not included in Varieties of Democracy because of its small population.
34 Operationalized here as country-years categorized as “electoral autocracy” or “closed autocracy” in Varieties of Democracy’s Regimes of the World measure.
35 Barany, “Moving Toward Democracy.”
36 Kipgen, “Decoding Myanmar’s 2015 Election.”
37 Stokke, Win, and Aung, “Political Parties and Popular Representation.”
38 Egreteau, “Myanmar: Transition, Praetorian Politics, and the Prospects for Change”; Jones, “Explaining Myanmar’s Regime Transition”; Wong, “Chinese Influence, U.S. Linkages, or Neither?.”
39 This survey was conducted as a street survey. The author’s research assistant went to different locations of the city on each day the survey was conducted and solicited the participation of every 3rd passer by. The research assistant was not asked to record how many people declined to participate. The survey was conducted in Burmese. Although we should be cautious with this approach (see: Sapsford, Survey Research), this was the most feasible approach to conducting a survey given logistical and survey infrastructure constraints at the time. Further, validating research has been conducted on this approach for capturing hard to reach populations (Miller et al., “The Feasibility of a Street-Intercept Survey Method.”), and it has been used in political science research in less democratic contexts (e.g. Onuch, Mapping Mass Mobilization). This survey research, as well as the interviews and focus group research presented after it, were conducted with the approval and oversight of the ethics review board of the author’s academic institution. The survey research, focus group, and some of the interviews were also conducted in collaboration with a Myanmar educational institution: Yangon School of Political Science.
40 Survey respondents were asked directly about how often they were contacted by a party, with response categories “never,” “once or a few times,” “at least once a year,” “at least once a month.” For the 2015 campaign respondents were also given the response option: “at least once a week.”
41 Beck and Heidemann, “Changing Strategies in Grassroots Canvassing.”
42 Aldrich et al., “Getting Out the Vote in the Social Media Era”; Schmitt-Beck, “Struggling Up the Hill.”
43 The questions for this figure were immediate addendums to the questions about party contact, where respondents were asked “What form did this contact take?” and provided with the options displayed.
44 Wai, “NLD to Replace Many 2020 Candidates.”
45 Pedersen, “Myanmar in 2018: New Democracy Hangs in the Balance.”
46 Barany, “Burma: Suu Kyi’s Missteps”; Pedersen, “Myanmar in 2018: New Democracy Hangs in the Balance.”
47 Croissant and Haynes, “Democratic Regression in Asia.”
48 Ibid.
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Jeremy Martin Ladd
Jeremy Ladd is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Pennsylvania State University. His primary research interests are in methodology, and electoral authoritarian regimes.