Don’t You Forget about Me? Candidate Performance, Club Goods and Vote Buying in Indonesia

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

Abstract

In a patronage democracy, political candidates have a choice between providing gifts and money to individual voters (vote buying) and distributing collective gifts to communities (club goods). In Indonesia, many candidates believe it is more socially desirable to take the second path and dispense patronage to groups rather than to individuals: roads or other small infrastructure projects to villages, equipment to sporting or religious associations, livestock or seeds to farmers’ cooperatives, and so on. In both surveys and focus groups, voters also say they are more attracted to candidates who distribute such collective benefits than to those who hand out individual gifts. Yet vote buying is widespread. To explain why, this paper draws on data compiled over five years of research into Indonesian elections, including interviews with candidates, direct observations of campaigns, and surveys of vote brokers and voters. It argues that many candidates, though attracted to the reputational benefits of club goods strategies, are often discouraged by the free rider problems they associate with the practice, believing that many beneficiaries of collective gifts will not feel obliged to reciprocate with their votes. They also distrust the community-level brokers whose good offices they must rely on to deliver vote banks in exchange for collective gifts. Candidates see vote buying, by contrast, as a way to bind voters to them, even if voters rarely report feeling bound. The gap so revealed between candidate and voter perceptions tells us much about notions of social and political order underpinning Indonesia’s contemporary patronage democracy.

Author

• Edward Aspinall, Australian National University