Mobilizing for Elections is an outstanding study and will be essential reading for all interested in Southeast Asian politics, but also for scholars working generally on subjects such as electoral mobilization, clientelism, patronage, “money politics”, and political parties. It takes into account major insights from historical institutionalism and is based on extensive field research. With this approach it goes far beyond quantitative studies. It answers salient questions on who exactly mobilizes voters, what kind of patronage is used, how would-be voters respond, and what the motives of candidates and brokers are in handing out specific forms of patronage.
This volume, by Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken, and Paul D. Hutchcroft, is the outcome of a long-term collaboration among four leading experts on Southeast Asian politics. Since 2012, the research project has involved large teams of researchers conducting extensive field research ahead of and during a range of elections with roughly 3,000 interviews. Moreover, national and local surveys as well as survey experiments have supplemented the research (p. 25ff). The authors have selected three Southeast Asian middle-income countries with significant experience of electoral politics (p. 22). Moreover, they conducted supplementary research in Singapore, Timor-Leste, and Thailand. Thailand was originally chosen as one of the major case studies, but because of the 2014 military coup it appears in the book only at times to strengthen the comparative aspect.
Clientelism is usually seen as a personalistic relationship of power with patrons of higher social status and clients of lower social status, typically hierarchically organized, enduring and characterized by contingency, meaning that patrons and clients are mutually dependent (p. 7). In contrast, Aspinall et al. argue that patronage is “a material resource, distributed for particularistic benefit for political purposes and generally (but not always) derived from public sources” (p. 6). According to the authors, patronage modifies resources and flows whereas clientelism modifies relationships, linkages, and ties.
One of the reasons to focus on patronage and not on clientelism has been the central insight discovered during the research that “much of the behavior” treated as “contingency-based clientelism is, in fact, not contingent at all” (p. 19), but rather serves to buttress strategies like credibility buying, turf protection, and brand building. Besides, quantitative studies often do not distinguish between forms of particularism and mobilizing networks and tend to oversee the rich variety of links between parties, candidates, and voters.
The authors distinguish three types of patronage: micro-particularism (p. 99ff) involving the disbursement of benefits to individuals and households, meso-particularism (p. 125ff) encompassing club goods to larger collectivities, and macro-particularism (p. 150ff) with regional-level or national-level programs. The latter type consists of three sub-types: candidates convince voters that they have been decisive for handing out patronage (credit-claiming), that they have somehow enabled the disbursement (facilitation), or they discretely use chunks of public resources to distribute patronage (morselization). These types are not mutually exclusive and exist on a continuum (p. 9). Often, candidates use different strategies in parallel.
The comparison serves to identify patterns of patronage and types of networks (p. 11). In the Philippines, local machines help to organize and distribute patronage, whereas in Malaysia national political parties and coalitions predominate. In Indonesia, ad hoc personal campaign teams (Tim Sukses) prevail. Each of these three types is connected to specific forms of electoral mobilization and patronage. This link between patronage types and networks is conceptualised as “electoral mobilization regimes” (p. 12).
Against this backdrop, in the second chapter the authors analyse the historical and institutional foundations of the electoral mobilization regimes. Following Martin Shefter (1994) and his stress on historical timing and sequencing of electoral mobilization, they add the role of electoral institutions, and then examine three distinct historical pathways (p. 32). Strong bureaucracies either precede the mobilization of mass electorates as in Germany or, as in Italy, the other way round (p. 34) leading to either a “constituency for bureaucratic autonomy” or a “constituency for patronage”, respectively. Moreover, Shefter differentiates between externally and internally mobilized parties, according to the location where these have been established, i.e., either outside or within the regime. The authors trace the three national trajectories from the time of colonialism and the formation of state apparatuses before and after independence, the choice and evolution of electoral systems, and they examine historical legacies and pathways shaping political parties, their relation to bureaucracies and the availability of patronage (p. 36ff).
Malaysia’s electoral authoritarian system was dominated until 2018 by UMNO (United Malays National Organization), a well-oiled party machinery with 3.35 million members and direct access to state-financed patronage. Thus, macro-particularistic practices of credit-claiming and facilitation overshadowed a limited micro-particularism. In contrast, political parties in the Philippines have always been weak and patronage has been more dependent on pork-barrel politics and local machines using public and private resources. All three types of particularism are used extensively. Political parties in Indonesia are between these two extremes, but an increasingly candidate-centred electoral system has produced a focus on private resources. Ad hoc teams organize the micro-particularistic incentives during campaigning. The extraordinary richness in detailing all these particular mobilization techniques in the three countries is one of the great qualities of this book.
The nuanced analysis also covers some regional patterns deviating from the predominant ones: Sabah and Sarawak in Malaysia, Aceh and Papua in Indonesia, and Mindanao in the Philippines are exceptions to the national trends and patterns and sometimes have more in common with electoral mobilization regimes in neighbouring countries. Another chapter covers the role of ethnic and religious identity networks (p. 179ff), gender disparities (p. 188ff), and class (p. 198ff).
The ambitious endeavour of the research team does not leave much ground for criticism. The historical institutionalism is in itself plausible, but the trajectories of regimes, party systems, campaign strategies, finance regulations, and the like are so complex since colonial times that the reconstruction of causal mechanisms with reference to Shefter’s insights is difficult. Shefter’s sequencing and the distinction between externally and internally mobilized parties, especially under conditions of colonialism, raises new questions. In addition, the typology is based on only three in-depth country studies and its generalizability is, therefore, restricted as evidenced by the short passages at the end on other cases in Southeast Asia such as Timor Leste, Thailand, and Singapore with their respective specificities.
In sum, the book offers a range of very innovative contributions to the literature. It develops a convincing typology of electoral mobilization regimes (p. 73ff) and I wonder if this typology could be expanded in the future. It would also be interesting to see how populist forms of electoral campaigning, in particular those involving new social media, would fit into the typology presented. The book also succeeds in transcending the usual fixation on micro-level and contingent practices. Instead, the authors deal with practices involving not merely the exchange of patronage for electoral support, they extend the analysis to “internally coherent and consistent systems of governance, with distinct clusterings of patronage forms and networks” (p. 238). This also implies a reconstruction of path-dependent electoral mobilization regimes and an approach that includes anthropological, political science, and politico-economic analyses in order also to understand specific social group characteristics (p. 242ff). Only this comprehensive analysis may help draft refined electoral and party regulations that better take into account the hardly predictable effects of such reforms (p. 251ff).
