1
INDONESIA’S PATRONAGE DEMOCRACY
Abdullah (not his real name) is the head of an RW (rukun warga), or neighborhood, in one of the industrial zones in Tangerang district, just to the west of Jakarta. Most of the residents in his neighborhood, a working-class housing estate consisting of a few hundred households, work in a nearby textile factory. In the months leading up to the 2014 legislative election, Abdullah decided that if the residents of the RW united they would be able to leverage their voting power to gain benefits for their community. To this end, he contacted various candidates who were running for seats in the national, provincial, and district legislatures. At first, he negotiated with members of the Indonesia Democracy Party—Struggle (PDI-P) and found a national and a provincial candidate who were each willing to pay for regular insecticide spraying to kill the mosquitoes that spread dengue fever in the community, and to fund repairs to the community hall and sponsor parties organized by the local youth group. When a district PDI-P candidate failed to commit to a similar deal, Abdullah found a candidate running for the rival Golkar party, who contributed 50 million rupiah (about US$4,400) to pave 1.3 kilometers of road into the community.1 In return for these benefits, Abdullah and his colleagues formed a team of brokers to deliver the votes these three candidates needed. Each sub-neighborhood (rukun tetangga, or RT) established a “victory team” composed of ten women and ten men whose job it was to talk to their neighbors and ensure they voted for the three candidates. They were also tasked with preventing teams working for rival candidates accessing the community and buying votes there.
This vignette, derived from field notes written in the lead-up to Indonesia’s 2014 legislative election, describes a practice known as political clientelism. Political clientelism happens when voters, campaign workers, or other actors provide electoral support to politicians in exchange for personal favors or material benefits. Politicians who use clientelistic methods to win elections do so by distributing favors, goods, or cash to individuals or small groups of voters, whom they then expect to reciprocate with their votes. These goods and favors can come in multiple forms—from envelopes stuffed with cash to assistance in getting a child into a government scholarship program, from a job as a hospital janitor to a government construction contract.
The essence of clientelistic politics is the quid pro quo, or, as it is often described in the scholarly literature, “contingent exchange” (e.g., Stokes et al. 2013, 7; Hicken 2011, 291): politicians offer benefits in the hope and expectation that recipients will reward them with political support, or as a reward for such support offered in the past. This element of reciprocity distinguishes clientelism from programmatic politics, in which candidates or parties offer broad policies that confer benefits to large categories of persons—or even to an entire population—regardless of the political support those persons offer at election time.
Though it may sound like a technical, even abstract, term, the concept of clientelism allows us to unlock the inner workings and day-to-day politics of many countries around the world, including Indonesia. In much of the world, if we try to understand politics only by analyzing formal institutions, or even by observing only what is reported in the media, we can arrive at a picture in which electoral politics is primarily about battles among parties, political movements, and charismatic leaders offering competing visions for their country’s future. Viewed up close, at the level of interactions between ordinary people, party workers, community leaders, and political representatives, what we often instead find is “the politics of the belly” (Bayart 1993), in which political actors of all sorts try to extract material benefits from the political system. At this level, politics is often conducted on a highly pragmatic basis, with the trading of favors, cash, material goods, and other benefits for political support being the daily stuff of politics. This netherworld of politics can become legible to outsiders briefly, such as when a newspaper reports on a high-profile corruption case linking a politician and a donor, or reveals a case of vote buying; but such publicly reported phenomena are typically mere instances in more widespread patterns of clientelistic politics.
Over the last decade or so, analysts and policy makers have recognized that across large swaths of the world, clientelism is both more common and more entrenched than was once thought. Not long ago, scholars expected that modernization, economic growth, and democratization would gradually force politicians to shed clientelistic practices and focus on the propagation of policy proposals as the principal means of wooing voters. Indeed, many theorists of democracy assumed that programmatic politics was the normal form of democratic competition.2 Yet although programmatic politics can be observed in varying intensity throughout the world, there is little indication that it is on course to drive out clientelistic practices. The experiences of both relatively older, established democracies, such as India, as well new “third wave” democracies like Indonesia, suggest that democratization is making clientelistic politics less asymmetrical by strengthening the bargaining power of voters and grassroots brokers, but not making it less pervasive (Gay 1998; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Krishna 2007; Roniger 2004). On the contrary, a recurring theme in recent studies of politics from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and South America is the centrality of clientelistic exchange in shaping interactions between citizens and the state (see for example Auyero 2001; Beck 2008; Collins 2006; Gay 1998; van Klinken 2009; Kopecký, Mair, and Spirova 2012; O’Dwyer 2006; van de Walle 2007). The term “patronage democracy” has gained currency to describe democracies where electoral mobilization primarily takes a clientelistic form (Chandra 2004), with the word “patronage,” in our usage, referring to the goods and favors that politicians provide in exchange for electoral support (we discuss definitions at greater length in chapter 2). Given the centrality of clientelistic politics throughout the world, it could be argued that patronage democracies actually constitute the normal—in the sense of most common—form of democracy.
Growing awareness of the persistence and centrality of clientelism has led scholars to devote increasing intellectual effort to understanding how clientelistic systems work. This book extends that effort to the world’s fourth-most-populous country, its third-largest democracy, and one of the great success stories of the so-called “third wave” of democratization: Indonesia. Throughout this book we argue that Indonesia’s newly democratized political system is saturated with clientelism. At every level, formal political institutions are shadowed by informal, personalized networks through which material benefits and favors flow. Politicians win power, often, by distributing small-scale projects, cash, or other goods to voters or community groups; they gain the funds they need to campaign by trading contracts, licenses, and other favors with businesspeople; and they engage in constant battles with each other and with bureaucrats in order to wrest control over state resources and turn them to their personal political advantage.
The exchange of favors and material benefits at every stage of the electoral cycle is so pervasive that one is apt to think of democracy in Indonesia as being for sale. The sale of state power is a step-by-step affair that proceeds throughout the electoral cycle. It starts with the considerable amounts of money that many candidates pay to political parties to acquire the support they need to stand for election. During their negotiations with would-be candidates, party officials often extract stiff prices, as well as promises of future benefits, in exchange for their backing. Such auctioneering of support is also present when candidates build their campaign organizations. Candidates attract campaign workers by enticing them with monetary incentives and with promises of privileged access to projects, development schemes, and other state resources. These campaign organizers in turn acquire the support of community leaders by offering—as in the case of Abdullah—contributions for community infrastructure or activities, or simply by providing them with under-the-table payments. In the days preceding an election, campaigners take their auction to the streets and households of Indonesia, in the form of the so-called dawn attack, in which they distribute large amounts of money to voters. Not infrequently, voters have to weigh bids from several candidates before deciding on which they will support. After the election, it is payback time, and campaign donors and workers can expect to be rewarded by the winning candidates with jobs, contracts, credit, projects, and other benefits. The winners turn their thoughts to building up a war chest—typically by engaging in various forms of corruption—in anticipation of the next election. The huge amounts of money involved, and the pervasiveness of clientelistic exchange throughout the electoral process, mean that state power is, in effect, auctioned off.
Of course, in Indonesia, as in other countries, this is not how politicians present their election victories. Politicians and their supporters generally prefer to claim they win because voters prefer their persona or program over those of their competitors, rather than because they outbid them. And, of course, sometimes they are right. Candidate quality and programmatic offerings do count a great deal in at least some Indonesian elections (Aspinall 2013b; Fossati 2017; Mujani, Liddle, and Ambardi 2012), most obviously in presidential polls. In this book we confirm that there is scope for programmatic voting even in local elections in parts of Indonesia, especially urban regions of the most densely populated island, Java. By calling our book Democracy for Sale we do not mean that every political office is merely auctioned off, nor even that clientelistic politics boils down merely to a matter of monetary exchange. Even so, in many areas pro-grammatic politics is mixed inextricably with clientelistic practices, and in some regions clientelism is so pervasive that the governing capacities or policy proposals of candidates have little impact on election results. The pervasiveness of clientelistic exchanges has turned elections into a contest of who dares to offer the most money and other resources. The pervasiveness of such clientelistic practices has given rise to the phrase demokrasi wani piro as a widely used descriptor for Indonesian democracy, where the Javanese phrase wani piro means “how much do you dare” (to pay)?
Treating Clientelism Comparatively
As well as describing how political clientelism works in Indonesia, our aim in this book is to place Indonesia’s system in a comparative context and highlight what is distinctive about it. To allow us to begin this process, let us compare the story of Abdullah, with which we began this chapter, with two more vignettes, the first taken from Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, the second from Buenos Aires in Argentina:
Mahesh Varma [is] a party worker for the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]. Every morning [he] can be found at the side of one of the main roads… next to Pravin Dalal, the local municipal councillor, and four other party workers. At this roadside they receive a daily flow of local inhabitants, who come to ask for Pravin Dalal’s help to deal with governmental institutions—for, for example, getting a loan, repairing broken paving, settling a police case, getting a proof of residence or reducing one’s hospital fees. The party workers help Pravin Dalal in this process.… During elections [Mahesh Varma] helps to organise rallies, tours the neighbourhood—“I go from home to home and I tell people to vote for the BJP, because of the work it has done.” (Berenschot 2014, 202–203)
Cholo still distributes milk, food, and medicine and opens his UB [unidades básicas, a Peronist neighborhood committee] almost every day of the year. Many residents identify this UB with the municipality. Asking people whether they knew Cholo, I would often receive the same answer: “Yes, there in the corner, at the municipality.”… In the end, it is the Peronist Party that has the most direct access at all levels—local, provincial, and national—to the resources of the state. In poverty-stricken neighborhoods, squatter settlements, and shanty-towns, the UBs constitute one of the most important places in which basic needs can be satisfied, through [which] basic problems can be solved. The UBs lend incredible organizational strength to the Peronist Party and ensure the party high (and unmatched) levels of territorial penetration. (Auyero 2001, 92 and 89)
Both of these quotations describe interactions that are clientelistic, as in the scene that opens this chapter. The first paints a typical picture of local politics in India, where party workers often act as fixers and problem solvers for their communities. Through such acts of support, these Indian party workers aim to generate a sense of obligation among their clients to vote for their party (e.g., Auerbach 2016; Witsoe 2013). The second describes politics in a poor neighborhood in Argentina’s capital, where the Peronist party has historically possessed a deeply entrenched party machine and uses its control over municipal welfare programs to cultivate political support. Here, such deals sometimes remain implicit, as party activists assume that “in the act of getting help, problem holders become increasingly ensnared within the Peronist web” (Auyero 2001, 117). As with Abdullah in Tangerang, in both these cases we see how political actors provide various favors with the aim of generating support: all three cases are examples of political clientelism at work.
However, the careful reader will have already noted a similarity between the Indian and Argentinian examples that contrasts with Abdullah’s story. Both feature political parties or, more precisely, grassroots party operatives, playing the role of intermediaries or brokers in clientelistic exchange. In contrast, what is striking about the story of Abdullah is how marginal political parties are to it. Yes, the candidates seeking office were party candidates. But the person initiating the deal, acting as these candidates’ chief broker, and organizing their combined campaign in this neighborhood was not a party worker. He was instead a nonpartisan community leader cum low-ranking state functionary. RW heads are not civil servants, but in most places they draw a small stipend from the state, and much of their work concerns managing community-level official business: we explain their functions and authority at length in later chapters. Abdullah established a team of brokers who were themselves not connected directly to the candidates they were supporting, let alone to their parties. The fact that they were simultaneously working for candidates from rival parties was somewhat unusual, but not unique in the Indonesian context. And while it is more typical for the candidate to be the one to make the initial approach, we shall see in later chapters it is by no means rare for community leaders to seek out candidates at election time and offer them support in exchange for small-scale projects of the type Abdullah sought. Bargaining between politicians and community brokers over such deals is so common that there is even an Indonesian term that encompasses such deals, along with those made for cash or other material rewards: politik transaksional, or “transactional politics.” While transactional politics can occur within political parties, it often takes place outside parties through deals that are ad hoc, temporary, even freewheeling.
Here we arrive at the nub of what makes Indonesia’s system of clientelism distinctive. In many countries, political parties are the principal intermediaries in clientelistic politics. Classic studies of clientelism have focused on party machines. In the United States, scholars paid attention to the party machines that operated in working-class and migrant cities like Chicago and Philadelphia (Banfield and Wilson 1963; Scott 1969). More recent studies on clientelistic politics in countries like India, Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil highlight the central role of political parties in clientelistic vote mobilization (see Auerbach 2016; Auyero 2001; Berenschot 2011b; De Wit 2016; Levitsky 2003; Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros, and Estévez 2007; Nichter 2014; Witsoe 2013). Indeed, as Hilgers (2012, 569) notes, the terms “machine politics” and “clientelism” are often used interchangeably. One recent influential cross-national comparative study of distributive politics considers clientelistic brokers solely as “agents of the party” (Stokes et al. 2013, 19) and assumes the distribution of clientelistic benefits to be the domain of political parties. This assumption is shared by much recent literature on the topic (see for example Calvo and Murillo 2004; Gans-Morse, Mazzuca, and Nichter 2014; Kitschelt and Kselman 2013; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Nichter 2008).
Indonesia is different. Political parties in Indonesia, as in most democratic systems, play an important role in politics. Indeed, as Mietzner (2013b) has persuasively demonstrated, Indonesia’s parties are relatively strongly institutionalized, at least when compared to those of similar third-wave democracies. Yet parties are often strikingly marginal to the clientelistic exchanges that are so important to Indonesia’s political life. At election times, most candidates build nonparty vote-brokerage structures known as “success teams,” tim sukses, that sometimes draw on party cadres but are more likely to rely on community leaders and other citizens not affiliated to parties. Politicians themselves often have only tenuous links to the parties, or coalitions of parties, that nominate them for elective office. Many of the patronage goods and services that are the medium of exchange in clientelistic politics in other settings—social welfare programs, for example—remain largely outside the control of parties but are instead distributed at the discretion of bureaucrats, community-level elected officials, or by politicians whose party links are weak. Parties themselves are often reduced to the role of toll keeper, selling nominations to candidates but doing little to help them campaign or to discipline or direct their behavior once they hold office. Indonesia is not in this regard unique: in a range of countries, including neighbors such as the Philippines and Thailand, parties are relatively marginal in the organization of election campaigns and the organization of clientelistic exchange (see for example Callahan and McCargo 1996; Chattharakul 2010). But the Indonesian pattern of party marginality is striking, and, as we shall show in later chapters, it has also developed relatively quickly, in the space of less than two decades since the introduction of the country’s new democratic system at the end of the last millennium.
In sum, Indonesia has a system that we characterize as freewheeling clientelism. Our book is devoted to outlining the features of this form of clientelism, explaining its internal logic, describing its origins, and explaining how it varies across different regions of Indonesia.
Framework and Arguments
We are now in a position to highlight our book’s three main goals and arguments. Our first goal, and the one to which we devote most space through this book, is to describe and analyze the core features of Indonesia’s patronage democracy and to highlight what makes it distinctive.
In order to do this, we need to come up with a framework that allows us to place the Indonesian system in comparative perspective. Although political scientists and other scholars have in recent years paid much attention to clientelism, there have been few efforts to systematically compare patronage democracies. We introduce a framework that allows us to do so in chapter 2. This framework focuses on four aspects: the networks through which politicians distribute patronage, the patterns of discretionary control they exercise over state resources, the varieties of benefits they provide to voters, and the intensity of clientelistic exchange. We maintain that such a framework highlights critical dimensions of clientelistic politics that differ across countries and could be used to systematically compare a large number of patronage democracies, though we lack space to do so in this volume. However, in order to bring the distinctive features of Indonesia’s system into focus, we keep a comparative eye fixed on India and Argentina through the volume, returning from time to time to contrast Indonesia’s experiences with those of...
