Electoral Malpractice in East and Southeast Asia Mini-Conference

Session Submission Type: Mini-conference

Session Description

Electoral integrity is a problem in Asia. According to the Perception of Electoral Integrity index, most countries in this region have moderate to low ratings of electoral integrity. This proposed mini-conference will build on the literature on electoral integrity to identify the dominant forms of electoral malpractice and study their effects on voters, parties and regime legitimacy in 12 East and Southeast Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam). Specifically, our research objectives are:
1. to conduct a comparative study on the capacity of the electoral management bodies and assess the quality of elections in 12 countries using mixed research methods;
2. for each country expert to report on the patterns of electoral malpractice and electoral reforms on the two recent national elections in the selected country, and
3. to discuss publication plans for a special journal issue and an edited book.
Previous studies on electoral malpractice in Asia are selective and limited in scope. This mini-conference will build cross-country comparative empirical evidence on the dominant forms of electoral malpractices in the region and examine their effects based on qualitative and quantitative research methods. Our aim is to address the following questions: 1) What constitutes free and fair elections in East and Southeast Asia? 2) Do the recent national elections meet international standards of electoral integrity? 3) How do the citizens respond to electoral malpractice? 4) Was electoral governance improved in the last two elections?
We adopt Sarah Birch’s definition of electoral malpractice to refer to situations where the principles of electoral integrity are violated and electoral fraud to describe interference with the electoral process that violates domestic laws, perpetrated intentionally by governments, officials or party workers. Our plan is to go beyond the overt form of malpractice such as ballot rigging, vote count irregularities or electoral violence that occur on polling day and include more subtle forms of manipulation of the legal framework such as malapportionment, gerrymandering or irregular campaign financing before elections.
As co-organizers, Netina Tan and Kharis Templeman have confirmed the participation of internationally renowned electoral studies scholars such as Pippa Norris as keynote speaker and Larry Diamond; Jorgen Elklit; Caroline Van Ham and Allen Hicken as discussants. In addition, we have also lined up an impressive list of junior and senior Asian country experts to present in this conference. The APSA venue will allow us to leverage on the conference’s central location to bring together international and regional political science experts in one location. We have applied for workshop funding (US$6000) from the ACLS-CCK Foundation to partially subsidize the travels and refreshments for this meeting. As most of the invited scholars have not had the opportunity to collaborate before, this face-to-face interaction is promising and likely to generate exciting insights. This proposed conference theme on electoral malpractice in East and Southeast Asia is timely given the perceptions of electoral integrity problems in recent U.S. presidential elections. From a comparative perspective, we hope to identify the dominant patterns and unpack the effects of flawed elections so as to identify the best practices to improve electoral integrity in an understudied region in Asia. We expect our participants to make a substantial theoretical and empirical contribution to the electoral integrity and comparative democratization literature. Depending on the quality of the papers presented, we plan to edit and provide feedback to all the participants to reframe their papers into a special journal issue and an edited book. We are confident that our collaborative efforts will advance scholarly and policy debates, and reach a wide academic audience, policy makers interested in election monitoring and governance in Asia, and beyond.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Individual Presentations

• Challenges in the Study of Pre-Electoral Malpractice - Carolien Van Ham, University of New South Wales

• Violations of Electoral Integrity in the Myanmar 2015 Election - Elin Bjarnegard, Uppsala University

• Electoral Malpractice in Myanmar: A Comparison of the 2010 and 2015 Elections - Marco Bünte, Monash University Malaysia

• The Decline of Vote-Buying as Electoral Mobilization Strategy in Taiwan - Chin-shou Wang, National Cheng Kung University

• Using Election Forensics to Detect Fraud and Strategic Behavior - Allen D. Hicken, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Free and/or Fair? How Japanese Courts Rule on Election Campaign Regulations - Kenneth Mori McElwain, University of Tokyo

• Electoral Malpractice in Single Party Dominant Malaysia - Kai Ostwald, University of British Columbia

• Voting for the Incumbent in Single Party Regimes: Fear or Conviction? - Guillem Riambau Armet; Kai Ostwald, University of British Columbia

• Voting in the Dark: How Vietnamese Voters Negotiate Low Information Elections - Paul J. Schuler, University of Arizona

• Challenges of Electoral Reform and Engineering in Mongolia - Michael Aagaard Seeberg, University of Southern Denmark

• The Use and Abuse of Electoral Rules to Manipulate Election Outcomes in Thailand - Joel Sawat Selway, Brigham Young University

• Reform and Malpractice in Contemporary Indonesian Elections - Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, Arizona State University

• Assessing Partisan Effects and Attitudes towards Gerrymandering in Singapore - Netina Tan

• The Sources of Electoral Integrity in Taiwan - Kharis Ali Templeman, Stanford University

• Drivers of Pre-Electoral Manipulations in the 2013 Cambodian Election - Max Grömping, The University of Sydney

• Restricting Free Speech in the Name of Fairness: Regulations in South Korea - Jong-sung You, The Australian National University

• Silent Manipulation: Effects of Polling Place Distance on Voting in Hong Kong - Stan Hok-Wui Wong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Chairs

• Netina Tan

• Kharis Ali Templeman Stanford University

• Jorgen Elklit University of Aarhus

• Allen D. Hicken University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Kenneth Mori McElwain University of Tokyo

• Guillem Riambau Armet

• Aurel S. Croissant University Heidelberg

Discussants

• Carolien Van Ham University of New South Wales

• Meredith L. Weiss SUNY, University at Albany

Presenter

• Larry Diamond Stanford University