Is money an insurmountable barrier to women’s political representation in transactional democracies? Evidence from North Sumatera, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Elections are expensive, disadvantaging women with limited access to financial resources. Strategies to address this problem have focused on increasing women’s campaign funds or lowering costs such as nomination fees. While important, such strategies will not overcome the disadvantages women face in countries where “transactional politics” is rife, with voter expectations for gifts and/or cash multiplying the costs of elections. Following the 2019 elections in Indonesia, women lamented that the only thing that mattered was: Isi ni tas? – how much money is in your bag? This article contributes to the literature on money and women’s underrepresentation by identifying what is at stake in electoral systems overwhelmed by “money politics.” Our research in North Sumatera, Indonesia, demonstrates that women candidates can lower the cost of expensive election campaigns through practices that achieve the symbolic ends of money politics without cash transfers to voters and campaigners. Despite these possibilities, the perception that elections are unavoidably expensive continues to deter otherwise viable women candidates from stepping forward. The commonly held belief that elections are synonymous with money politics hence serves to sustain the dominance of Indonesian politics by privileged men. New narratives of electoral successes are required to address the underrepresentation of women.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• campaign costs
• money politics
• transactional politics
• gender and politics
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to the men and women who participated in this study. This research project is a part of the Development Leadership Program led by the University of Birmingham and La Trobe University, and funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Government of Australia [DLPGFA-A]. Tanya Jakimow is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT190100247]. We are grateful to the participants at the Indonesian Council Open Conference (University of Queensland July 2021) for their comments on a presentation of this paper. Thanks also to the excellent suggestions by three anonymous reviewers, and the clear guidance provided by the editor that significantly improved our paper. Any remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Jakarta FGD was held at Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). We thank Kurniawati Dewi for organising this event. The FGD underlined the importance of money in Indonesia’s elections, but we have not drawn upon the data further in this paper that focuses on North Sumatera.

2 All names are pseudonyms

3 Research on the New South Wales council elections is being undertaken by Tanya Jakimow.

4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT190100247]; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australian Government [grant number Development Leadership Program - DLPGFA-A].