Papers by Edward Aspinall
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RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2016
How do politicians win elected office in Indonesia? To find out, research teams fanned out across... more How do politicians win elected office in Indonesia? To find out, research teams fanned out across the country prior to Indonesia’s 2014 legislative election to record campaign events, interview candidates and canvassers, and observe their interactions with voters. They found that at the grassroots political parties are less important than personal campaign teams and vote brokers who reach out to voters through a wide range of networks associated with religion, ethnicity, kinship, micro enterprises, sports clubs and voluntary groups of all sorts. Above all, candidates distribute patronage—cash, goods and other material benefits—to individual voters and to communities. Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia brings to light the scale and complexity of vote buying and the many uncertainties involved in this style of politics, providing an unusually intimate portrait of politics in a patronage-based system.
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Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs, Aug 31, 2016
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Third World Quarterly, 2021
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Electoral Studies, 2020
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Offering comprehensive coverage of decentralization in Indonesia, this work contains contribution... more Offering comprehensive coverage of decentralization in Indonesia, this work contains contributions on a wide range of topics relating to democratization, devolution and the blossoming of local-level politics.
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Journal of East Asian Studies, 2017
What underlying logic explains candidate participation in vote buying, given that clientelist exc... more What underlying logic explains candidate participation in vote buying, given that clientelist exchange is so difficult to enforce? We address this question through close analysis of campaigns by several dozen candidates in two electoral districts in Java, Indonesia. Analyzing candidates’ targeting and pricing strategies, we show that candidates used personal brokerage structures that drew on social networks to identify voters and deliver payments to them. But these candidates achieved vote totals averaging about one quarter of the number of payments they distributed. Many candidates claimed to be targeting loyalists, suggestive of “turnout buying,” but judged loyalty in personal rather than partisan terms, and extended their vote-buying reach through personal connections mediated by brokers. Candidates were market sensitive, paying prices per vote determined not only by personal resources, but also by constituency size and prices offered by competitors. Accordingly, we argue that a ...
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Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia
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Third World Quarterly, 2021
Around the world, legislatures are dominated by politicians who are wealthier and more educated t... more Around the world, legislatures are dominated by politicians who are wealthier and more educated than their constituents. This is particularly so in developing democracies, where clientelist politics and wealth inequalities make it difficult for lower-class citizens to run for office. We contribute to scholarly debates about the substantive consequences of descriptive inequality by analysing a new and important case –Indonesia, the world’s third most populous democracy. Indonesian politicians have much higher levels of education and income than citizens, and they are more likely to have professional backgrounds. To explore the implications of these inequalities, we survey and compare politicians’ and voters’ positions on a range of economic policy issues. We find the views of Indonesian politicians are generally more congruent with those of upper-class voters. However, we also find variation across policy areas. There is much cross-class agreement on statist interventions like price ...
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
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Democratization
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Journal of Democracy
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Democratization
The current worldwide democratic regression has prompted debate about the drivers of democratic d... more The current worldwide democratic regression has prompted debate about the drivers of democratic decline. One country experiencing decline is Indonesia, where most analysts blame the shift on actions of illiberal elites, casting the public as a democratic bulwark. Yet, as in other fragile democracies, regression in Indonesia has come at the hands of politicians enjoying popular support. To investigate drivers of democratic decline we ask: How democratic are Indonesian citizens when compared to the politicians they elect? We answer this question using an original, representative survey of provincial legislators, which we compare to a general survey of the Indonesian population. While both populations express overwhelming support for democratic government, we find significant differences between how elites and masses conceive of democracy, and in their commitment to liberal norms. Though neither group is a bulwark of liberal values, we find the legislators are systematically more liberal than voters. These findings challenge widely held assumptions about Indonesia’s political class, and suggest a public that is either indifferent to, or supportive of, an increasingly illiberal democratic order. Our study demonstrates that comparing elite and mass attitudes to democracy and liberalism is one fruitful technique for investigating sources of democratic resilience and fragility.
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Journal of Democracy
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Contemporary Southeast Asia
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Papers by Edward Aspinall