Going to the Ground (or Astroturf): A Grassroots View of Regime Resilience

• In Event: Money Politics in Southeast Asia: Patronage, Clientelism, and Electoral Dynamics

Abstract

The study of regimes is an enterprise fundamentally concerned with the state. We classify regimes most commonly in terms of how a change of government is effected or avoided. Without discounting the importance of these institutional dimensions, I suggest that we can better understand and conceptualize regime persistence, collapse, or reform by looking to the point at which state and society meet: how, where, and when regime actors and challengers insert themselves into or engage with the grassroots. That dimension is especially important in “hybrid,” or electoral authoritarian, regimes—defined usually in terms of meaningful, but flawed, elections, and of which Singapore and Malaysia are the most durable and consistent examples in the world. Drawing on extensive field research, supplemented by survey data, government and party documents, local media, and secondary sources, I explore what accounts for the durability of Singapore’s People’s Action Party government and Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional (National Front) government, as well as what a new government would need to change if political mobilization, competition, governance, and policy access—defining attributes of the political regime—were to shift. I argue that a combination of what amounts to classic machine politics with the structural “assist” of sub-par elections renders electoral authoritarianism extraordinarily and increasingly resilient over time. This robustness is not just because it is hard or unlikely for voters to vote in new leaders, but also because the opposition, once elected, may end up reproducing rather than subverting key attributes of that same regime.

Author

• Meredith Weiss, State University of New York, Albany