Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Across Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, politicians win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters. But they do so in ways that vary tremendously—both across and within countries. This author-meets-critics roundtable will examine these dimensions through a discussion of Edward Aspinall, Meredith Weiss, Allen Hicken, and Paul Hutchcroft’s Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022). Mobilizing for Elections presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. It does so by drawing on a large-scale, multi-country, multi-year research effort involving interactions with hundreds of politicians and vote brokers, as well as surveys of voters and political campaigners across the region. The book explores how local machines in the Philippines, ad hoc election teams in Indonesia, and political parties in Malaysia pursue distinctive clusters of strategies of patronage distribution—what the authors term electoral mobilization regimes. In doing so, the book shows how and why patronage politics varies, and how it works on the ground. The book draws on Southeast Asian experience; the participants in this roundtable will assess and critique the volume in light of their expertise on other world regions: Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Meredith L. Weiss SUNY, University at Albany

Discussants

• Edward Aspinall Australian National University

• Allen D. Hicken University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Paul D. Hutchcroft Australian National University

• Meredith L. Weiss SUNY, University at Albany

Presenters

• Amy Louise Catalinac New York University

• Herbert Kitschelt Duke University

• Ellen M. Lust University of Gothenburg

• Noah Nathan Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Simeon C. Nichter University of California, San Diego