Brokers and the Roots of Partisanship in Indonesia

Abstract

Why are parties stable and voters loyal when brokers are independent, vote-buying is ubiquitous, rates of party identification are low, intra-party competition is fierce, and ideology is absent? In other words, why might stable partisan voting patterns exist in a place where most of the things believed to generate that stability do not? Drawing on the example of Indonesia, I show that extra-party mobilization networks can produce stable voting patterns in contexts where parties themselves cannot. In Indonesia, extra-party mobilization networks place vote brokers at the center of electoral mobilization for all parties. Links between parties and these mobilization networks provide parties differing levels of access to different kinds of brokers, some with high capacity to deliver votes and other with less. These links explain which parties are stable and which are not. This project draws two-and-a-half years of fieldwork in six provinces of Indonesia, a novel survey of vote brokers using a respondent-driven sampling design, a survey of candidates for legislative office, and an original dataset of local election results collected by hand (2004 – 2009) and scraped from election databases (2014 – 2019). Interviews included candidates for all levels of elected office, election administrators at the national, provincial, and district levels, party leaders, neighborhood leaders, district- and provincial-level religious leaders, and civil servants at the village and subdistrict levels. I show that candidates for office in Indonesia are primarily focused on vote mobilization through brokers. Vote brokers vary widely in their accountability to candidates and their ability to deliver votes. Brokers comprise at least two distinct mobilization networks—one secular and one religious. Vote administrators are a distinct third type of vote broker. Parties with access to more accountable vote brokers perform better than parties without. At the candidate level, there is almost no accountability.