BUYING BROKERS
Electoral Handouts beyond Clientelism
in a Weak-Party State
By ALLEN HICKEN,1* EDWARD ASPINALL,2
MEREDITH L. WEISS,3 and BURHANUDDIN MUHTADI4
1
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
3
Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at
Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA
4
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University,
Jakarta, Indonesia
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ahicken@umich.edu
2
ABSTRACT
Studies of electoral clientelism—the contingent exchange of material benefits for electoral
support—frequently presume the presence of strong parties. Parties facilitate monitoring
and enforcement of vote buying and allow brokers to identify core voters for turnout
buying. Where money fuels campaigns but elections center around candidates, not
parties, how do candidates pitch electoral handouts? The authors analyze candidates’
distribution of cash during an Indonesian election. Drawing upon varied data, including
surveys of voters and brokers, candidates’ cash-distribution lists, and focus-group discussions, they find heavy spending but little evidence of vote buying or turnout buying.
Instead, candidates buy brokers. With little loyalty or party brand to draw on, candidates
seek to establish credibility with well-networked brokers, who then protect their turf with
token payments for their own presumed bloc of voters. The authors find little evidence of
monitoring of either voter or broker behavior, which is consistent with their argument
that these payments are noncontingent.
E
handouts—cash payments, small gifts, community projects, and the like—are a core feature of election campaigns in
many countries. Political scientists typically conceptualize such distributions as clientelism: the contingent exchange of material resources
for political support. The literature offers varying explanations for the
efficacy of clientelist practices and for their prevalence. Dominant readings emphasize two dimensions: targeting, and monitoring and
enforcement. Arguments based on targeting suggest that to maximize
effectiveness and efficiency, parties prioritize voters or brokers most
likely to respond favorably to payments. Works focused on monitoring
and enforcement start from the insight that it can be difficult to enforce
LECTORAL
World Politics 1–44
doi: 10.1017/S0043887121000216
Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Princeton University
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clientelist exchange; they consider factors, such as social networks, electoral malfeasance, institutions, or social norms, that might ensure that
recipients of handouts deliver votes. A focus on one or both of these
dimensions is common to both vote-buying and turnout-buying
approaches1 and to broader discussions of broker-mediated clientelism.2
Much of this literature explicitly or implicitly centers around political
parties as key actors, with two common assumptions. The first is that
parties are reasonably strong, meaningful organizations; the second is
that partisanship is salient among the electorate. Where these
assumptions hold, candidates can sort voters according to ideology or
partisanship and so target core or swing voters. Party loyalties help
lower the costs of monitoring and enforcement by conveying
information about which voters are most likely to defect and by cultivating brokers’ interest in the party’s success.3
Yet strong parties are often absent. As Ernesto Calvo and Maria
Victoria Murillo note, “Assumptions of organizational encapsulation
and programmatic party linkages that characterize the Western
European sociological tradition do not adequately reflect the behavior
of voters and the dynamics of party competition in most new
democracies.”4 Our work is part of a growing literature that seeks to
understand the dynamics of electoral clientelism in weak-party states.5
Our goal is to probe how to conceptualize electoral handouts in
polities without strong parties—that is, where party loyalties are too
anemic and voting too candidate-centered to present identifiable core
constituencies, or where party machines cannot reliably mobilize
votes on behalf of candidates. Indonesia exemplifies such a polity.
With few exceptions, and influenced by candidate-centric electoral
rules, parties there are weak, opportunistic personal vehicles.6
In this article, we develop a new theory, which we dub the personalized broker model, to explain how electoral handouts operate
among weak parties. Weak parties are present in a number of political
and institutional contexts, and where parties are weak, candidates tend
to develop largely nonpartisan, individualized, and often tenuous networks of support. A candidate’s core of support is personal: it comprises
those voters to whom they have familial or other ties, perhaps due to
1
For example, Larreguy, Marshall, and Querebín 2016; Stokes 2005; Schaffer and Baker 2015;
Nichter 2008.
2
Stokes et al. 2013; Schneider 2019; Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015.
3
Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, p. 17.
4
Calvo and Murillo 2013, p. 852.
5
See for example, Novaes 2018; Muñoz 2019; Ravanilla, Haim, and Hicken 2021.
6
Allen 2012; Aspinall 2014a; Fossati et al. 2020; Hadiz 2003; Mietzner 2014; Slater 2004.
BUYING BROKERS
3
some associational link or past provision of patronage. But that core is
rarely sufficient to secure electoral victory; to expand it, candidates must
recruit brokers, generally without easy recourse to party faithful. With
party an unreliable cue among voters or brokers, the primary purpose
of handouts is neither to persuade swing voters (as vote-buying models
assume) nor to spur core supporters to the polls (as in turnout-buying
models). Rather, the distribution of cash serves three main purposes.
Most importantly, it purchases the personal networks of local brokers
(broker buying); along the way, it signals to those brokers as well as
to voters that candidates are serious contenders (credibility buying);
and it helps to secure the votes of weak loyalists (turf protection).
At the center of candidate strategy sit brokers. It is not that candidates are unconcerned with attracting voters—nearly all they do is
toward that end. But to make sense of candidate strategies, the focus
needs to be on the critical mediators in these exchanges: brokers.
We are not the first, of course, to direct attention to brokers. The
seminal work of Susan Stokes and colleagues helped to reorient work
on electoral clientelism around questions of broker behavior.7
Subsequent studies have built on this foundation.8 But scholars have
only recently begun to examine carefully the dynamics of brokerage
where parties are weak.9 In such contexts, to wage a viable campaign,
candidates must win over diligent, well-connected brokers who can
reach voters beyond the candidates’ circles. Electoral systems that foster
intraparty competition further amplify brokers’ significance. Competing
against members of their own party obliges candidates to rely on their
own networks and teams, rather than on the party structure. But where
brokers have only tenuous ties to candidates, they have little a priori reason to be loyal agents. In this environment, electoral handouts reinforce
the standing and line the pockets of the brokers who distribute them.
They also help tie voters to brokers (whom voters are backing with
their vote), while doing little to create lasting loyalty toward candidates
or parties.
We develop our theory of electoral exchange in weak-party systems
using data drawn primarily from a large-scale election study in
Indonesia in 2014. Our starting point was partly inductive. Finding existing theory insufficient to explain Indonesian practice that we observed on
Stokes et al. 2013.
For example, Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015; Larreguy, Marshall, and Querebín 2016; Camp
2017; Auerbach and Thachil 2018; Brierley and Nathan 2021; Schneider 2019; Ravanilla, Haim, and
Hicken 2021.
9
Novaes 2018; Muñoz 2019.
7
8
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the ground, we searched for clues. Qualitative interviews helped us
develop and refine plausible explanations. We next evaluated these explanations/hypotheses systematically using new data sources, including surveys, brokers’ voter lists, and focus groups, with a largely deductive logic.
In the following section we lay out our argument, sketching our theoretical contributions, the observable implications of our argument, and
our scope conditions. We then outline Indonesia’s electoral context,
after which we explain our methods. Last, we highlight our key findings. We find little evidence of contingency-based electoral clientelism.
Instead, candidates buy brokers more than they buy voters. Unable to
rely substantially on voter loyalty or party brand, candidates seek to
establish credibility among, and by way of, well-networked brokers.
Those brokers then offer token payments to their own presumed bloc
of voters as a form of turf protection.
THE PERSONALIZED BROKER MODEL
Our theoretical point of departure is clientelist systems with strong
parties. Much of the literature on clientelism presumes strong parties.
This focus makes sense. The study of party-based machines was an
intellectual progenitor of this literature10 and recent, agenda-setting
work focuses heavily on relatively strong-party systems, such as those
in Argentina and Mexico.11 Systems with strong parties share three
characteristics that facilitate clientelist mobilization strategies. First,
parties have the organizational capacity to mobilize voters through
local operatives. Second, parties are distinct from one another. For
our purposes, the basis of this distinction—ideological, ethnic, regional,
or leadership—does not matter, as long as voters and candidates
distinguish among parties on some politically salient dimension.
Third, in strong-party systems, voters are partisan; many are reliably
attached to parties, making it possible to identify core supporters,
diehard opponents, and swing voters.
The absence of strong parties complicates electoral clientelism in
three principal ways. First, rather than relying on an established party
machinery to mobilize voters, candidates must assemble their own
personalized networks of mobilizers. Typically, candidates start by
tapping into alternative networks. Largely unable to rely on party-based
machinery or loyalties, they aim to recruit brokers with whom they have
10
11
For example, Lowi 1967; Scott 1969.
For example, Stokes 2005; Calvo and Murillo 2004; Brusco, Nazareno, and Stokes 2004.
BUYING BROKERS
5
close, often personal, ties, and on whose loyalty they can rely. These
include family and friends, as well as individuals connected to candidates through enduring clientelist ties. Where such personal networks
are sufficiently large, we would expect electoral clientelism to function
in much the same way as in systems with strong parties, but with
brokerage networks centered around candidates rather than parties.
In most instances, however, the pool of reliably loyal potential brokers
is insufficient to win. When this is the case, candidates must turn to
brokers-for-hire—brokers with weak or no personal ties to the candidate, who view their job through an instrumental lens. Although loyalist brokers may see the election as punctuating a long-term relationship,
brokers-for-hire may have little expectation of future interactions with
or benefits from the candidate. As we discuss below, this perspective
has important consequences for the effectiveness of brokers, the voters
they target, and the efficiency of electoral handouts.
Second, degrees of partisanship and party organizational capacity
directly affect the cost of the monitoring and enforcement expected
under contingent electoral clientelism. Party machinery and partisan
loyalists feature prominently in accounts of these functions12 for
which personalized networks of support are a poor substitute. The
need to include brokers-for-hire generates greater risk that brokers
will shirk (work inefficiently) or defect (work for a rival candidate).13
Further, where partisan attachments are weak, risks of voter defection
increase: voters may not show up to vote, they may abstain or vote
for someone else for reasons unrelated to handouts, or they may accept
handouts from more than one candidate for the same office.14 In addition, weak partisan attachment makes monitoring more costly for brokers. They cannot simply observe whether a weakly loyal party voter
shows up to vote but must also somehow ascertain whether that person
voted as instructed.
Third, it becomes difficult for candidates and their brokers to distinguish between core supporters and undecided or swing voters. If parties
are insufficiently differentiated, nearly everyone is a potential swing
voter. Likewise, even if parties are meaningfully distinct from one
another, if most voters are not reliably attached to those parties, then
candidates cannot even assume the support of their supposed core
constituents.
For example, Stokes 2005; Stokes et al. 2013; Nichter 2008; Szwarcberg 2012.
Aspinall 2014b; Szwarcberg 2012; Wang and Kurzman 2007.
14
Schaffer and Schedler 2007, pp. 19–20; Kramon 2016.
12
13
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In short, where party differences are negligible, partisan attachment
weak, and party organizations feeble, viewing electoral handouts
through the lens of electoral clientelism—contingent exchange that is
monitored and enforced—may obscure as much as it enlightens.15
But if targeting individual voters with offers of money is not electoral
clientelism as we typically understand it, what is it?
Brokers are the key. Candidates rely almost entirely on these intermediaries to recruit and mobilize supporters. Departing from conventional models, however, we do not see the primary utility of brokers
as sources of local information (for example, identifying core and
swing voters) or as agents helping with monitoring and enforcement.
Rather, the paramount value of a broker is the broker’s personal network—close friends and family who may plausibly respond to appeals
from that broker to vote for a given candidate, especially if those appeals
are accompanied by a handout. Thus, these constellations of personalized broker networks are essential. Lacking sufficient party or personal
ties of their own to voters, candidates purchase as many brokers as they
can afford in the hope of securing access to those brokers’ personal
networks. Whether brokers’ voter catchments follow is largely beyond
candidates’ control. We label this process of purchasing access to personal
broker networks as broker buying and elaborate on it more in the next
section.
Our model recommends rethinking the role and character of candidates’ campaign spending and, specifically, their payments to brokers
and voters. Four dimensions are especially revealing: how candidates
select the brokers in their teams, what messages brokers present, how
candidates target voters for handouts, and the extent to which candidates emphasize monitoring and enforcement. We turn next to exploring the observable implications of our model across these four
dimensions.
BROKER SELECTION
Weak parties force candidates to develop independent networks of
support. At their core are individuals with personal connections to
the candidate based on family or other networks (for example, school
cohort, religious community, birthplace), or, as Simeon Nichter and
Michael Peress describe, arising from ongoing clientelist relationships.16 This core comprises the candidate’s loyalists: brokers with a
15
16
Hicken and Nathan 2020.
Nichter and Peress 2017.
BUYING BROKERS
7
low risk of shirking or defecting, regardless of other inducements.
Candidates prefer these brokers.
But these personalized cores are rarely large enough to win an election, requiring candidates also to turn to brokers with whom they lack
direct connections. In hiring these brokers, candidates seek access to
their personal networks. Overlapping networks would be less useful
than complementary ones, so these supplementary brokers are unlikely
to move in the same circles as the candidate. Candidates will seek to
attract brokers with loyal personal followings, which, like those of candidates, comprise relatives, friends, or other associates, and brokers will
pursue or accept employment not necessarily from candidates with the
best ideas, but from those who pay well or reliably or to whom their own
personal acquaintances have links. An implication of this argument is that
many brokers will have tenuous ties, at best, to the candidate for whom
they canvass.
BROKER EFFORT AND MESSAGING
Once candidates have their networks in place, how diligent should we
expect brokers to be and what messages might we expect them to
deliver to voters? First, given the weak ties between many brokers
and candidates and a lack of investment in monitoring and enforcement
(discussed below), we expect many brokers to exert minimal effort to
woo voters. This stands in contrast to strong-party systems in which
the possibility of future party position deters broker shirking.17
We anticipate that brokers will not always speak to voters before adding
them to their handout lists, let alone take pains to tout candidates and
their qualifications.
Second, where few parties are programmatically differentiated, party
programs are not worth promoting because a candidate or broker
cannot use them to distinguish the candidate from rivals. Nor is
there reason to expect a given candidate’s brokers to express party loyalty; the core team is a personal one. Under these circumstances, when
brokers exert effort to persuade voters, we should expect them to
emphasize the personal qualities of the candidate. But there’s a catch.
The core team knows and supports the candidate; the extended team
of brokers-for-hire often does not. We might therefore expect these
brokers to tout themselves—to urge voters simply to follow their lead
in casting their vote. All told, if our expectation that candidates focus
mainly on buying access to brokers’ networks is correct, we should
17
Auerbach and Thachil 2018.
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expect little information about party or programs in broker appeals and
little, too, about the candidate from brokers outside the core. Rather,
we should see brokers pulling personal strings, sweetening and sealing
deals with payments from the candidate.
VOTER TARGETING
Meanwhile, absent reliable partisan cues, candidates must determine to
whom they will distribute their handouts, a decision made iteratively
with the decision about which brokers to recruit. We expect candidates’
highest return to come from voters with whom they have personal ties.
But, assuming that winning requires far more votes than that pool provides, most distribution will occur through the candidate’s network of
brokers. We expect that brokers, too, will first target their own personal
core—closely connected family and friends—to minimize transaction
costs and because resources directed toward this group may redound
to the broker’s benefit, either by augmenting family or community
resources or because being the one to distribute largesse conveys social
rewards. Resources permitting, we expect brokers-for-hire to distribute
electoral handouts in concentric circles, expanding from their personal
core to more extended networks.
Thus, most brokers do not target voters for their attitudes toward the
candidate or the candidate’s party, but for their relationship with the
broker. Lacking recourse to partisan cues, a voter without personal
ties to a competing candidate will consider voting for a broker-proposed
candidate. Candidates, meanwhile, hope that their payments to voters
through their brokers will ensure that enough distal voters neither
shirk nor double-deal, though they expect little proactive loyalty from
voters. This argument implies that we should see less strategic targeting
of voters than we would expect under standard models of electoral
clientelism. Instead, brokers indiscriminately target as many in their
personal networks as resources allow.
MONITORING AND ENFORCEMENT
Because brokers and voters have weak ties to candidates, the risks of
shirking and defection are high. To minimize such behavior would
require candidates to invest in monitoring and enforcement. But how
much monitoring and enforcement should we anticipate? If the distribution of cash and goods to voters is contingent clientelism, mobilizing
core supporters through turnout buying, or persuading swing voters
through vote buying, then a voter who accepts money will be expected
to reciprocate by voting for the candidate. Candidates will thus monitor
BUYING BROKERS
9
brokers and voters, tying future rewards (for example, jobs or other
forms of patronage) to broker performance and voter behavior (whether
they voted and, so far as possible, how they voted). Brokers will have an
incentive to target the most reliable supporters—either core voters or
those especially likely to feel morally or socially obliged to vote for
someone who gives them a handout.18 By contrast, in our brokerbuying model, handouts do not primarily serve as contingent exchange.
Rather, in addition to purchasing brokers’ networks, they facilitate credibility buying and turf protection.
CREDIBILITY BUYING
Handouts are the price that candidates pay to be considered credible,
viable contenders—in effect, an entry fee. This credibility buying
resembles what scholars have observed in other contexts where politicians reward voters who attend campaign events.19 One important
distinction is that those studies find distribution to be relatively untargeted. By contrast, in our model, credibility buying, on its face, looks
much like contingent electoral clientelism; benefits are distributed
through a network of brokers with only some voters targeted.
Moreover, as Eric Kramon finds in election rallies in Kenya, handouts
in Indonesia convey important information to key audiences. Like
in Kenya, these handouts signal viability; but unlike in Kenya, the primary audience includes brokers, not just voters, and signaling occurs
one-on-one rather than at large public rallies. Particularly where candidates cannot rely on their party to vouch for them, candidates who fail
to distribute handouts will find it hard to recruit brokers and to maintain their loyalty, and brokers and voters are likely to dismiss them as
serious contenders.
TURF PROTECTION
The inconstant loyalty of even presumed core voters—the conditional
loyalty of which Thad Dunning and Stokes write, or the endogeneity
of partisan loyalty as conditional on benefits received that Alberto
Diaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez, and Beatriz Magaloni discuss—is a
known dilemma for parties.20 But this problem is even more acute
among voters with weak partisan attachments, or whose partisan
attachments will not assure a vote for a particular candidate (as in an
Respectively, Stokes et al. 2013; Finan and Schechter 2012.
Kramon 2017; Muñoz 2014.
20
Dunning and Stokes 2007; Diaz-Cayeros, Estévez, and Magaloni 2016.
18
19
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open-list system). Outside a candidate’s narrow core (family and close
friends), no voter’s electoral support can be taken for granted. This
uncertainty applies even to voters connected through past patronage
exchange; without electoral inducements to seal the deal, these contingent loyalists cannot be relied upon. With that in mind, we would
expect token electoral handouts to these contingently core voters to
double as a form of turf protection. Even a candidate’s presumed loyalists are vulnerable to poaching. Hence, the need to direct payments
their way in an effort to insulate them from competing offers, not necessarily by outbidding other candidates, but by signaling that the candidate remembers and values these voters.
IMPLICATIONS
OF THE
MODEL
If our argument is correct, much of what on its face looks like vote
buying or turnout buying is actually not contingent distribution of
money to voters but rather a strategy intended to signal viability and
to keep voters from straying. These strategies may not be efficient in
an objective sense, but eschewing payments altogether guarantees
defeat. Candidates averse to money politics are thus trapped in a classic
prisoner’s dilemma game; if they defect from the game that voters,
brokers, and other candidates are playing, they will surely lose.21
Contingent and noncontingent electoral handouts present different
implications for monitoring and enforcement. Contingent electoral
clientelism requires campaigns to monitor voter behavior before and
on election day, tasks made easier and less costly where party organization and partisanship are strong. Noncontingent credibility buying and
turf protection do not require similar investment. In fact, the choice of
such strategies may be endogenous to the degree of organizational
capacity to monitor and mobilize voters.
What about monitoring broker behavior? Where parties or local
machines are robust and enduring organizations, brokers’ expectations
of future rewards, tied to campaign-period performance, reduce incentives to shirk or defect. By contrast, where candidates construct personalized networks relying heavily on brokers-for-hire, risks of broker
defection are acute. Thus, we expect candidates to invest some effort
in minimizing the risks of shirking. Specifically, candidates should be
wary of giving substantial sums to individual brokers to distribute, lest a
disloyal broker expropriate funds intended for voters. Candidates can
21
Muhtadi 2015; Hicken and Nathan 2020.
BUYING BROKERS
11
hedge by decentralizing distribution—engaging many brokers, each
responsible for recruiting a small number of voters. But we do not
expect much beyond that. Lacking exclusive access to party infrastructure, candidates are unlikely to attempt excessive monitoring. And
given the one-off nature of the candidate-broker relationship, we expect
to see little in the way of postelection rewards or punishment. In short,
candidates can do relatively little to oblige loyal diligence on the part of
brokers. And again, because of limited capacity or enduring partisan
ties, we expect to see very little in the way of monitoring or enforcement
when it comes to voters.
All told, we expect to see small sums dispersed over a network of
many brokers with less assiduous monitoring of voter and broker compliance than where handouts represent contingent clientelism. Given
the large number of brokers-for-hire and the implausibility of effective
monitoring, we expect substantial shirking. Likewise, we expect the lack
of personal or party ties connecting most voters and candidates to correspond with low voter loyalty. If affinity to the broker from whom they
receive a handout drives voters’ support, the further away voters are from
that broker, the more likely they are to shirk, just as brokers more distant from the candidate will be less loyal. We also expect electoral handouts to be inefficient as a result of shirking by voters and brokers,
yielding low returns on investment.
Table 1 summarizes our expectations. To test the extent to which practice conforms to these expectations, we draw on the rich, original data
from Indonesia described in the next two sections. Before we turn to
that task, however, we address some of the limitations and scope conditions of our argument. First, our argument is built on an assumption that
candidates, brokers, and voters operate in an environment with weak parties that cannot serve as significant assets for mobilization, monitoring, or
enforcement, and where party labels are not useful cues for voters or candidates. Where parties exist that serve these functions, we would expect to
see different patterns than the ones we describe. To be sure, parties’ handouts might well also serve functions similar to those served by candidatecentered credibility buying and turf protection, but structural mechanics
matter. Parties are by nature enduring and aggregated and have at least
some institutional identity, allowing coordination among copartisan candidates, differentiation from rivals from other parties, and economies of
scale and longer time horizons to facilitate both monitoring of and alternative strategies to electoral clientelism.
We do not present a theory of how or why strong or weak parties
emerge, and we are agnostic about the relative role of, for instance,
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TABLE 1
EXPECTATIONS
Expectations
Broker selection
Broker effort and
messaging
Voter targeting
Monitoring and
enforcement
Effectiveness (returns
good from handouts)
Contingent Electoral Clientelism
Personalized Broker Model
(Broker Buying)
personal or partisan ties between
brokers and candidates
significant effort; active promotion
of candidate/party
weak ties between most
brokers and candidates
significant shirking; little
promotion of
candidate/party
strategic targeting of core or swing little strategic targeting of
voters
core or swing voters;
targeting of voters in
brokers’ personal
networks
substantial monitoring and
limits on brokers’ voter lists;
enforcement of both brokers and
little monitoring of
voters or evidence of alternative
brokers or voters;
enforcement strategiesa
little punishment of
shirking among brokers or
voters
poor
a
For example, targeting reciprocal voters (Finan and Schechter 2012) or self-enforcing clientelism
(Gallego 2015; Magaloni 2006; Mares and Young 2018; Hicken and Nathan 2020).
electoral institutions, social structure, or historical sequencing in shaping
how a party system develops.22 As we explain below, however, multimember districts with candidate-centered voting rules in Indonesia have
unquestionably exacerbated party weakness; we thus do not and cannot
disarticulate assumptions regarding electoral rules from those about parties. Our personalized broker model also applies best in environments
where candidates lack alternative ways of building strong and enduring
ties with large numbers of voters. To the extent that candidates can
develop substitutes for partisan ties (for example, through exclusive access
to ethnic or religious networks or by leveraging access to patronage to
build durable patron-client ties with voters), we expect our model to
have lower utility in explaining the distribution of electoral handouts.23
For a discussion of these factors in Southeast Asia, see Aspinall et al. forthcoming.
For example, a recent comparison between Indonesia and the Philippines describes the greater
prevalence of enduring local political machines in the latter. Campaigns in both countries make use
of broker buying, but it is less prevalent in the Philippines, where the ratio of loyalists to guns-forhire is higher; Aspinall and Hicken 2020.
22
23
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THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT
We evaluate our argument in the context of elections in Indonesia,
where parties are, overall, weak. Although some Indonesian parties
have deep historical roots and appeal to distinct constituencies, most
are poorly differentiated, form promiscuous coalitions, and are highly
personalized.24 Moreover, the introduction of open-list proportional
representation (PR) in 2009 generated an impetus toward candidatecentered elections, further undermining parties’ local-level organizational capacity.25
Partisanship is weak among Indonesian voters. As of the 2019 election, fewer than 2 percent were party members and only around
10 percent reported being close to a party.26 Most candidates rely on
personalized networks of support, forging multitiered campaign
teams known as tim sukses (success teams) with minimal assistance
from their party.27 These teams are familiar-looking pyramidal organizations; the candidate and core team are at the top and local brokers are
at the bottom.28 Electoral handouts flow down to voters through these
pyramids.
Our focus on Indonesia contributes to a growing body of scholarship
examining the recruitment and behavior of nonparty brokers. Lucas
Novaes, for example, explores recruitment of local-level nonpartisan
candidates to work as party brokers in Brazil, explaining how their disloyalty fuels party fragility.29 Alisha Holland and Brian Palmer-Rubin
distinguish among party brokers, organizational brokers (representatives
of interest associations not permanently attached to a party), hybrid
brokers (representatives of interest associations linked to a party), and
independent brokers (local notables not linked to any larger organization), and explore how each type behaves in Mexico and Colombia.30
As in the contexts these studies highlight, the recruitment of nonparty brokers is central to campaigning in Indonesia but with two
important differences. First, party organizations are less important in
broker recruitment. Even in the underinstitutionalized party systems
24
Aspinall 2014a; Hadiz 2003; Mietzner 2014; Slater 2004; Fossati et al. 2020.
Aspinall 2019.
Muhtadi 2019, p. 256.
27
Parties play an important role in determining who appears on the ballot; all candidates run under
one of a limited number of registered parties.
28
For details, see Aspinall et al. 2017; Aspinall et al. forthcoming; and the section entitled
“Electioneering in CJ3” in the supplementary material to this article, Hicken et al. 2022.
29
Novaes 2018.
30
Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015. Hilgers 2008 takes a different tack, exploring how weaknesses
in party organization, specifically party factionalism, fuel electoral clientelism.
25
26
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of Brazil and Colombia, parties recruit and manage brokers, which is
rarely the case in Indonesia, as we describe below. Second, the composition of brokerage teams is different. The local brokers whom Novaes
studies are mostly candidates for local office, whereas those on whom
Holland and Palmer-Rubin focus are mostly linked to either parties
or interest associations. In Indonesian legislative elections, few brokers
are local candidates or officials; some are attached to associations, but
not at a dramatically higher rate than voters. Many are not even local
notables, although these are certainly present.
A second theme that emerges in recent literature is the importance of
candidate rallies and similar campaign events in the absence of a reliable
party infrastructure and stable core of partisan voters. Paula Muñoz
finds that candidates in Peru use handouts to induce poor voters to
attend rallies; a large turnout broadcasts a candidate’s prospects to
donors, activists, media, and other voters.31 Kramon discusses the
handouts distributed at rallies in Kenya, arguing that candidates use
them to signal capability and generosity to voters.32
We observe a different pattern in Indonesia. The handouts that
Muñoz and Kramon describe are largely nontargeted (given at rallies
or to induce people to attend a rally), and are distributed well before
an election. But in Indonesia, as we discuss in detail below, handouts
target particular individuals and households, usually just one or two
days before an election. Are the handouts and gifts that shroud the electoral landscape intended to develop specific candidate brands and signal
viability, to buy purely opportunistic support, or to perform some other
function?
To answer, we draw on data collected in conjunction with Indonesia’s
fourth national legislative election of the post-Suharto era, in April
2014. At stake were around twenty thousand seats in the national
People’s Representative Council (DPR, Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat) and
Regional People’s Representative Council (DPRD, Dewan Perwakilan
Rakyat Daerah) at the provincial and district levels. Because
Indonesia uses open-list PR, in some electoral districts, voters selected
one out of 144 candidates from twelve national parties. The patterns
we describe for 2014 are broadly consistent with what we observed
and what was reported in subsequent national and local elections,
with a few exceptions, as noted below.
Muñoz 2014; Muñoz 2019.
Kramon 2016; Kramon 2017. Although working in a context with relatively strong parties
(Argentina), Szwarcberg 2012 also focuses on the importance of rallies, arguing that candidates use
them to gauge brokers’ reliability and effectiveness.
31
32
BUYING BROKERS
DATA
AND
15
METHODS
We compiled and analyzed these data through a multifaceted research
strategy. First, in cooperation with local partners, we deployed a team of
fifty field researchers across a representative sample of constituencies,
spanning twenty provinces nationwide, for the month before and a
short time after the election. Researchers interviewed candidates and
brokers and observed campaigns, and where possible, shadowed candidates and brokers as they interacted with voters. Team members conducted more than fifteen hundred interviews and generated reports
on hundreds of campaign events.33 From these qualitative data, we
developed the explanatory framework we present here. To test it, we
compiled seven additional sources of data:
—1. National voter surveys. We conducted preelection and postelection,
random-sample, face-to-face surveys, each of roughly twelve hundred voters
nationwide. Each posed a variety of questions relating to electoral handouts
and voters’ behaviors and attitudes. We draw here primarily on the postelection survey (designated “national survey”), which asked a series of direct,
indirect, and experimental questions about electoral handouts.34
—2. Provincial and district candidate survey. In the wake of the 2014 election, Burhanuddin Muhtadi organized face-to-face surveys with roughly
three hundred randomly selected successful provincial and district DPRD candidates in four provinces: Central Java, East Java, North Sulawesi, and West
Sumatra.35 These surveys explored clientelist strategies, recruitment of brokers, targeting strategies, and related issues.36 Recognizing that winning campaigns may differ from losing campaigns, we take care to highlight any
disparities between these data and data from our national and broker surveys.
—3. Brokers’ voter lists. Candidates who distribute cash to voters in
Indonesia require their brokers to draw up lists of targeted voters that candidates then collate. These are not lists of all voters in the district, but only
of those the campaign intends to provide with a cash gift. Some candidates
compile these data in spreadsheets; most keep them as bundles of paper
documents. During our interviews, some candidates freely showed our
partner researchers and us these lists. Realizing that they were an important
data source, we selected a single electoral constituency and asked our partners there to request copies of lists from candidates after the election,
with assurances of anonymity and protection of sensitive information.37
We selected the Central Java III constituency (CJ3) because cash
See Aspinall and Sukmajati 2016 for case studies drawn from this research.
For details on the sampling strategy, see the supplementary material.
35
Due to space constraints, we present the results from the combined provincial sample here,
leaving cross-province comparisons to future work. But see Muhtadi 2019 for a discussion of some
interesting differences.
36
For details on the sampling strategy, see the supplementary material.
37
We particularly thank three researchers who played essential roles in acquiring and compiling
these remarkable data: David Efendi, Noor Rohman, and Zusiana Elly Triantini.
33
34
16
WORLD POLITICS
distribution to voters, at amounts from US$0.50 to $5.00 per voter, was
especially open there and because our field teams enjoyed excellent access
to candidates. See the supplementary material for details of this constituency, including how it compares to constituencies elsewhere in
Indonesia.38 Suffice it to say that this rural, rice-growing area, dotted
with towns and industrial pockets, is fairly typical.
Eleven of the approximately twelve hundred candidates running for
office at the three legislative levels in CJ3 agreed to share their voter lists.
To the best of our knowledge, these candidates are, like CJ3 itself, typical.
They include winning and losing candidates from a range of political parties.
Our interviews with these and other candidates and campaign teams did not
suggest any systematic differences between the campaigns that shared their
lists with us and those that did not, apart from, perhaps, higher levels of
trust between the list-sharing campaigns and the research team.
Regardless, given the nonrandom nature of the sample, we are careful with
the inferences we draw and use these data mainly to validate findings from
other data sources. We obtained these lists with the full knowledge and consent of the candidates within sixty days of the election. The full lists that
these campaign teams compiled varied in size from three thousand names
for a district DPRD candidate to more than three hundred thousand names
for a DPR candidate, reflecting the much larger number of voters in the latter
constituency.39 In most cases, we were unable to collect the full lists because
of limited resources and time constraints. (The largest list, on loose-leaf
pages, filled a 2 meter × 3 meter storage cupboard.) Instead, we focused on
specific administrative regions, usually subdistricts, within CJ3, collecting
the relevant parts of each list. We are therefore able to compare candidates’
voter lists with the votes they attained in a sample of villages and to identify
the brokers working for the candidates in those villages. Although each campaign claimed that its voter lists were complete and accurate for the regions
we targeted, we have limited ability to confirm whether that is true. We
dropped one list because of too much missing and incomplete data, leaving
us with ten lists, eight from district DPRD candidates and one each from a DPR
candidate and a provincial DPRD candidate. We digitized the information we
had for voters and brokers on each list. We assigned each broker and voter a
unique code, then conducted all analyses on a data set stripped of personal
information and containing 2,288 brokers and 94,437 voters.
—4 and 5. CJ3 surveys of brokers and voters. We used our digitized list
of brokers and voters as a sampling frame for a random-sample,
face-to-face survey of the voters and brokers appearing on the lists
(labeled “CJ3 survey”). We surveyed 383 voters and 332 brokers three
months after the election. Voters were told neither that they appeared
on a voter list nor that we would be surveying brokers. Brokers were
told that we had received their names from a given campaign, but not
that we had received the voter list or that we were also surveying voters.40
Hicken et al. 2022.
See Table A1 in the supplementary material for details, including a tally of brokers per candidate.
40
See the section entitled “Data Sources” in the supplementary material for more details.
38
39
BUYING BROKERS
17
—6. Survey of brokers for winning candidates. We also draw on additional face-to-face surveys that Muhtadi conducted with nine hundred
randomly selected brokers who worked for the winning candidates surveyed in his four targeted provinces, discussed above.41 We refer to this
survey as the “winning-broker survey,” and, again, indicate where this survey diverges from our survey of winning and losing brokers in CJ3.
—7. Focus-group discussions. From our CJ3 lists, we randomly selected
one hundred-fifty brokers to participate in one of six focus groups and
one hundred voters to join one of four focus groups. Slightly less than
50 percent of those selected attended, receiving modest compensation
for their time. Voter focus groups were all female, all male, or mixed gender. Broker focus groups included brokers working for the same party
and, in most cases, for the same candidate, although one involved brokers
working for rival candidates in the same subdistrict. Moderators fluent in
local languages (Indonesian and Javanese) asked participants to reflect on
their campaign experiences, brokers’ techniques for mobilizing voters, the
meaning of cash gifts for voters, and related matters. We used the transcripts to supplement our understanding of how participants viewed these
voter-mobilization efforts.
None of these data sources are perfect, but all told, this unique mix
of varied quantitative and qualitative data allows us to evaluate our
empirical expectations from different perspectives, cross-checking
respondents’ subjective characterizations with more objective measures.
FINDINGS
We break our findings into the five broad categories sketched in Table 1
above: broker selection, broker effort and messaging, voter targeting,
monitoring and enforcement, and effectiveness. First, however, we
describe our surveyed brokers.
BROKER CHARACTERISTICS
During our field research across Indonesia, the political candidates we
interviewed described their ideal success-team member in similar
terms. Consistent with the comparative literature on clientelism, most
candidates said that they tried to recruit, to quote one candidate on
the island of Bangka, “people who [had] influence in their immediate
neighborhood.” Candidates then typically reeled off a list of categories
of influential people who made good success-team members, often
naming village and neighborhood heads (especially influential because
they handled the paperwork for access to government welfare programs,
41
See the section entitled “Data Sources” in the supplementary material for more details.
18
WORLD POLITICS
ran community-level development programs, and resolved community
disputes), religious leaders, and leaders of associations and clubs of various sorts. Indonesians are known to have high levels of associational
affiliation, with manifold community groups in both rural and urban
areas,42 so most communities offer rich pickings in this regard. But candidates typically also stated that people who exercised any sort of informal influence, such as village elders or community problem-solvers, also
made desirable brokers.
Although we lack theoretical priors about broker characteristics, our
CJ3 broker and winning-broker surveys help us develop a rough profile.
The strongest and most consistent finding across our two sets of broker
surveys is a pronounced gender bias; 87 percent of brokers in the CJ3
survey and 91 percent in the winning-broker survey were male, versus
just under 50 percent of voters. The average broker in the winningbroker survey was slightly older than the average voter, although our
CJ3 broker survey showed no significant age gap. The two surveys
also present interesting differences between brokers’ social status and
that of most voters. The winning-broker survey reveals brokers to be
somewhat wealthier and better educated and to have more organizational connections than the average voter, whereas this not the case
for brokers in the CJ3 survey. But in both surveys, brokers were considerably more likely than voters to be party members. For example, 22
percent of brokers in the CJ3 survey reported a party affiliation, compared to fewer than 5 percent of voters. But we should be cautious in
taking the former figure at face value. Not only is party membership
a loose concept in Indonesia—some brokers may have simply been
expressing their affiliation with a candidate rather than with the candidate’s party—but the winning-broker survey also suggests that most
respondents who became a party member or sympathizer did so during
an election year, implying that that many do so only after being
recruited as brokers. Indeed, both our quantitative and qualitative evidence
suggests that party affiliation often follows from being engaged as a broker
and is considered temporary, lasting only as long as the campaign.43
At the end of the day, although candidates no doubt attempt to
recruit influential individuals, their efforts produce mixed results.
Even among winning campaigns, many brokers closely resemble the
voters they are targeting. What we think best explains this disjuncture
Lussier and Fish 2012.
For example, almost all (99 percent) of brokers in the winning-broker survey reported that politics/
brokerage was not their main profession, and most brokers we interviewed considered themselves free
agents, willing to work for candidates from any group or party.
42
43
BUYING BROKERS
19
is the mass nature of the brokerage effort and the huge competition for
brokers in Indonesia’s open-list PR system. Recall that the voter lists we
compiled in CJ3 contained the names of 2,288 brokers and 94,437 voters, a ratio of about one broker for every forty-one voters. Most constituencies saw about eighty district DPRD candidates competing. Were
they all recruiting brokers at this rate and avoiding overlap, brokers
would have outnumbered voters—not even accounting for provincial
and national candidates who were also seeking brokers. Although we
obviously do not believe competition was this extreme (some candidates
were not serious contenders and made minimal effort to recruit brokers), it was clearly intense. Thus, although it is certainly true that candidates prefer to target socially influential, high-status individuals, such
persons are hard to get. Such brokers also tend to be able to select more
competitive, wealthier, and better-resourced candidates, which is consistent with the differences between respondents in our winning-broker
survey and the mix of winning and losing brokers in our CJ3 survey.
Most candidates have to build teams composed primarily of ordinary
individuals with little social influence to offer beyond their immediate
connections.
BROKER SELECTION
We turn now to our first set of expectations. Recall that we anticipate a
core of brokers with close personal links to the candidate, complemented by brokers-for-hire lacking such ties. To test these predictions,
our broker surveys explored how brokers joined success teams. The
majority—nearly 70 percent in our CJ3 survey and nearly 80 percent
in our winning-broker survey—said they said were recruited by individuals they categorized as family or friends (Figure 1). Organizational
networks, often presumed to be a key campaign asset,44 played only a
minor role in broker recruitment. Note, too, the minimal role of
party officials. Brokers working for winning teams were more likely
to have been approached by party leaders, but overall, parties were
less important than personal connections. This pattern corresponds
with the story we heard repeatedly from candidates. With few exceptions, parties played a minimal role in election campaigns, whether
financial, advisory, or coordinating.
Figure 2 sheds further light on the relationship between candidates
and brokers. When recruiting brokers, candidates start with individuals
with whom they have close ties. But they soon run out of such people;
44
For example, Thachil 2011; Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015.
20
Fig. 1 - B/W online, B/W in print
WORLD POLITICS
BROKER RELATIONSHIP
WITH THE
FIGURE 1
PERSON WHO INVITED THEM
TO JOIN THE
SUCCESS TEAM
21
Fig. 2 - B/W online, B/W in print
BUYING BROKERS
WHO INVITED
THE
FIGURE 2
BROKER TO JOIN
THE
SUCCESS TEAM?
in our CJ3 broker survey, only 23 percent of respondents said that the
candidate personally recruited them. The number was substantially
higher—61 percent—for candidates in the winning-broker survey,
offering support for our assumption that brokers with personal connections to a candidate are more likely to work diligently for that candidate.
We see a similar difference in the extent to which brokers knew the
candidate before joining a success team. Only 40 percent of brokers
in our CJ3 survey reported being close to the candidate for whom
they worked (Table 2), versus 71 percent in our winning-broker survey,
which may help explain why they were successful. Still, that means that
even in the latter teams, nearly one-third of brokers lacked strong ties to
the candidate for whom they worked—and about the same proportion
in our CJ3 survey had never even met the candidate.45
Together, these data paint a picture of how success teams are built.
Candidates recruit individuals with whom they have personal ties to be
campaign staff and brokers, who in turn enlist people with whom they
enjoy similar ties. Close ties arise primarily through family and friendship, although sometimes they develop through ongoing clientelism.
Once the team is assembled, many members have connections with
the candidate that are more pragmatic and transactional than personal.
Brokers’ expectations confirm this premise. Unlike in clientelist systems
built upon ongoing, often party-based, relationships, few Indonesian
brokers (fewer than 7 percent in our CJ3 survey) expected to be rewarded
with postelection jobs or patronage, 63 percent were paid for their time,
45
For ethnographic detail on how recruitment into these teams works, see Aspinall et al. 2017.
22
WORLD POLITICS
HOW CLOSE WAS
TABLE 2
BROKER
THE
Knew candidate personally and was close
to the candidate
Knew candidate personally (had met) but
was not especially close to the candidate
Had heard of candidate but had never
met the candidate
Had never heard of the candidate
Refused to answer
TO THE
CANDIDATE?
CJ3 Broker Survey
(Percent)
Winning-Broker Survey
(Percent)
40
71
27
19
16
4
12
5
5
1
and only around 30 percent (those who had the closest personal ties to
the candidate) reported working without pay.
In sum, our findings are consistent with our expectations regarding
broker selection. Beyond a loyal core, most brokers support candidates
on a contractual basis as guns-for-hire. The share of loyalists is higher
in winning teams, however, confirming that proximity to the candidate
affords an added punch. We turn next to examining the work these
brokers do: communicating with voters and distributing handouts.
BROKER EFFORT AND MESSAGING
Given the large number of guns-for-hire, we expected to find widespread broker shirking. Indeed, that is what the surveys show. Our
CJ3 survey examined how much effort brokers exerted in persuading
voters, including whether they spent time discussing the candidate
with voters before adding them to their voter lists. Consistent with
our prediction, 81 percent of brokers reported spending little or no
time talking to voters about their candidate. Also consistent with our
expectations, brokers personally close to the candidate spent more
time promoting the candidate than brokers with no ties, but even the
most diligent made only minimal efforts (Table 3).
Our qualitative data support the idea that it is the messenger that
matters, not the message. One broker explained his relatively high success rate: “I managed to get those votes just because my relatives were
looking at me; they don’t even know [the candidate]. They know me.
They would have felt awkward [not to vote for my candidate].”46
46
Focus group discussion (FGD), Rembang, August 28, 2014.
23
BUYING BROKERS
TABLE 3
DOES KNOWING THE CANDIDATE AFFECT
HOW MUCH BROKERS TALK ABOUT THEM?a
Dependent Variable: Time Spent
Talking about the Candidate
Never heard of candidate before election
Never met candidate before election
Knew, but not close to candidate
Observations
–1.485***
(0.365)
–0.592*
(0.341)
–0.369
(0.280)
306
* p < 0.1; *** p < 0.01
a
Reference group is brokers who knew and were close to the candidate before
working as a broker. Ordinal logistic regression with ordered independent variable.
Another used similar language, explaining that she implored her voters,
most of them relatives and close friends, to consider her reputation when
she gave them the candidate’s cash gifts: “Don’t you look at [the candidate]; after all, you know nothing about politics. But look at me. If I
work and I produce nothing, how will it look?”47 Candidates and brokers
agree, of course, that local notables and associational leaders—especially
those with some discretionary authority over the material circumstances
affecting voters’ lives, such as the village head who decides who can access
subsidized rice, or the head of a farmers’ group who determines which
members get to use the group’s hand tractors—are the ideal brokers precisely because their circles of social influence are much wider than those of
the average broker. But as we have explained, such individuals are the
exception rather than the rule in the massive brokerage teams we have
examined.
VOTER TARGETING
We expected that candidates and brokers would prefer to concentrate
handouts to voters in their personal core and that, inasmuch as such
cores are distinct, many voters receiving handouts would be loyal to
the broker, not the candidate. Our data align with expectations.
Most candidates we interviewed reported that their priority targets
were their base (basis). And yet they distributed most of their funds
47
FGD, Pati, August 23, 2014.
24
WORLD POLITICS
to voters with whom their ties were tenuous at best. How do we make
sense of this seeming contradiction?
In interviews, candidates defined their base widely to include personal, patronage, and brokerage networks, which only occasionally
coincided with associational and party networks. These networks comprise overlapping concentric circles around the candidate. Outer circles
encompass more voters, but with diminishing loyalty to the candidate.
The nucleus of a candidate’s core comprises personally loyal family
members and friends. These individuals can be expected to support the
candidate whether or not they receive a handout. Even these voters generally expect a token payment, however, as a reminder that their candidate
is serious and remembers them. Making up the outer circle are voters connected to the campaign only through a broker. Although candidates refer
to these voters as part of their base, in practice, candidates frequently have
little confidence in their loyalty, as we discuss below.
Between these two circles are voters connected through patronage
networks. These are voters whom candidates have helped in the past,
whether as individuals, families, or groups (for instance, as members
of a sports team that received uniforms or residents of a village in
which the candidate built a mosque). Typically, these voters are connected to the candidate by brokers who play some sort of associational
or community leadership role, like the aforementioned village head or
farmers’ group leader. Comparative literature would suggest that such
voters view electoral handouts as part of an ongoing clientelist relationship.48 In Indonesia, we found that candidates target such voters,
believing them more likely than typical voters to be loyal; 66 percent
of candidates in the provincial and district candidate survey and 51 percent of brokers in the winning-broker survey believed that “a lot” or
“quite a lot” of their votes came from voters the candidate had assisted
in the past. These estimates are likely exaggerations, and we find it
intriguing that although candidates considered such voters to be relatively loyal, they also understood that this loyalty was not assured—it
had to be reinforced with handouts during elections, in what we
label turf protection.
In short, uncertainty about voter loyalties, even among those voters
whom candidates consider their core, drives much candidate behavior.49
Most candidates and brokers stressed that they offered loyalists the
same payment as nonloyalists to discourage defection, a practice our
48
49
Nichter 2008.
Rohman 2016.
BUYING BROKERS
25
provincial and district candidate survey confirms; 86 percent of these
winning candidates believed that at least some loyalists would defect
to rivals if not provided payments. Their brokers were even less sanguine; 44 percent predicted at least “quite a lot” of defections in the
absence of handouts. These findings suggest that candidates and brokers understood payments to this category of voters less as contingent
vote buying or turnout buying than as turf protection: reassurances of
the candidate’s loyalty to voters.
Whom brokers choose to target thus matters immensely. Candidates
have their brokers draw up lists of targeted voters. In deciding which
names to include, the broker’s strategy, endorsed by the candidate, is
clear and consistent: target those you know. Broker efforts are neither
party-centered nor candidate-centered; they are broker-centered. Our
interview and focus-group data suggest that brokers rarely ask themselves which voters are more or less likely to support the candidate or
which could be convinced to do so. The key question is “Who am
I close to?” That a voter appears on a broker’s list has little to do
with the voter’s characteristics, party affiliation, or relationship to the
candidate and everything to do with that person’s relationship with
the broker.
Indeed, almost all the brokers we interviewed in focus groups or individually identified their targets in personal and relational terms. The
majority identified relatives, neighbors, and close friends as their preferred targets, in roughly that order. One summed up:
“We prioritize, number one, family. You can almost certainly rely on
your family, let’s say you can be 99 percent sure you’ll get their votes.
Then, second, it’s close neighbors or close friends. Only then others,
sometimes they are people you know, but not all.”50
Our surveys confirm this pattern. More than three-quarters of the
brokers in our CJ3 survey included immediate family in their lists
(Table 4). Their next most frequent targets were neighbors, other relatives, and close friends. Hired only to bring in votes, not to promote
a program and not expected to recruit a lengthy list or trusted with
funds to do so (more on this below), brokers rarely targeted individuals
outside these circles. Our winning-broker survey presents an even more
pronounced pattern. Notwithstanding variations across the four provinces, 90.5 percent of those brokers targeted close family members, followed by neighbors (88.8 percent), other relatives (88.5 percent), and
friends (85.0 percent).
50
FGD, Pati, August 27, 2014.
26
WORLD POLITICS
WHAT SORTS
Members of your
Neighbors
Relatives
Close friends
Acquaintances
Members of your
Members of your
Members of your
OF
TABLE 4
PEOPLE ARE
ON
BROKERS’ LISTS?
CJ3 Broker Survey
(Percent)
Winning-Broker Survey
(Percent)
76.5
66.6
52.4
36.1
15.1
3.9
3.6
0.6
90.5
88.8
88.5
85.0
n/a
14.0
4.8
12.5
family (i.e., household)
professional group
religious community
community group
The comparative literature suggests that close connections between
brokers and voters serve two purposes. First, they enable brokers to
gather detailed information about voters’ political preferences and
material needs and to target their assistance accordingly.51 This logic
came through in a few focus groups and interviews, but far from universally. Some brokers noted that they would not list voters they
knew to be committed to another broker or candidate, but only a few
thought of themselves as playing intermediary roles in long-term clientelist or service-based relationships. Thus, few saw any point in identifying voter needs. Most brokers saw their task as simply identifying
individuals who they felt might be willing to vote for the candidate,
putting their names on a list, and giving them cash. The relationship,
explained one broker in a focus group, was more short-term and transactional than long-term and contractual.
Second, brokers’ personal relations with voters underpin the effectiveness of electoral handouts. Voters typically feel greater obligation
to follow through when they accept a payment or gift from someone
with whom they have close social relations, and brokers more deeply
entrenched in voters’ social networks are more likely to be able to assess
and encourage compliance.52 This dynamic is critical in Indonesia. In
our focus-group discussions, many brokers struggled to articulate reasons for prioritizing relatives and other close associates, apparently considering this choice self-explanatory. Those who could explain mostly
cited voter compliance. As one broker insisted, “I handed out
[money] to my grandchildren, to my nieces and nephews. If it’s me
51
52
Stokes et al. 2013, p. 24.
Brusco, Nazareno, and Stokes 2004, pp. 79–81.
BUYING BROKERS
27
who gives it to them, they will be reluctant to break their promise [to
vote for the candidate].”53
Given the nature of broker networks, brokers’ preference for targeting voters with whom they have personal ties means that most recipients of handouts have no personal loyalty to the candidate. This
pattern reverses what Stokes and colleagues observe in Argentina.54
They find that parties attempt to target swing voters, but that due to
brokers’ incentives to maintain their own bases of influence to capture
greater rents, they end up distributing mostly to core supporters. By
contrast, in Indonesia, candidates talk as if they are targeting their
core supporters, but ultimately direct most of their funds to only tenuously loyal voters.
To be clear, these payments do buy votes among a small share of
voters. Handouts, though, rarely buy turnout; more than 97 percent
of respondents in our CJ3 voter survey said that they would have turned
out on election day regardless of monetary inducement. But Muhtadi,
assessing local survey results from 34 provinces and 513 districts from
2006 through 2015, found that 20.8 percent of voters who deemed
taking cash handouts acceptable said that they would vote for the
candidate who gave them the most.55 In our CJ3 voter survey,
25.5 percent of targeted voters said that they would change their
votes as a result of handouts, whereas 74.5 percent would support the
same candidate regardless of payment. Keep in mind that despite the
relative ubiquity of cash handouts, only a minority of Indonesian voters
receive them. Various surveys indicate that between one-quarter and
one-third of all voters receive handouts; our own national survey places
the number at 25.1 percent.56 Thus, assuming that voters in the CJ3 survey are reasonably representative, payments induce only about 7 percent
of voters nationwide to change their votes.57 This number is not trivial,
particularly for candidates close to the vote threshold for a seat, but it
suggests that other factors do more to sway voters’ decisions and that
these payments primarily perform other functions.
What are those functions? First, channeling payments through hired
brokers constitutes broker buying; candidates purchase access to
FGD, Blora, August 23, 2014.
Stokes et al. 2013, p. 76.
55
Muhtadi 2018, p. 221.
56
An experiment to probe the extent of social desirability bias in voter responses yielded a nearly
identical percentage—27.3 percent. We elaborate below.
57
The percentage of voters in our national list experiment who reported receiving offers of money
(27.3 percent), multiplied by the percentage in our CJ3 voter survey who said they would have voted
differently had they not been paid (25.5 percent).
53
54
28
WORLD POLITICS
brokers’ personal connections. We tend to think of elections as quintessentially contestant-focused affairs in which voters evaluate parties or
candidates either retrospectively or prospectively, or programmatically
or clientelistically. In the elections studied here, the most compelling
appeals have little to do with candidates or parties; voting decisions
often turn on personal connections between brokers and voters.
Second, as predicted, we find that brokers speak of handouts as the
price of admission candidates must pay to be considered credible rather
than as contingent exchanges. Commented one broker, “If you don’t
have money, you can’t stand.”58 What we see with handouts is less a
market for votes than barriers to entry that help brokers and voters
screen out unserious employers and contenders, respectively; handouts
are a form of credibility buying. Third, payments serve as turf protection. In an environment of pervasive uncertainty about the loyalty
even of base voters, and one in which other candidates also mobilize
brokers and distribute cash, candidates need to shore up their support
against the ever-present threat of defection.
MONITORING AND ENFORCEMENT
Recognizing this broker-centered reality, we expected candidates to
focus their monitoring efforts more on reducing broker shirking than
on reducing voter defection—but also to emphasize risk-mitigation,
given scant capacity for close scrutiny or sanction. Our qualitative
and quantitative evidence supports this expectation; candidates seek
to hedge their exposure to shirking. Candidates repeatedly told us
that they viewed overly large voter lists (beyond around thirty names
per broker) with suspicion, as they doubted the ability of brokers to
secure commitment from voters outside their immediate circles.
Campaigns often limited the number of voters per list, verified individuals’ location and voter-registration status before disbursing funds to
brokers, and confirmed that voters did not appear on more than one
broker’s list. For more systematic evidence, we analyzed our ten CJ3 brokers’ lists. A majority (55 percent) included no more than thirty names;
76 percent had fewer than fifty. If we exclude one provincial candidate
who had few brokers because he was sharing those of district-level
candidates from his party, the average number of voters per broker
was thirty-three, near the stated upper target.
Even so, brokers have abundant opportunities to shirk, not just by
falsely inflating their voter lists or failing to promote their candidate,
58
FGD, Rembang, August 21, 2014.
BUYING BROKERS
29
but also by simply failing to hand payments to voters.59 In the next section we look at survey evidence of broker shirking, but almost all the
candidates we interviewed during our fieldwork admitted that it was
a serious problem. That prevalence confirms our expectation that for
most brokers, enlisting voters is merely a job, and that skimming
from handouts is compensation for many. To ameliorate this risk,
the most important step candidates could take was to recruit trustworthy senior brokers—when possible, people personally loyal to them or
dependent on them for future business deals or other favors—and
hope that these brokers would recruit equally reliable or similarly
dependent individuals down the chain. Many also claimed to have elaborate provisions for cross-checking and monitoring brokers. Candidates
said that they tried to check at least some of the lists that their brokers
provided; some claimed to employ “invisible teams” (tim siluman) to
monitor brokers in the field by visiting or telephoning voters on their
lists to check whether they had been contacted by the broker; a few
even hired a polling firm to check their brokers’ voter lists. In focus
groups, some brokers said that they were aware of these efforts, but
few were troubled by them. The one candidate we encountered who
applied a mechanism overtly designed to minimize broker cheating at
the point of distribution was also the only candidate whom brokers
explicitly criticized in focus groups. Instead of entrusting field-level
brokers with cash and rice packets to distribute, this candidate
employed a special team to distribute this material. Several of his brokers
said that this approach suggested that the candidate did not trust them;
they blamed his poor performance on that perceived disrespect. If our
presumptions about incentives are true, the issue was not just distrust,
but also brokers’ reluctance to mobilize their personal networks absent
anticipated rents.
To be clear, candidates do care about their brokers’ performance;
many of them spoke bitterly and with a deep sense of personal betrayal
about the perfidy and unreliability of their team members. In the final
analysis, however, most candidates admitted that they had few mechanisms for disciplining wayward brokers precisely because they were so
weakly connected to them and because competition among candidates
for brokers was so high. Our survey results confirm that overall, few
ground-level brokers felt that their work was monitored—only 30.5
percent in our CJ3 survey and 28 percent in our winning-broker survey
(Table 5). Nor did brokers fear being held accountable for subpar
59
Aspinall 2014b; Triantini 2016.
30
WORLD POLITICS
TABLE 5
DID YOU FEEL YOUR WORK WAS MONITORED?
Yes, I feel that my work was often
monitored
Yes, I feel that my work was
sometimes monitored
No, I do not feel that my work was
monitored
Refused to answer
CJ3 Broker Survey
(Percent)
Winning-Broker Survey
(Percent)
18.7
10
11.8
18
69.0
72
0.6
0
performance; fewer than 5 percent of the CJ3 brokers feared punishment
for poor results. Indeed, candidates had few levers available. They could
bar deceitful or underperforming brokers from further election campaigns
or future patronage, but most brokers worried little about such penalties.
As we explained above, brokers are in high demand. As long as they
do not develop a public reputation for absconding with campaign funds,
they can expect future brokerage work from some candidate, even if they
are not re-employed by a candidate they let down. Incumbent legislators
have some access to patronage resources—for allocations to farmer or
fisher groups, assistance for microenterprises, donations to social organizations, and for small-scale infrastructure projects—and our interviews
suggest that brokers who have links to such organizations and who
work for such candidates are much less likely to abscond with funds or
to shirk.60 But these individuals are the exceptions who prove the rule;
most brokers dismissed threats to withhold future patronage. Most
knew that their candidates stood a significant chance of losing and
were not tied to them by way of parties or organizations that could significantly affect their future personal advancement or material well-being.61
Harsh punishment of a broker, such as public condemnation, threats,
or violence, might alienate the broker, the broker’s family, and other associates, thus undermining the candidate’s support base, without providing
electoral benefit. When candidates did uncover evidence of shirking or
cheating, therefore, they would most often quietly exclude those brokers
from their list for distribution of cash payments and make a note not
60
On patronage-seeking brokers’ unwillingness to betray candidates they see as having a high chance of
success, see Aspinall 2014b; on legislators’ access to discretionary funds, see Aspinall and Berenschot 2019,
pp. 149–75.
61
Compare this to the motives and efforts of Indian brokers who hope to secure higher positions
within their parties; Auerbach 2016.
BUYING BROKERS
31
to employ them again. Similarly, few brokers expected rewards for good
performance. We did hear of schemes to reward high-performing brokers
with bonuses, but these were relatively rare. Only 8.9 percent of our CJ3
brokers surveyed thought that excellent performance would be rewarded.
However minimal campaigns’ investment in monitoring brokers, it
far outstrips their effort to monitor voters. One worry with clientelism
is that it may produce what Stokes calls “perverse accountability,” allowing politicians to hold voters accountable for their behavior, rather than
the reverse.62 There is little sign of such a pattern here. To help with
last-minute mobilization efforts, brokers sometimes tried to track
who turned out to vote, but no campaigns reported systematically collecting or acting on such information. Moreover, across all our voter
surveys, large majorities reported believing that their votes were secret.
For example, in our postelection national survey, only 2.4 percent
believed that a candidate could work out how they had voted.
Respondents to our CJ3 survey of voters who appeared on brokers’
lists were more likely to feel monitored. Still, only 18.3 percent believed
that it was at least “possible” for a campaign to learn how they had
voted, and 75 percent of that total said it may be by their willingly telling, if asked. Regardless, voters evinced almost no fear of reprisal
(Table 6). Large majorities in our CJ3 voter survey believed that a candidate would do nothing if they failed to turn out (76.7 percent) or
voted for a rival (79.6 percent). About 20 percent said that they
would feel embarrassed for not voting as promised, but few feared consequences beyond that. Brokers echoed that belief; 87 percent in our CJ3
broker survey saw no way to punish noncompliant voters.
In sum, our findings show that candidates make some effort to
reduce broker opportunism by limiting the scope of their voter lists
or by verifying the identity of those listed, but that few attempt broker
monitoring or enforcement. They expend even less effort on monitoring or enforcement directed at voters. That lack of investment is
consistent with our broker-buying reading of electoral handouts as signals of credibility and turf-protection measures, and inconsistent with
contingent vote buying or turnout buying.
EFFECTIVENESS OF ELECTORAL HANDOUTS
If our broker-centered framework is correct, candidates have limited
ability to control the relative efficiency of electoral handouts and little
reason to expect a high rate of return. The sheer number of candidates
62
Stokes 2005.
32
WORLD POLITICS
TABLE 6
SUPPOSE YOU RECEIVED AN ENVELOPE OR FOODSTUFFS/GOODS FROM A
CANDIDATE BUT DID NOT TURN OUT TO VOTE/VOTED FOR A DIFFERENT
CANDIDATE ON ELECTION DAY. WHAT MIGHT THE CONSEQUENCES BE?a
Not Vote Defect
(Percent) (Percent)
None, the candidate would not do anything
I would feel embarrassed but the candidate would not do anything
I would not be able to go to the candidate and ask for help if
I needed it
I would not get any envelopes/gifts from that candidate in the next
election
The candidate or a member of the candidate’s team would ask for the
money/gift back
I would be the target of verbal abuse
I would be physically threatened or targeted with violence
a
76.7
21.2
3.2
79.6
20.4
4.3
7.3
4.6
1.5
.6
1.5
.6
1.1
0
Respondents could select more than one option, so columns total more than one hundred.
contesting in any local area makes it likely that any given voter will be
close to more than one broker, and such proximity is what sways vote
choices. Even so, campaign teams strategize details ranging from the
market rate for votes to the best time to distribute payments for
maximum effect.63 Central to these calculations is the thorny question
of how effective electoral handouts are. Our expectation is that the
payoff rate is likely to be low, given broker shirking and voter defection.
Even so, candidates pay because doing so will surely garner at least
some votes in a context with few more viable options to differentiate
themselves and in which even a small supplemental personal vote
might yield a win.64
In line with this expectation, brokers’ own assessments of the effects
of electoral handouts are inconsistent. In surveys, they projected confidence; 53 percent of our CJ3 brokers thought that more than 75 percent
of the voters they listed for payment voted for their candidate. Nearly
70 percent in our winning-broker survey were at least “quite certain”
that the handouts they delivered could influence their neighbors’ voting
decisions. But in interviews and focus groups, brokers expressed greater
doubt. In those settings, most brokers agreed that a return in votes
above 50 percent was a good result.
See Aspinall et al. 2017 for details.
The efficiency of handouts should not be considered in a vacuum, but rather, relative to other
strategies available to candidates. See Hicken and Nathan 2020.
63
64
BUYING BROKERS
33
Candidates we interviewed presented an even more pessimistic view
of the returns from handouts. All expected what they termed a margin
error, or gap between the number of names listed for payments and
votes received. One national DPR candidate, for instance, who secured
around 123,000 votes—enough to get elected—after distributing
450,000 envelopes of cash explained, “There is a consensus among candidates: If you only get a third of the total envelopes you distribute,
that’s a good result. First, set your target. If you want to receive
100,000 votes to get elected, you must distribute envelopes tripling
that. That’s the rule.”65
Beyond interviews and focus groups, two sources of data allow us to
probe the relative efficacy and purpose of electoral handouts: yield rates
from the voter lists (for example, whether the number of names listed
tallies with votes received) and our preelection and postelection voter
surveys, which included survey experiments to explore what drives
voter decisions.
First, we examine our broker lists and vote results. Table 7 displays
yield rates by candidate in our CJ3 sample calculated by comparing
the total names on a candidate’s broker lists with the number of
votes they received. We sum broker lists and votes received across all villages in our sample for a given candidate, then divide by votes for a yield
rate.66 Yield rates in our sample tend to be much lower than the brokers’
hoped-for 50 percent; all missed even the candidate target of 33 percent, averaging less than 22 percent. These rates mask enormous variation across villages and brokers. Nearly all candidates had at least one
village where, despite distributing cash, they failed to capture a single
vote. More than half the candidates could boast of villages where
they received more votes than one would expect given the number of
names on their broker lists (that is, yield rates above 100 percent).
We therefore have substantial evidence that yield rates were lower
than either brokers or candidates claimed, consistent with significant
shirking by brokers and voters. Our data also allow us to investigate
how and why that shirking happens. Candidates and their top coordinators worried about brokers pocketing money intended for voters,
hence their preference for brokers with close ties to the candidate.
These fears were well grounded. In interviews, candidates gave examples of brokers absconding with funds. Asked directly, 12 percent of
Quoted in Muhtadi 2019, p. 154.
We drop those villages where we lack the required vote and/or full broker and voter information,
leaving data for 243 villages.
65
66
34
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TABLE 7
LIST YIELD BY CANDIDATE
Candidate Number
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Average
Type of Candidate
Yield Rate (Percent)
district
district
district
district
district
district
district
district
provincial
national
31.5
27.7
19.7
3.8
4.4
32.7
24.4
26.3
29.5
18.1
21.8
brokers in our winning-broker survey who acknowledged receiving
money to give to voters admitted to such skimming.
Our CJ3 voter survey offers further insight. In theory, all the voters
we surveyed should have received payments. The reality, at least as voters reported it, was that only 53 percent did so. If respondents told the
truth, that means only about half the targeted voters received funds. But
were voters truthful? Some of the discrepancy between what brokers
and voters report may result from underreporting of frowned-upon
behavior. In our qualitative interviews we found that most voters and
brokers spoke frankly about electoral handouts, but to evaluate whether
voters prevaricated for social-desirability reasons, we included an
unmatched-count list experiment in our national surveys to measure
the magnitude of this bias among voters.67 The resulting estimate is
that 27.3 percent received payments, a finding that closely mirrors
that for the direct question about payments (25.1 percent), suggesting
minimal social-desirability bias, on average.
Taken together, we have ample evidence of brokers shirking by pocketing some money meant for voters. But they can shirk in other ways,
too. As we discussed above, candidates worried that brokers would pad
their voter lists, and thus often limited the number of voters per list.
Our findings suggest that concern had merit. Some voters in our
focus-group discussions, for example, were surprised to learn that
they had been on brokers’ lists at all. Perhaps the most dramatic case
67
For discussions of list experiments for estimating vote-buying, see Corstange 2009; and GonzalezOcantos et al. 2012.
BUYING BROKERS
35
was a participant whose name appeared on a candidate’s voter list but
who turned out to be a subdistrict coordinator for, and close confidante
of, a rival candidate. Moreover, 30 percent of brokers in the CJ3 survey
and 22 percent in the winning-broker survey reported adding names to
their lists without first consulting those voters. In focus-group discussions, several brokers said that they felt no need to consult with family
members or voters otherwise close to them.
Even when brokers did talk to voters before adding them to the list,
as explained above, brokers more distant from the candidate were less
likely to talk up the candidate and more likely to center their messaging
on the broker’s personal connection to the voter. How much proximity
between voters and brokers matters, though, is less clear. Unfortunately,
we lack systematic data on how close voters were to the brokers who
approached them. But if we assume that, ceteris paribus, the distance
between a broker and the average voter on their list increases with list
size, we can use list size as a rough proxy for distance. Our data from
the CJ3 broker-voter lists allow us to examine how list size relates to
yield rates. For each village, we have counts of brokers and of names
on each of their lists; we use these to calculate average voter-list size
per village. We next examine the village-level relationship between
list size and yield rate. As hypothesized, we find a negative correlation
between average list size and yield rate, significant at the .05 level.
Interestingly, our survey data suggest that brokers themselves consider
less-close voters less reliable. Brokers with larger lists estimated significantly lower yield rates than brokers with smaller lists.
In sum, we find substantial evidence of shirking by voters and brokers, particularly among weakly attached brokers-for-hire, producing
lower yields than either brokers or candidates claim to expect.
CONCLUSION
Our examination of electoral handouts in Indonesia paints a picture
that differs from those that normally emerge from the comparative
literature. In the standard view, handouts are fundamentally about
clientelism—contingent exchange, whether understood as a one-time
transaction or as a signal of benefits to come. Herbert Kitschelt and
Steven Wilkinson, for example, insist that in such exchanges, “voters
dedicate their votes only to those politicians who promise to deliver a
particular mix of goods and services to them as individuals or small
groups in return” and that “it is the contingency of targeted benefits,
not the targeting of goods taken by itself, that constitutes the
36
WORLD POLITICS
clientelistic exchange.”68 Stokes and colleagues offer a similar test,
whereby an exchange is clientelist when “receipt of benefits” is “contingent on [an] individual’s political support.”69
But scholars increasingly recognize that contingent exchange is rarer
than we may have assumed.70 The monitoring and enforcement that
such exchange requires is costly and difficult. This is doubly true
where parties are weak. Much of the existing literature points to parties
as equipping candidates for these purposes, or assumes that they are
doing so. Parties, by sorting the population into identifiable sets of
loyal, swing, and opposition voters, help candidates, however imperfectly, to direct their handouts to the recipients most likely to deliver
votes. Parties also provide the machinery with which to monitor the
efficacy of the exchange itself, both by disciplining brokers (for example, withholding rewards from those who underperform) and by
encouraging voters to turn out and vote appropriately (for example,
by threatening that the party will withhold future benefits from precincts that fail to deliver). Even though this literature on electoral clientelism can trace its origins in part to earlier works on highly
personalistic, dyadic, and face-to-face relationships,71 in the context
of mass democracy, parties provide the machinery that powers electoral
clientelism.
Our personalized broker model and evidence from Indonesia underscore the need to modify this standard view of electoral handouts to
account for candidate-centered voting and party weakness; these handouts stretch the concept of clientelism. Of course, contingency is not
completely absent from Indonesia. A minority of voters in our surveys
indicated that cash gifts influenced their vote choice, and some were
enmeshed in iterative exchange relationships with candidates. But not
most voters. When distributing cash, candidates clearly hoped that voters would reciprocate, but they knew that many would not.
Instead, lacking better alternatives, candidates distribute cash with
little chance of ascertaining the alignments of most recipients, let
alone of monitoring or enforcing these exchanges. Candidates can
almost always count on a core of loyalists to whom their connection
is typically personal rather than partisan, but those ranks are quickly
exhausted. Beyond this core are voters who have received past benefits
and might hope for more. But in the outer ring, linked to the candidate
Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, p. 10.
Stokes et al. 2013, p. 7.
70
See Hicken and Nathan 2020 for a review of this literature.
71
For example, Scott 1972; and Landé 1965.
68
69
BUYING BROKERS
37
only through the intermediation of brokers and their personal
networks, voters’ reliability can be tenuous indeed. Rather than either
vote buying or turnout buying, in this context we see very different
underlying logics to the distribution of electoral handouts. Candidates
engage in broker buying, employing brokers’ personal networks to distribute money to voters as a marginal signaling device (credibility buying)
and to shore up their core support (turf protection). Such handouts lack
the contingency of vote buying or turnout buying and fall far short of
guaranteeing votes, as the low yields we uncover show. Taken together,
our data suggest that money primarily enables candidates to build larger,
stronger networks of brokers. And brokers, not parties, are at the center
of Indonesian elections. Electoral handouts arguably hinge more on
mobilizing brokers than on mobilizing voters.
As we have described it, this system seems highly disadvantageous to
candidates who, to a significant degree, are at the mercy of their brokers. They have little recourse when brokers take their money but fail
even to try to deliver votes in return. It is natural to ask, then, why
they continue with the practice. Candidates are acutely aware of the disadvantages of the current system, but our interviews suggest that most
feel trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma in which opting out of the system
of brokers and payments would doom them to defeat. At the same
time, they lack the organizational tools to discipline their brokers. In
addition, however objectively inefficient a strategy for mobilizing
votes, electoral handouts are still more efficient than all the other feasible alternatives.72
Of course, candidates, learning from experience as Indonesia’s electoral rules have evolved,73 do what they can to improvise new solutions.
It is possible that some candidates will come to invest more in invisible
teams to monitor broker performance, although they will still lack leverage over brokers without strong ongoing ties and expectations of future
rewards. Incumbent legislators are increasingly trying to overcome this
problem by gaining more control over local budgets, hoping to use projects and other benefits to reward supporters and thus enhance voters’
loyalty at election time.
One direction for future work is to explore how the dynamics that we
have described shape national electoral outcomes. At first glance we
perceive a seeming disconnect: rampant distribution of cash amid
weak parties at the local level, but relatively stable electoral results at
72
73
See Hicken and Nathan 2020.
Shair-Rosenfield 2019.
38
WORLD POLITICS
the national level. It seems germane that, although Indonesian parties
differ (for instance, some are highly personalistic, whereas others seek
to carve out distinct ideological positions), they share three facts in
common. They operate within an electoral landscape in which, first,
very few voters consider themselves aligned with any particular party;
second, members of the same party fight over the same purported
strongholds (given the incentive structures of multimember districts
and open-list PR) rather than working to expand the party’s base; and
third, all parties distribute electoral handouts. The last detail is particularly notable. Over the course of our extensive research, although we
found the odd, usually losing candidate who eschewed money politics
(whether for moral reasons, because the candidate was operating in
middle-class urban constituencies where the practice was less common,
or, more often, because the candidate could not afford it), our team
found no discernible differences across parties. Candidates from every
party distribute electoral handouts, even those from parties espousing
anticorruption rhetoric, like the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party.
Indeed, our argument suggests that they must do so to be considered
credible and viable. With all candidates distributing handouts, their
efforts tend to cancel each other out in aggregate.
Also worth noting is that given open-list PR, intraparty rather than
interparty competition is paramount. Due to the way in which brokers
are recruited—first drawn from within candidates’ personal networks,
then from those of higher-level brokers, all the way down the line—
teams are likely to come from similar organizational (including partisan) or ideological networks. The individuals and households to
whom brokers disburse handouts are also likely to share those affinities—but so will brokers and voters aligned with other candidates for
that party in that constituency. Although further research is needed,
this pattern could help to explain why electoral handouts do not appear
to affect national-level electoral outcomes. Handouts may do more to
determine which candidate within a party prevails than which party
voters choose, yielding a negligible effect on party votes nationally.
Our research has implications for the study of electoral handouts in
other contexts. In countries with weak parties—like the contemporary
Philippines or Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s—lavish cash distribution characterizes campaigns. The literature often describes such distribution as vote buying, even while noting voters’ and candidates’
resultant uncertainty. These studies present a picture of fluid relations
between candidates and voters and of the deployment of large teams
of personal brokers that resemble our description of the Indonesian
BUYING BROKERS
39
case in such countries.74 Our approach might also have implications for
cases in which parties are important actors but are highly personalized
or weakly differentiated in programmatic or identity terms. On the
ground, campaigners working for such parties may act more in accordance with the expectations of our personalized broker model than
with those of the contingent-clientelism model, offering their personal
networks to the party rather than operating as cogs in machines for
inducing turnout among a party core or for monitoring and disciplining
clientelist exchange. In short, homing in on the intermediary stratum
that conveys and frames handouts makes clear the unlikelihood of contingent exchange.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
Supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017
/S0043887121000216.
DATA
Replication files for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN
/SCXPHI.
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AUTHORS
ALLEN HICKEN is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
His research interests include parties, elections, political institutions, and clientelism. Along with Edward Aspinall, Meredith Weiss, and Paul Hutchcroft, he is
the author of Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in
Southeast Asia (forthcoming). He can be reached at ahicken@umich.edu.
EDWARD ASPINALL is a professor of politics in the Department of Political and
Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National
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University. He is a specialist in the politics of Indonesia and works on a range of
topics including democratization, nationalism, ethnic politics, and democratic
decline. With Ward Berenschot, he is the author of Democracy for Sale:
Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (2019). He can be reached at
edward.aspinall@anu.edu.au.
MEREDITH L. WEISS is a professor of political science in the Rockefeller College
of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY. Her research addresses
social mobilization and civil society, parties and elections, institutional reform, and
subnational governance in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She is
the author of The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in
Southeast Asia (2020). She can be reached at mweiss@albany.edu.
BURHANUDDIN MUHTADI is a senior lecturer with the Faculty of Social and
Political Sciences, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta. He is
also an executive director of Indonesian Political Indicator and the director of public affairs at the Indonesian Survey Institute (Lembaga Survei Indonesia, LSI).
His research interests include voting behavior, clientelism, social movements,
political Islam, and democracy. He can be reached at burhanuddin.muhtadi@
uinjkt.ac.id.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank our numerous research partners in Indonesia for helping
to make this project possible, with special thanks to Noor Rohman, Zusiana Elly
Triantini, and David Efendi. We greatly benefitted from our collaboration with
Universitas Gadjah Madah, especially with Mada Sukmajati, Amalinda Savirani,
Wawan Mas’udi, the late Cornelis Lay, and the other members of the Research
Centre for Politics and Government (PolGov); Indonesian Political Indicators
(Indikator Politik Indonesia); and Lembaga Survei Indonesia. We are also grateful
for research assistance from Michael Davidson and Dotan Haim. We thank participants in panels at the American Political Science Association, the Asian Studies
Association of Australia, and the Association for Asian Studies conferences, and
at workshops at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and
at Chiang Mai University, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback. All errors and omissions are our own.
FUNDING
Funding for this project came from the Australian Research Council through a
Discovery Grant (DP140103114).
KEY WORDS
brokers, clientelism, elections, Indonesia, money politics, patronage, vote buying