My dissertation presents a wide-ranging study of the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesia’s young democracy, exploring the nature, extent, determinants, targeting and effectiveness of this practice. My study addresses these central issues in the
context of comparative studies of vote buying, arguing that although in relative
terms, partisan voters are more likely to be targeted, in absolute terms, vote buying
largely happens among undecided voters (given the relatively small number of party loyalists in Indonesia). Regardless of such a substantial amount of leakage, vote buying remains an attractive strategy for many candidates because the 10 percent range of vote buying effects on vote choice is high enough to secure victory.
Following this introduction, Chapter 2 discusses a central question of this study. It attempts to answer how extensive vote buying and club goods distribution are in Indonesian elections. Especially with regard to vote buying, I present estimates of these practices using various measures and techniques. This chapter compares the findings from Indonesia with the level of vote buying in other countries. The chapter focuses on vote buying in legislative elections, but also pays attention to evidence of extensive vote buying in local executive contests. Utilising a rich vein of data from 2006 to 2015, I identify inter-regional variation in levels of vote buying over time. The chapter concludes that vote buying has become an increasingly prominent feature of Indonesia’s electoral politics both at the national and local level.
Chapter 3 identifies factors explaining why some individuals are more likely than others to be targeted with vote buying and club goods by political operatives. This chapter also provides a complete profile of the typical vote sellers. It rigorously tests
the patterns of vote buying and club goods based on two sets of polling data: one is based on a survey done after the 2014 legislative election; the other is a large dataset of surveys on local executive elections from 2006 to 2015. Interestingly, both data sources confirm that party identification is among the strongest predictors for explaining vote buying. Simply put, the closer the ties of an individual to a political party, the more likely he/she is to be exposed to, or to be accepting of, vote buying. However, partisanship has little predictive value in explaining club goods provision. Building on this finding, Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between party-based partisanship and vote buying in the context of the debate on whether vote buyers are more likely to target swing or party loyalist voters. It discusses the levels of party identification and the demographics of party identifiers in Indonesia. Given the centrality of the finding that a high degree of party identification in a voter makes him or her more likely to be the target of vote buying, this chapter engages in further tests of this hypothesis with multiple sources of data. First, it reviews evidence from voter-level data which also indicates the greater likelihood of party loyalists being targeted. Moreover, the chapter presents evidence from a unique survey of politicians and brokers as well from as a list experiment which is strongly suggestive of the party loyalist strategy. After interrogating the evidence, the chapter comes to the
conclusion that despite the fact that in relative terms party loyalists are more likely
to be targeted, in absolute terms vote buying mostly happens among non-partisans –
largely because the number of voters with high levels of party identification is small. Chapter 5 explains the gap between politicians’ intention of capturing party loyalists and the fact that it is undecided voters who most receive benefits. It offers an additional explanation to the conventionally more party-oriented literature by combining an emphasis on the core-voter argument with a stronger focus on candidates’ and brokers’ reliance on personal networks. I call this explanation the ‘personalist loyalist’ argument. I highlight that the concept of loyalty is ambiguous in the Indonesian context, leading many political actors to misidentify (and overestimate the number of) partisan voters. This chapter also emphasises that the problem of targeting could partly be a story about agency loss in which many of the people who are selected through personal networks are in fact weakly connected to the candidate. In this regard, institutional and structural contexts matter greatly in shaping the environment in which vote buying can thrive; thus, the chapter begins with a comparison between Indonesia and Latin American countries regarding institutional and contextual factors.
Chapter 6 puts flesh on the bones of my argument about the personal loyalist strategy. It demonstrates how personal networks feed the recruitment and organisation of brokers, and help define targeting strategies in settings where party-based partisan ties are weak. The chapter then addresses many of the unanswered questions in the study of electoral clientelism in Indonesia, such as those regarding the demographic profiles of brokers and the logistics of vote buying. Importantly, this chapter argues that the dual-track strategy employed by many candidates, in which they target both party loyalists and persons connected to them through personal networks strategy— not only suffers from misdirected targeting, but is also jeopardised by agency loss, that is leakage of the funds provided by candidates. The discussion shows that, despite reliance on brokerage networks, candidates typically develop weak monitoring and lack enforcement methods, encouraging brokers to engage in rent-seeking behaviour. Given that the widespread leakage and failed targeting, it is crucial to investigate the effectiveness of vote buying. Chapter 7, therefore, begins with discussion of its impacts on both voter turnout and vote choice. It shows that despite targeting strategies being imperfect and despite the unreliability of brokers, vote buying produces greater turnout. This chapter also shows that while receiving money influences the vote choice of ‘only’ approximately 10 percent of voters, these 10 percent matter immensely in Indonesia’s highly competitive election settings. It concludes that vote buying serves as an effective mechanism to produce narrow winning margins, and this in turns accounts for its attractiveness to politicians.
In the conclusion, I discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the findings and point to an agenda for future research. Overall, the comparative literature on vote buying and turnout buying have emerged in contexts different from that in Indonesia. This makes the dynamics of vote buying, especially its targeting, very distinctive.
CHAPTER 2
THE PREVALENCE OF VOTE BUYING IN INDONESIA:
BUILDING AN INDEx
How prevalent is patronage distribution in Indonesia? Although there has been a burst of
scholarly and non-scholarly writings on the topic in the last few years,1 little is known
about how many voters actually receive material incentives from politicians. This chapter offers a systematic answer to fundamental questions about the intensity of money politics in Indonesia that have vexed scholars for many years. It involves a complex study of
patronage politics in Indonesian elections, which draws predominantly on surveys.2
This chapter deals with two forms of patronage distribution: first, it briefly assesses the prevalence of club goods provision, which can be classified as the most important form of collective patronage distribution; and second, it discusses –in much more length– the intensity of vote buying, the most individualised form of patronage politics. As I show in the following pages, although club goods are also a widespread practice in Indonesia, the level of scholarly and legal controversy about this strategy is relatively small. Given that such collective patronage is often viewed as legally and socially more legitimate than vote buying, my analytical focus is on vote buying.
Concretely, I measure vote buying by constructing a vote buying index as the main dependent variable of this study. I argue that vote buying is central to election campaigns in Indonesia. Drawing from a wide range of survey methods, I estimate that the proportion of voters participating in vote buying during the 2014 legislative election was between
1Among others, Choi (2007), Aspinall (2014), Nurdin (2014), Allen (2015), Aspinall and As’ad (2015),
Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016), Aspinall et al (2017), Amick (2016) and Tawakkal et al (2017).
2I use a number of nationwide surveys in this chapter, including an April 2009 survey by The Indonesian
Survey Institute (LSI) and a December 2013 survey by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC). The LSI survey took place from 20 – 27 April 2009, around one week after the legislative election. The sample was 2,000 voting-age adults with a margin of error of ±2.4 percent at 95 percent confidence level. Meanwhile, the SMRC survey interviewed 1,210 respondents, who, like the respondents in the LSI poll, were selected with multistage random sampling, with an estimated margin of error of ± 2.9 percent at 95 percent confidence level. This chapter also draws from a pre-election survey conducted March 19–24, 2014. The number in the sample was 1,220 voting-age adults who were selected with multistage random sampling proportionally distributed over the 34 provinces. The margin of error was around ±2.9 percent at 95 percent significance level. However, this chapter draws primarily from my post-legislative election survey conducted 22 – 26 April 2014, around two weeks after the legislative election. I timed of the surveys to take advantage of a simultaneous national and sub-national parliamentary election, held in April 9th 2014, which would mean that citizens’ recent interactions with parties, candidates, and brokers were fresh in their minds. In addition to these national surveys, I also utilise a large amount of data drawn from 963 of
25 percent and 33 percent (depending on the method and specific question used in the survey). For comparative purposes, I relate this figure of self-reported vote buying with rates from other countries in the world. It turns out that the range between 25 and 33 percent is comparatively high by international standards, with Indonesia’s level of vote buying being the third-largest in the world (at least as measured in surveys within the last decade). As vote buying is illegal in most countries, including Indonesia, it is plausible to suspect that respondents directly asked about such exchanges are reluctant to provide truthful answers. However, despite this presumed desirability bias, my findings show that the list-experiment and the straight survey questions result in consistent estimates of the aggregate levels of vote buying. The chapter discusses this question extensively.
Finally, although this study puts greater weight on vote buying in national parliamentary elections, it also offers new insights into the underexplored nature of such practices in different election settings. In the last part of this chapter, I present historical survey data owned by my home institutions (LSI and Indikator Politik Indonesia), to identify inter-regional variation in levels of vote buying in executive elections at the local level. This chapter concludes that vote buying is not only widespread during national legislative elections, but that it has also become a central feature of local executive elections, where the prize is the position of district head, mayor or governor.