Vote Buying in Indonesia The Mechanics of Electoral Bribery

Burhanuddin Muhtadi

Vote Buying in Indonesia

Burhanuddin Muhtadi

# Vote Buying in Indonesia

The Mechanics of Electoral Bribery

Burhanuddin Muhtadi Faculty of Social and Political Sciences Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia

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# Acknowledgements

This book is based on a revised version of my dissertation at the Australian National University (ANU). Therefore, I am particularly grateful to my dissertation chair, Prof. Edward Aspinall who played a significant role in the evolution of this project. My special thanks and deepest appreciation also go to Prof. Marcus Mietzner, Prof. Allen Hicken, Prof. William Liddle, and Dr. Ward Berenschot, who each read the entire manuscript and provided insightful comments and useful criticism.

This book could never have been completed without the help and contribution of many people and institutions. First and foremost are my home survey institutes, The Indonesian Survey Institute and Indonesian Political Indicator. My polling organisations not only provided an additional budgetary support to cover the costs of my post-election survey of voters, they also allowed me to insert several questions into a series of nationwide surveys before the 2014 elections.

This project was also enriched by the massive number of electoral district surveys conducted by the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC). Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to my senior colleague, Prof. Saiful Mujani for introducing me to the tradition of empirical and statistically orientated social science research. I have learned much of what I know about quantitative methods from my bright colleague, Deni Irvani, and I have greatly benefited from discussions with him about experimental design and on how to interpret my results. Of course, I also extend my heartfelt appreciation to all of my interviewees who generously gave of their time in interviews and often lengthy discussions about their political strategies, opinions, and practices.

Finally, I must extend my deepest thanks to my beloved wife, Rahmawati Madanih, and children, Rayhan Adnan Musthafa, Avicenna Ananda Musthafa, and Alexa Shakira Musthafa for their support in completing this project. This book required very costly methods, including the financing of unique, innovative surveys of brokers and politicians. When I was unable to get grants to fully cover all these activities, my wife didn't object to spending our own money. I am also indebted to my parents, H. Muhtadi and the late Hj. Siti Mas'udah. Without their unfailing encouragement and support, I wouldn't have been able to finish this project.

As is the rule in academic writing, I bear sole responsibility for any errors and inconsistencies in this book.

# Contents

# List of Figures

# List of Tables

# Introduction

*"Cut off my finger if there is a MP in Indonesia today who got elected without doing buying votes!" —One-time DPR member (Interview, 20 April 2014)*

# 1.1 Background: Why Are New Democracies Vulnerable to Vote Buying?

As the third and fourth waves of democratisation have swept the world since the 1970s (Huntington, 1991), elections have truly become a global norm: more than 90% of countries in the world now elect their leaders through competitive multiparty elections (Van Ham and Lindberg, 2015; Global Commission, 2012). However, as many of the newly democratising regimes only achieved barely minimal standards of electoral competition, the early optimism about the rise of democracy has significantly waned in much of the global democratic world. A lot of the erstwhile enthusiasts soon turned into sceptics, given that electoral democratisation hasn't automatically transformed into liberal form of democracy but beset by the curtailment of civil liberties and the feeble establishment of the rule of law (Diamond, 2002; Rose and Shin, 2001).

No less important, while almost all nations in the world currently hold multiparty elections, not all of them were able to improve the quality of its elections, that is, the degree to which elections are free and fair (Van Ham and Lindberg, 2015). If the de jure multiparty elections are plagued by a wide range of election fraud and electoral malpractice, the quality of democracy becomes problematic at best. Vote buying—the exchange of material benefits for or at least in the expectation of votes—is among electoral manipulation that has become a key component of electoral mobilisation in many young democracies (Jensen and Justesen, 2014). Ironically, instead of diminishing vote buying, the transition stages from authoritarian regimes to democracy may encourage such a distinctly non-democratic practice. In transitional democracies where democratic institutions (i.e. political parties) are still weak, the design of electoral and political institution consequently provides strong incentives for politicians to launch such strategies. These include competitive elections and multiparty system (van de Walle, 2007; Muno, 2010), electoral rules (Scheiner, 2007), decentralisation (García-Guadilla and Pérez, 2002), and credibility on decisionmaking process (Keefer, 2005).

Indonesia is no exception. Soon after Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime came to an end in 1998, Indonesia's party system entered a new, post-authoritarian era. Political parties, of which there were previously only three because of heavy government regulations, could now form freely. Consequently, a highly competitive multiparty system emerged, which coincided with the simultaneous introduction of multilevel elections from legislative to direct presidential ballots. In the wake of this unprecedented development, almost all political parties were neophytes with no political credibility (Vlaicu, 2016). Ideological divisions among political parties were also not salient. Thus, voters were often unable to differentiate political parties regarding policy positions or platforms. Meanwhile, post-Suharto's electoral system that generated 'candidate-centred' elections (voters can choose candidates over parties) failed to mitigate such problems. Under these circumstances, candidates were forced to generate a personal vote and candidate-centred campaigns rather than building a party vote and party-centred campaigns. Thus, in order to stand out from competitors within their own parties, candidates were unhesitating to buy votes, as happened in numerous transitions during the third and fourth waves of democratisation.

It is increasingly clear that an unprecedented wave of institutional changes in Indonesia since 1998 has created more room for clientelistic strategies. The changes in political and electoral systems, even with the best of longterm goals to create free and fair elections as well as appropriate channels of accountability (Shair-Rosenfield, 2012: 1), crystallise one of basic questions guiding this book: what effects have political and institutional factors had on the nature of patronage politics in Indonesia? How well do institutional arrangements explain the scope, patterns, determinants, targeting mechanisms, and effectiveness of vote buying as a form of patronage distribution? This book aims to answer these questions posed by the connection shared between these twin issues of change: the changes in the political institutions after the authoritarian regime, especially in the electoral arena, and the changes in the nature and mechanics of vote buying.

However, given the burgeoning of scholarly writings on the impact of electoral systems on clientelism, the analytical focus of this book is on vote buying by arguing that particular contextual factors—especially the adoption of open-list proportional voting system as a result of the electoral reforms after the fall of Suharto's authoritarian rule—matter greatly in explaining the ubiquity of vote buying in Indonesia. This book presents in much more length—a wide-ranging study of the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesia's young democracy, exploring the nature, extent, determinants, targeting, and effectiveness of this practice. Despite vote buying becoming central feature to electoral campaigns in Southeast Asian countries, particularly in Indonesia, where this practice has gained prominence in its post-Suharto's electoral politics, most influential studies on clientelism have emerged from other world regions. This book therefore aims to fill the gap in the scholarship reference on electoral clientelism in Indonesia and to situate my findings about the country within the context of wider academic literature on the field.

# 1.2 Vote Buying in Indonesia's Post-authoritarian Rule

As noted above, vote buying appears to be endemic in many recently established democracies (Jensen and Justesen, 2014; Keefer, 2005). For instance, using the 2005 Round 3 Afrobarometer survey, Andrews and Inman (2009) found massive evidence of vote buying in seven democratic countries in Africa,1 and the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) released findings of the 2010 Americas Barometer surveys showing high levels of—and interesting variations in—vote-buying behaviour across the Latin American and Caribbean regions (Faughnan

1These seven countries included Ghana, Mali, Namibia, South Africa, Benin, Senegal, and Botswana.

and Zechmeister, 2011).2 Similarly, politicians in Asian countries often opt to target poor citizens with offers of money, goods, or other forms of compensation for their vote in elections. In the Philippines, for instance, vote buying has long been a major feature of the country's elections, with an estimated 22% of its total electorate having been offered money or goods in exchange for their votes during the May 2013 elections (Pulse Asia, 2013).

One country in Asia that has attracted particular attention in terms of its vote-buying practices is Indonesia. It is difficult to find an analysis, either in the mass media or in the academic literature, of Indonesia's current electoral politics that doesn't mention vote buying, locally known as 'money politics' (*politik uang*). Despite its prominence, this issue surprisingly hasn't received much systematic and comprehensive scholarly attention. The few examples of scholarly works on this topic are based on qualitative approaches (e.g. Choi, 2007; Hidayat, 2007; Hadiz, 2010; Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016). Although they have significantly contributed to our understanding about vote buying, this qualitative literature is unable to measure vote buying's scope, pattern, and effects on electoral outcomes (Gonzalez-Ocantos et al., 2012: 203). Equally, much of the existing literature on vote buying has relied on anecdotal evidence, often drawing from unproven rumours and claims (Corstange, 2012: 483). Consequently, little is known about how many voters actually sell their votes in Indonesia and whether cash handouts have discernible effects on turnout or vote choice. This book deals with these key questions that have haunted scholars of Indonesian studies for the last 15 years.3

Indonesia is a compelling case study to illuminate the dynamics of vote buying in post-authoritarian societies. This is because of its significance as the third largest democracy in the world and because it belongs to a group of Southeast Asian nations that report offers of vote buying in higher numbers than most other countries (Schaffer, 2007; Amick, 2016).

2Among 22 countries across the region, according to the LAPOP, the Dominican Republic came out on top, with 22% of respondents claiming that they have been offered material benefits in exchange for their votes. Argentina was second, with 18% of those surveyed reporting having been offered money for their votes either sometimes or often; Panama followed with 17.8%. This big project involved a total of 37,642 individuals selected randomly to represent a population of eligible voters in 22 countries in the Latin American region.

3 In addition, much has been written about Indonesian voting behaviour from the perspective of sociological context, party identification, and rational choice (e.g. King, 2003; Ananta et al., 2004; Mujani et al., 2012; Liddle and Mujani, 2007).

Indeed, my study finds that vote buying is so widespread that it has become central to election campaigning in Indonesia (see Chap. 2). In addition to establishing the extent and effects of vote buying, this book also addresses broader questions in the comparative literature on clientelism, such as those regarding the determinants and targeting mechanisms of vote buying. Using survey data from Indonesia's legislative elections in 2014, I examine a large number of variables generally believed to be the determinants of vote buying at the individual level (such as income, civic engagement, and political attitudes). Surprisingly, my results suggest that, among other things, partisanship (i.e. strong emotional attachment to a particular political party) is a highly significant predictor of vote buying. Party identifiers were three times more likely to be targets of such practice than nonparty identifiers.

This finding is striking, given that strong party supporters should be expected to vote for their party without material incentives. But this result is only one piece of the evidence in a jigsaw puzzle I put together through this book. This finding cannot establish definitively whether voter partisanship attracts handouts or whether the reverse is true: that these benefits cause people to identify with the party that hands out cash (see also Stokes et al., 2013: 54). Despite such a potential endogeneity problem—which I discuss later in this book—my finding challenges one strand of scholarship that suggests that partisanship encourages voters to voluntarily help their parties during campaigns (e.g. Dalton, 2016; Verba and Nie, 1972). Further complicating this picture is the fact that the aggregate level of political partisanship—as expressed in levels of party identification—is comparatively low in Indonesia, constituting only 15% of my survey respondents during the 2014 election. Given these conditions of low partisanship, one major problem for candidates and parties arises: how feasible is it for candidates in Indonesia to win only by targeting partisans?

The issue of partisanship is in fact at the heart of the scholarly debate about the logic of vote buying (Dunning and Stokes, 2008; Cox, 2010; Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2012). Efforts at vote buying incur high costs, caused by both the need to establish a structure of vote brokers to deliver benefits to the voters and, of course, the requirement to raise the cash for distribution. With limited resources in hand, and in an environment in which ballot secrecy is protected, candidates are concerned with the effectiveness of vote buying in determining voting outcomes. As a result, they focus on the distribution of electoral incentives to some voters but exclude others (Stokes et al., 2013). The literature identifies two contrasting strategies in how they do so: the core-voter model and the swing-voter approach. The first posits that parties provide to core supporters in order to mobilise them to turn out on election day (Nichter, 2008; Stokes et al., 2013; Aspinall et al., 2015). The second sees vote buying as a strategy that attempts to sway uncommitted voters (Stokes, 2005). What types of voters, then, do Indonesian politicians target?

While the results of my voter surveys seem to provide evidence for the core-voter prediction in Indonesia, and my survey of politicians and brokers finds ample evidence of strong intentions among political actors to target partisan, loyalist voters, the picture is in fact complex. The data clearly show that although such voters are more likely to be targeted, in fact, overall they only make up a tiny proportion of the electorate in Indonesia. How can politicians rely on targeting only party loyalists to win in an election, given the limited number of such voters? As the election draws nearer, how do they make choices on how to spend their money once they have exhausted party loyalists? This challenge becomes even more complicated as, under open-list proportional representation (hereafter: PR) systems such as that used in Indonesia, candidates from the same party have to compete for votes between themselves to gain a seat. The small number of party loyalists is thus highly contested among co-partisans desperately seeking personal votes.

Moreover, while party loyalists are more likely to be targeted in relative terms, in absolute terms the data show that vote buying in Indonesia mostly occurs among non-partisans. If candidates and brokers express such a strong desire to target loyalists, why do they largely end up distributing so much cash and goods to so many uncommitted voters, and what sort of people get targeted for those payments? Hence, the puzzle underlying this book revolves around the question of how politicians and brokers decide which voters to target—voters who they might deem 'loyal' but who are in fact emotionally unattached to any party or candidate. In addition, the principal-agent problems inherent in vote buying—with agents leaking money provided by their principals—are also common in Indonesia. Regardless of such challenges, this book shows that candidates still pursue this electoral strategy with enthusiasm, with the result that as many as a third of voters across Indonesia are exposed to vote buying.

Why is vote buying so widespread despite targeting being imprecise and leakage high? In the context of the secret ballot, as in Indonesia, how can parties and candidates be sure that their investment has an effect on voting behaviour? It is fair to assume that without a traceable effect of vote buying, parties and candidates wouldn't engage in it either in Indonesia or anywhere else. Indeed, despite all the problems of inefficient delivery, my study finds cash handouts are surprisingly effective in producing higher turnout and vote share. In particular, I show that it is particularly the small margin candidates need under an open party list system that makes vote buying effective, its high cost notwithstanding. I show that, despite all its inefficiency, vote buying has an effectiveness ratio that is more than enough to make the difference in the tight races that occur between candidates on a single-party list. This helps explain the underlying logic behind candidates' insistence on running vote-buying campaigns.

Overall, therefore, this book aims to explore the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesian electoral politics and how post-Suharto's institutional arrangements explain the prevalence of vote buying. In doing so, I present systematic answers to many of the key questions that have arisen in the literature on clientelism. These questions concern the scope, patterns, determinants, targeting mechanisms, and effectiveness of vote buying. My primary research question is: what logic determines the patterns of vote buying in Indonesia? Developing an answer will require answering a set of subsidiary questions. These include, first, how prevalent is vote buying in Indonesia? Here, I aim to identify various forms and the intensity of this practice in Indonesia. Second, in order to explain the ubiquity of vote buying, I tackle questions such as what kinds of voters are most likely to 'sell' votes, what factors explain why some individuals are more likely than others to be targeted for vote buying, and how are they targeted? A third set of questions focus on the impacts of vote buying. In particular, I ask: how effective is vote buying in boosting greater turnout or vote share?

The rest of this introduction first reviews the literature on vote buying, and particularly the debate on whether it mainly targets core or swing voters. It then proceeds by introducing my main arguments, which the book chapters substantiate. The subsequent section presents Indonesia's institutional framework, explaining how it has helped shape vote buying during elections. This section helps distinguish the Indonesian case from the conventional patterns identified in literature that largely stems from Latin American cases. The chapter then explains the research methodology used and concludes by offering an overview of the chapter structure.

#### 1.3 Literature Review

#### *1.3.1 Electoral Clientelism: Vote Buying*

Following Nichter (2010), this study distinguishes electoral clientelism from the broader category of clientelism. Nichter (2010: 2) defines electoral clientelism as the distribution of material rewards to voters "exclusively during electoral campaigns." This runs contrary to the generic, classic definition of clientelism which typically involves ongoing relationships where politicians (or indeed, other social leaders) provide assistance and benefits *not only* during elections (Scott, 1969; Bobonis et al., 2017; Kitschelt and Wilkinson, 2007). Hicken (2011: 290–294) lists a number of crucial aspects of clientelism, describing it as a form of relationship based on material exchange and involving contingency, hierarchy, and iteration. Muno (2010) adds two important elements, insisting that clientelism is personal and voluntary.

Accordingly, if we stick to such key features of clientelism, not all payments made during elections are part of clientelist relationships. Hicken (2011: 295) reminds us that some instances of vote buying that scholars have documented around the world actually don't fit neatly into the classical category of clientelism. In many instances, vote buying is a one-off interaction rather than an example of an ongoing, or iterative, and mutually beneficial relationship of exchange (Kramon, 2011; Aspinall, 2014). In this study, therefore, vote buying can take the form of clientelist or non-clientelist exchanges. In order to capture both clientelist and nonclientelist forms of vote buying, I follow Schaffer and Schedler (2007) in viewing vote buying as an act which doesn't need to involve an element of clientelism. Hence, I simply define vote buying as a last-minute effort to influence a voters' decision in an election, typically taking place days, or even just a few hours, before a poll, by providing the voter with cash, goods, or some other material benefit.

#### *1.3.2 Targeting Strategies*

As indicated earlier, given the budgetary constraints candidates face, the question of how they determine the targets of their vote-buying strategies has become a key theme in the literature. Much scholarly theorising on vote buying involves two competing camps, that is, the core-voter versus swing-voter schools. The former holds that when they distribute cash payments or goods, parties tend to target their own core voters in order to motivate them to vote and thus increase their turnout (e.g. Nichter, 2008; Stokes et al., 2013). This form of vote buying is often referred to as 'turnout buying.' The second school suggests the opposite. According to this camp, parties will not waste their limited budgets on core supporters, but instead expend it on swing voters or weakly opposed voters (e.g. Lindbeck and Weibull, 1987; Stokes, 2005). This argument is based on the underlying assumption that a core voter is already committed to support the party and hence needs no further incentive to vote for it.

In this study, I examine these two dominant streams to explain how Indonesian politicians and their intermediaries distribute benefits to voters. Cox and McCubbins (1986) were among the first to outline the core-voter hypothesis. They contend that in many settings, political parties tend to allocate distributive benefits primarily to their core voters. The driving factor in the core-voter model is the assumption of *risk aversion* on the part of politicians. Core voters are seen as being more responsive than swing voters because politicians are in "frequent and intensive contact with them and have relatively precise and accurate ideas about how they will react" (Cox and McCubbins, 1986: 379). In their model, risk-averse politicians are unlikely to target swing voters and supporters of their opponents because these two groups of the electorate are riskier bets. Cox and McCubbins coined the term *maintenance buying* to reflect the fact that channelling benefits to core supporters is a rational strategy for a party seeking to maintain a long-term relationship with supporters. Gans-Morse et al. (2014: 4), on the other hand, called it a *rewarding loyalist* strategy to lock in core voters who might otherwise defect.

Focusing on the individual level, Nichter's (2008) study developed a strong rationale for Cox and McCubbins' argument, but with a slightly different focus and argument. While Cox and McCubbins (1986) emphasised the role of risk aversion in this strategy, Nichter (2008) argued that passive supporters are substantially more likely to receive electoral incentives due to the primary goal of vote buying being voter mobilisation (as opposed to persuasion). In his model, vote-maximising politicians don't try to change voters' preferences, but—and he uses the term *turnout buying*—their goal is to increase turnout among their supporters, some of whom may not be sufficiently militant to go to the ballot box at all costs. In addition, Nichter (2008) argues that turnout buying is much easier to monitor for parties and their intermediaries.

A study by Diaz-Cayeros and his colleagues (2012) also found empirical support for the core-voter hypothesis. In their work, however, the focus is on the *endogeneity of partisan loyalties* to material benefits. They argue that parties, especially in Mexico where their study was developed, tend to target loyal supporters to maintain their electoral coalitions over time. They argue that party machines still find it in their interest to target party loyalists, particularly in the presence of fear that if ignored the loyalists might defect. Finally, Stokes and her collaborators (2013) brought a different emphasis to the debate by arguing that this party loyalist strategy is used neither for systematically buying votes nor for purchasing turnout, but it is simply a manifestation of *rent-seeking behaviour* by electoral brokers. They argue that broker predation is the driving force behind the tendency of targeting party loyalists, as this strategy allows brokers both to get a higher profit margin from the funds given to them and to consolidate their position in their own patronage networks.

In contrast to such views, Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) proposed the swing-voter thesis. The main proponents of this strand suggest that distributive benefits will be more likely to be targeted at swing voters because it is these voters who determine the outcome of an election (Lindbeck and Weibull, 1987; Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Stokes, 2005). Parties need to address the short-term interests of voters outside of their ideological and social core constituency to expand their base at election time (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2012). Core voters, by contrast, remain supportive of their party even if material benefits are cut off (Stokes, 2005). Therefore, the rationale behind the swing-voter strategy is simple: swing voters' electoral decisions might be affected by gifts, while core voters are unlikely to be. In the swing-voter logic, to reward loyalists who are close to the party or candidate is to waste limited resources. In the same vein, the swing-voter hypothesis also predicts that politicians will not reward opposition supporters who are too ideologically distant from them to be persuaded by gifts to change their electoral choice.

In some of her earlier work, Stokes (2005)—in drawing from Dixit and Londregan (1996)—argued that parties avoid investing in core voters because the latter cannot credibly threaten to defect from the party. "Such a threat would lack credibility: the party knows that the loyal voter, even without rewards, is better off cooperating forever than defecting forever" (2005: 320). In her 2005 model, party machines predominantly favour swing voters, or even those swing voters who are slightly opposed to their party because only these swing voters can credibly threaten to vote with their conscience if they aren't swayed by the offer of material inducement. Alternatively, a typical element of the swing-voter hypothesis is the logic of vote maximisation, in which favouring swing voters over core voters increases the prospect of electoral victory. As Diaz-Cayeros and his colleagues (2012: 3) put it, for the swing-voter hypothesis, "swing voters are often equated with the closeness or margin of the victory." This is largely because in order to win elections, parties cannot exclusively rely on their loyalist voters, but they also need to persuade swing voters who are indifferent to the rival parties. Hence, investing a large amount in gifts to swing voters, in this view, can be decisive in determining electoral outcomes.

So how does Indonesia fit into this debate between proponents of the core-voter and swing-voter models of vote buying? Or does Indonesia take a different path altogether? It is worth noting that despite stark differences between the swing-voter and core-voter arguments, both camps typically assume that it is the party that is doing the vote buying (Aspinall et al., 2015, 2017; Kramon, 2013). The problem with this sort of analysis in the context of Indonesia's democratic transition is that, although political parties still count in legislative elections, it isn't parties but candidates with networks of informal brokers who play the key role in organising grassroots electioneering and, therefore, vote buying. Candidates not only campaign *for* their party but also *against* candidates of the same party. As I will show below, this circumstance has significant implications for the patterns of vote buying and the targeting mechanisms used.

In addition, many scholars of vote buying have assumed that the key parameter parties use to identify recipients when distributing benefits is voters' ideological or partisan proximity to the machine or to its opponents (Dunning and Stokes, 2008: 3). The Indonesia context, however, makes this assumption problematic. As noted above, the number of party loyalists is comparatively low, and party organisation isn't well organised. Many of the parties are also not clearly ideologically differentiated from their rivals. Thus, the Indonesian case displays significant differences from the context in which much of the literature on vote buying was developed. This book, therefore, attempts to go beyond just testing the two dominant positions—and beyond locating Indonesia in terms of a 'choice' in the swing versus loyalist targeting debate. It aims to do justice to Indonesia's complex electoral dynamics and—in turn—use the findings to inform the comparative debate on vote buying.

### 1.4 The Argument in Brief

This book argues that Indonesia's open-list proportional voting system as a result of the post-Suharto's electoral reforms—plays a crucial role in explaining the ubiquity of vote buying. Under this system, candidates must compete against their party peers for personal votes, and they only need to win a small slice of the votes to defeat their internal rivals. This means that despite vote buying's inefficiency and small effects, in close contests such as in Indonesia, vote buying can still make a difference to a candidate's odds of victory. Even if offers of money influence the vote choice of 'only' 10% of voters, this figure is high enough for many candidates to clinch a win.

This book demonstrates the centrality of vote buying to election campaigns in contemporary Indonesia. It shows that such practices aren't only prominent in national legislative elections but in local executive elections as well. Based on survey responses on all measures of vote buying, as will be thoroughly discussed in Chap. 2, the estimated proportion of people engaging in this activity lies between 25% and 33% of voters. These figures, however, define a range, rather than an accurate point-estimate, of vote buying incidents in Indonesian electoral politics. In the legislative election in 2014, there were around 187 million registered domestic voters. Hence, the range of between 25% and 33% would mean an estimated 47 million to 62 million voters nationwide were offered material benefits in return for their vote. If we rely on the highest estimate, one out of three voting-age Indonesians was personally exposed to vote buying, making Indonesia the site of the third largest reported frequency of vote buying in the world, as measured in recent surveys. High levels of patronage distribution are also pervasive in local executive contests. My local elections dataset measures vote buying in terms of its acceptability among voters rather than its frequency; we can also use this measure as a proxy for those likely targeted by the practice. Utilising a rich vein of voter data from 2006 to 2015, I show that the acceptance level of vote buying is comparatively high, with four out of ten Indonesians finding it acceptable for politicians or their brokers to distribute cash or gifts as part of campaigning in local elections.

Given that vote buying is so widespread in Indonesia, it is crucial to identify the determinants of the practice. Specifically, whom do candidates target with their vote-buying efforts? I show that the consistent findings of multivariate analysis based on pre- and post-legislative election nationwide surveys suggest that party-based partisanship (or party identification) is among the strongest predictors of vote buying. Put differently, my study found that the closer the ties of a voter to a political party, the more likely he/she was to receive offers of vote buying. On the surface, the underlying rationale seems to be simple, as suggested by many proponents of the corevoter school: by targeting party loyalists, candidates and brokers reduce the risks of vote buying; such voters are the most reliable and have the greatest electoral potential. Clearly, the results from my individual data are in line with expectations from the literature on the core-voter model, suggesting that party loyalists are an attractive target of electoral clientelism in Indonesia.

But a closer look at the data in the framework of the specific Indonesian context raises more complex issues and questions. First, in the context of an open-list proportional representation system, where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a candidate within the same party is elected, such as that in Indonesia, partisan voters are highly contested among co-partisans (i.e. candidates of the same party). In a voting environment where securing seats doesn't so much depend on defeating candidates from different political parties but on winning against internal party competitors (Selb and Lutz, 2015: 335), the candidates need to translate a voter's partisanship—their support for their party—into a *personal* vote. The link to clientelist strategies is clear: in order to outdo their fellow intraparty candidates, candidates need to differentiate themselves and one way to do so is by buying votes (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016: 13). Thus, as the main actors of vote buying, candidates focus on party loyalists because they are the real battleground in open-list systems—adding an important nuance to typical core-voter arguments such as risk aversion and turnout mobilisation.

Second, if it is true that party loyalists are more likely to be targeted for vote buying, how feasible is it for candidates to win only by targeting such partisans? It is important to note that the number of partisan voters in Indonesia is comparatively small. Only 15% of my national survey respondents admitted being close to any political party during the run-up to the 2014 election. Equally, the number of voters who voted for the same party in the 2014 and 2009 elections was only 22% of the total electorate. Conversely, the number of non-partisans, defined as those who don't feel close to any political party, is extremely large by any standard (85%). Given such limited mass partisanship, candidates can quickly exhaust the supply of voters if they decide to target only party loyalists with their vote-buying efforts. Indeed, as noted above, my voter surveys showed that the vast majority of vote buying—in absolute terms—happens among uncommitted voters. Thus, despite actors' insistence that they are targeting partisan voters, the reality is that they are mostly paying out benefits to non-partisans. This outcome appears to be a flow-on effect of the small number of voters with close emotional links to parties.

In its focus on understanding candidates' strategy of selecting targets of vote buying, this study offers an additional explanation to the scholarly debate between core- versus swing-voter models by combining an emphasis on the core-voter strategy with an emphasis on personal networks, such as are widely used by candidates in Indonesia. By doing so, this study captures the gap between the declared efforts and intent of candidates and brokers to target partisan voters, and the reality that most benefits are distributed to voters who don't in fact feel close to any party but who are instead embedded in personal clientelistic networks which are linked, often through long chains of personal connections, to the candidate. These networks, which include but often vastly exceed the constituency of deeply committed party loyalists, function as the primary target area of brokers and candidates, explaining how both core and swing voters receive benefits. This explanation contrasts with the assumptions that typically underlie both the swing- and core-voter models. In these models, particularistic rewards are distributed in a highly targeted way to specific types of voters guided by the *partisan preferences* of the recipients to the machine or its opponents (Dunning and Stokes, 2008: 3). In my analysis, *personal connections* are key. While my argument differs from the dominant literature on vote buying, it complements earlier works on the significance of personal networks in facilitating clientelistic practices.4

This study calls the strategy used by Indonesian candidates a 'personal loyalist' strategy, insofar that it targets persons not on the basis of their partisan affiliations but as identified through personal networks. Though candidates using this approach will still target partisan voters (who will typically be connected to them through party or other personal networks), such voters have been personalised in the sense that what counts for the candidate isn't only their loyalty to the party but also their loyalty to the individual candidate within the party. The reliance on personal networks rather than party loyalties and linkages can be expected to be most preva-

4Among others, James Scott's (1972) "Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia" is one excellent, classic work on clientelism that emphasised the importance of personal networks. The recent study by Cruz (2014) also finds that those with larger social networks (defined as more friendship and family ties) in the Philippines are more likely to be targeted for vote buying. Similarly, Wantchekon (2003) shows that in Benin, clientelistic goods are often distributed through personal networks.

lent in settings where political parties are largely absent in election campaigns and where partisan ties are weak. In Indonesia, the adoption of an open-list PR system in the beginning of its transition to democracy played a significant role in encouraging the development of such a context. The open-list system shapes candidates' strategies in three ways: (1) they are forced to compete against internal competitors for personal votes; (2) they must rely on personal networks rather than the party structure; and (3) they only need to win a small slice of the voters to defeat their co-partisan rivals. With limited resources in hand and dealing with large constituencies, they are more likely to invest in areas that have traditionally been viewed as their party's strongholds—which they think would provide the largest pool for their personal votes too. But given that party constituents are limited and highly contested among co-partisans, every candidate seeks to personalise their party constituents in the attempt to get the most intraparty votes. Although voters might have a sense of loyalty to a party, under open-list PR systems, they still can vote for different candidates within that party, meaning that their personal choice of a candidate is highly consequential for determining which candidate wins. Even voters who simply vote for a party without indicating any preference for an individual candidate, while helping to boost the chances of that party gaining a seat, will have no direct impact on determining an individual candidate's personal prospects of victory, since the open-list system requires parties to allocate the seat only to the candidate who receives the most personal votes. Accordingly, candidates define their so-called base voters not only on the basis of past voting record but also on the basis of personal connections. Such personal connections typically include a candidate's birthplace, kinship, ethnic and religious networks, or even simply in terms of receipt of past patronage. Moreover, candidates tap into informal brokerage networks. In short, where personalised electoral systems focus the competition on intraparty contests, candidates try to personalise their party's captive voters, prioritising personal connections mediated by brokers.

In its implementation, however, this personal loyalist strategy runs into various difficulties. First, most candidates and brokers tend to overestimate the number of partisan, loyalist voters. This is in part because they view past voting patterns for parties as a predictor of partisan voting behaviour in the current campaign. The latter works in some cases (i.e. some parties do have clearly defined strongholds), but overall there are strong fluctuations in Indonesians' voting behaviour. Second, loyalty is an amorphous concept in the Indonesian context. It has multiple dimensions which include partisan terms but also include kinship, religion, and ethnic ties as well as patronage loyalties. Accordingly, candidates and brokers typically misidentify non-partisans as loyalist supporters because they misinterpret personal connections as partisan leanings. This confusion over which 'loyal' voters to pursue makes brokers dispense benefits to swing voters they falsely believe to be core voters. Third, brokers have strong incentives to shirk due to principal-agent problems between candidates and brokers (Aspinall, 2014). Many candidates pour cash handouts en masse but invest little effort in monitoring and disciplining brokers. Lastly, in addition to the brokers' rent-seeking behaviour, the problem of targeting could partly be a story about agency loss between voters and brokers, and between voters and politicians. Many of the people who are selected through personal networks are in fact not even loyal to the candidate.

But if vote buying is often so misdirected and susceptible to broker predation, why do candidates invest so heavily in it? Recall that vote buying is ubiquitous in Indonesia. If such clientelist exchange is truly inefficient, how can it have an impact on electoral outcomes? In the comparative literature on vote buying, measuring the effect of vote buying on voting behaviour has two main dimensions: (1) it is assessed whether cash handouts are effective at producing higher turnout and (2) it is measured whether they have an impact on determining voting choice. Despite the misdirected targeting and the unreliability of brokers, my study demonstrates that vote buying has a significant effect on voter turnout. My voter survey reveals that respondents who experienced a vote-buying attempt were more likely to vote (81%) than those who didn't (74%), and this difference is statistically significant at conventional levels (*p* = 0.017).

Similarly, my study shows that the estimated effect of cash handouts on vote choice is up to 10%, meaning that 10% of voters cast their vote as a direct response to a gift of cash or goods. In this seemingly low number, however, lies the key to vote buying's attractiveness. As elaborated in more detail below, in a highly competitive open-list system like Indonesia's, where candidates only need small margins to beat co-partisans, that 10% can be a deciding factor in an election. Utilising official election statistics to assess the competitiveness of the 2014 legislative elections, the average winning margin for candidates when defeating party rivals was only 1.65%. Therefore, many candidates enthusiastically pursued vote buying because such a strategy could be a potential game changer. My dataset of electoral district surveys also shows that as electoral races grew tighter (marked by smaller margins of victory), the more likely a voter was exposed to vote buying, and vice versa.

Note that chasing a slim margin of victory isn't the only explanation for why vote buying is so widespread, given there are many competitive elections in many countries where the vote margins are small, and still politicians don't buy votes. There are two more plausible interpretations for why politicians might still prefer vote buying, even if such investment only produces low returns, and even if they aren't in a particularly close race. The first is some sort of prisoner's dilemma-type coordination failure (Chap. 7). Candidates would stand to gain more if they don't engage in vote buying. But the consequences and risk that if they don't and others do, mean that they will lose the game. While participating in vote trading may be inefficient, and may not result in victory, not buying votes is a *guaranteed* losing strategy (Hicken et al., 2018). Second, judged by its *objective* effectiveness in mobilising votes, vote buying isn't a quite reliable strategy although it *relatively* still is more efficient than all the other feasible alternatives. As will be discussed in Chap. 7, the narrative among candidates and brokers is that vote buying is perceived to be more significant in driving votes, relative to other mobilisation tactics.

This finding further strengthens the conclusion that vote-buying patterns in Indonesia differ from both the core- and swing-voter models. Core voters, in the sense of party supporters, are indeed primary targets of vote buying but, in total numbers, uncommitted voters receive most of the benefits, whether intentionally or not. This is largely because of the institutional context that shapes the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesia. The conventional literature on the swing- versus core-targeting model is framed by a context that is quite different from that in Indonesia. The difference is particularly evident in the electoral system (Indonesia has an extreme version of an open party list system) and, correspondingly, the degree of party identification (which is extraordinarily low in Indonesia). This drift towards a more candidate-centred electoral system has personalised voting and vote buying and has undermined parties' role in elections and eroded party loyalty among voters. Given that the high levels of vote buying in Indonesia are closely linked to the institutional setting that produced them, I suggest that vote buying will continue to be pervasive as long as the existing electoral framework and related socio-political settings persist. Instead of diminishing incentive for vote buying, in an environment where parties are weak and voters determine the fate of individual candidates, the adoption of an open-list voting system in Indonesia is creating a situation where vote buying has become rampant, and such practice then leads to serious failures of representation and accountability in the country.

# 1.5 The Institutional Framework: Party System and Electoral Rules

As noted above, candidates' decisions to launch vote buying need to be examined and explained in relation to the institutional and structural context within which they operate. This section highlights such institutional frameworks, notably as they relate to the party system and the open-list electoral system. Both have tended to encourage vote buying.

#### *1.5.1 Political Parties and Party System*

As indicated above, Indonesia's party system has entered a new chapter after the resignation of Suharto in 1998. Post-Suharto period has also experienced simultaneous multi-level elections from legislative elections to direct presidential elections. All legislative elections ranging from those for the national legislature known as the People's Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) and the Regional People's Representative Councils (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah, DPRD)—both at the provincial and municipal/district levels—and the upper (but in practice only advisory) chamber known as the Regional Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD) occur simultaneously. Up to and including 2014, they preceded the presidential election by approximately three months (Allen, 2015).5 All legislative elections at different levels are held in multimember constituencies divided into multiple electoral districts known as *daerah pemilihan* (electoral districts). In 2014, there were 77 national districts that varied in size between 3 and 10 seats (the electoral system will be explained in more detail in the next section).

Early in the post-Suharto period, there was an explosive growth of parties. The political elite has since then tried to reduce the number of political parties over time through various registration requirements, which have been gradually tightened. In 2014, only 12 national parties were allowed to compete in the national legislative election (down from 38 in 2009, 24 in 2004, and 48 in 1999). Further, the elite has closed the door to independent candidacies in legislative polls—persons who aren't nominated by these nationally registered parties aren't allowed to run.6 These limitations notwithstanding, the number of national parliamentary

5From 2019 onwards, legislative and presidential elections will be held at the same time.

6The only exception is Aceh where—as a result of the 2005 Helsinki peace accord—candidates for provincial and district seats are able to compete through local parties.

parties remains significant by international standards and contributes to the competitiveness of the party system.

Political parties in the post-authoritarian Indonesia are diverse and can be classified into various categories in terms of their religio-ideological orientation and political purpose. Perhaps the oldest binary category developed by Indonesian scholars is that of secular parties on the one hand and Islamic parties on the other (Liddle and Mujani, 2010). Among the 12 national parties in 2014, 5 parties can be viewed as Islamic, while the rest can be categorised as 'secular.'7 Within these categories, parties aren't homogenous, and there is a range of ideology and policy platforms. Islamic parties, for instance, can be defined as those that either explicitly claim Islam as their party ideology, or which don't do so but still draw most of their support from long-established Islamic organisations. Secular parties, likewise, have a range of historic and cultural differences.

Alternatively, but relatedly, Indonesian parties can be divided by their being part of a socio-cultural cleavage ('aliran'), or by their catch-all orientation (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016: 16–17; Mietzner, 2013). The former includes those which had their roots in the Islamic community or, by contrast, in historically developed nationalist groups. For example, Partai Amanat National (PAN, National Mandate Party) benefits from its close links to the largest modernist Muslim organisation, Muhammadiyah, and its once solid base among religious-minded urban middle classes. Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB; National Awakening Party) is associated with the biggest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), and draws on support especially among underprivileged traditionalist Islamic communities in rural Java. Despite profiting from close ties and associations with Islamic organisations, these two parties present themselves as pluralist. At the more conservative end of the spectrum, Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party) came out of the Tarbiyah, Muslim Brotherhood-inspired campus movement and draws its strongest support in major urban centres. Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, United Development Party) was formed as a result of Suharto's fusion of Islamic political parties in 1973 and has maintained an Islamist stance on important policy issues. On the other hand, Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDI-P, Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) describes itself as 'nationalist,' promoting pluralism and protection for minority groups. It therefore has particularly

7 It is important to note, however, that all 'secular' parties reject the term 'secular'—given that the country's state ideology describes Indonesia as multi-religious—and prefer to call themselves 'pluralist' instead.

found acceptance among *abangan*, socio-economically lower-class nominal Muslims, and in areas with predominantly non-Muslim populations.

Contrary to the *aliran*-based parties, catch-all parties seek to maximise votes by attracting "as wide a variety of social interests as possible" (Gunther and Diamond, 2001: 26). This leads the catch-all parties not to appeal to any particular social group or constituency. The most-cited example is Golkar, the political machine of the Suharto regime. It claims to serve the interests of the entire nation and styles itself as "a non-*aliran*, non-sectarian and non-ideological party" (Hatta, 2000 quoted by Tomsa, 2008: 96). Furthermore, Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016: 17) mention the important and growing subcategory of 'presidentialist parties,' in which parties only serve as a political machine for their founders seeking presidential office (Samuels and Shugart, 2010; Ufen, 2006). The examples include Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, Prabowo Subianto's Gerindra (Gerakan Indonesia Raya, Great Indonesia Movement Party), Wiranto's Hanura (Hati Nurani Rakyat, People's Conscience Party), and Surya Paloh's NasDem (Nasional Demokrat, National Democrat) Party. The presidentialist parties rely heavily on personalist appeals of their main figures—but this is often coupled with patronage delivery and populist policies to attract voters.

While presidentialist parties have often been described as lacking ideological commitment, this absence isn't a monopoly of the presidentialist parties. Ideological divisions among political parties are generally not strong—with the exception of the schism between those who want a stronger role for Islam in state organisation and those who don't.8 On most other issues, party positions are near-arbitrary, and shaped by vested rather than ideological interests. Thus, voters are often unable to differentiate political parties regarding policy positions or platforms. Given that parties tend not to compete on programmatic grounds, parties and office-seeking politicians are viewed primarily as personal distributors of private rather than public goods (Mueller, 2011). Confronted by these challenges, almost all politicians (at least those running for legislative seats) I encountered tried to focus voters' attention on personalities, instead of party, as a voting cue. To be fair, some parties or candidates attempted to go through the motions of presenting programmatic promises in the 2014 elections, but their pledges commonly lacked credibility (Keefer, 2007). Instead, they typically quickly resorted to various clientelistic strategies to appeal to voters.

8Pepinsky et al. (2012) argue that Indonesian voters use Islam as a cue when party policy positions aren't available.

Another institutional factor that characterises political parties in Indonesia and contributes to the widespread practice of patronage politics is the weakening of the parties' roots in society as evidenced in the general decline of party loyalty. As will be discussed more comprehensively in Chap. 5, party affiliation has decreased significantly over the past 15 years from about 86% of voters who felt close with any party in 1999 to only 15% in 2014—a low figure by international standards. These statistics correspond with the declining trend of party membership in Indonesia from 2004 to 2014 recorded by two polling institutes I am affiliated with, Indonesia Survey Institute (LSI) and Indikator Politik Indonesia. As shown in Fig. 1.1, the trend reports just how steep the decline has been in Indonesia from around 10% in August 2004 to roughly 1.5% in mid-2014.9

**Fig. 1.1** Trend of party membership in Indonesia, 2004–2014 (%). Sources: A series of surveys from April 2004 to September 2012 belong to LSI; while surveys in December 2013, August 2014, and October 2014 owned by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC); Surveys in January 2014, February 2014, April 2014, May 2014, and June 2014 by Indikator

9The chart is based on the combination of those who reported being active and inactive members of a political party. During legislative elections, candidates typically ask their supporters to register to be party members in order to get benefits they offer such as a free ambulance service and 'grief money' [*uang duka*—i.e. life insurance] for the family should the holder pass away (Ace Hasan Sy, interview, 14 April 2014). Accordingly, party membership often increases during legislative elections.

Of course, the decline of party membership isn't unique to Indonesia, and nor is the current level of party membership extraordinarily small by international comparison (Mietzner, 2013: 44–45). But the decline in both party identification and membership reinforces the notion that Indonesian elections are getting more candidate-centred, and provides another incentive for candidates to engage in private clientelist exchanges.

Some scholars maintain that the sharp decline of party identification and party membership correlates with electoral volatility, which denotes the extent of voters' inclination to switch their support between elections (Mujani et al., 2012; Mietzner, 2013; Tomsa, 2014). This electoral volatility, while not high compared to other new democracies, is significant. In 1999, the top five parties accounted for more than 80% of the vote, and PDI-P won the election gaining 33.74%. In 2004, the share of the five biggest parties dropped sharply to just 66%, and Golkar came out as the champion with 'only' 21.58%. The declining trend continued in 2009 with the top five parties at just 61%, and the winner Democrats received only 20.85%. In 2014, the share of the main parties increased somewhat to 62%, but the victorious PDI-P got only 18.95%. Thus, the socio-political and institutional settings of the party system—with its increased focus on catch-all appeals as well as highly competitive interactions between no less than a dozen parties and thousands of their candidates—have fuelled increasing personalisation and loosening ties between parties and voters.

#### *1.5.2 Electoral Rules and Its Implications*

Indonesia's electoral institutions have also affected the extent of patronage politics, especially in terms of candidates' choice of strategy. It is well established in the comparative literature that electoral system design can have a large impact on candidate strategies. As Hicken explains (2007a: 49), "all else being equal, where electoral systems limit voters to a single choice among parties, as in closed-list proportional representation systems, candidates are more likely to rely on party-centred strategies." And indeed, when, in 1999, Indonesia adopted a fully closed-list system, competition took place primarily between parties. Voters cast a ballot for a fixed list, with the candidate ranking determined by the party. Candidates were therefore predominantly concerned with their positions on party lists because those positions would determine their electoral prospects. A universally recognised term to illustrate the significance of candidates' list positions was *nomor topi* (lit. 'hat number'), describing those who occupied high positions on the list and thus had a higher chance of winning. In contrast, lower-ranked candidates were called *nomor sepatu*, (lit. 'shoe number'), denoting rankings at the bottom of the list. There were numerous reports of wealthy candidates purchasing winnable slots on party lists by bribing party leaders.10

Partly in response to these internal bribery dynamics, Indonesia in 2004 applied a semi-open proportional system, enshrined in Election Law No. 12/2003. Although voters were allowed for the first time to express their preference for a particular candidate, the law still allowed for heavy party control of candidates (Sherlock, 2009). In order to get elected outside their order of the party list, lower-ranked candidates had to receive an individual vote equal to or above the full party quota required to secure a seat in their respective electoral district (Allen, 2015). If they didn't achieve this, the seat would go to the candidate placed highest on the party list (Sherlock, 2009: 6). Given the difficulty of meeting this requirement, only 2 out of 550 members of parliament were elected by achieving an individual vote which reached the quota; the rest entered the legislature via the party list.

As shown in Table 1.1, under the 2004 election law, party votes and highly ranked slots on the lists counted a great deal in determining which candidates were elected. Again, this is largely because most candidates were unable to achieve the individual quota, handing the seat to those who attained highest positions on their party lists (Sherlock, 2009). Regardless of this limitation, Allen (2015: 76) called 2004 an 'important

**Table 1.1** Party list position of elected national parliamentarians

Source: Assorted Indonesian Electoral Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) documents relating to the 2004, 2009, and 2014 legislative elections

10Even some scholars indicated that some parties simply auctioned their winnable positions off to the highest bidder (e.g. Rich, 2013: 75).

moment of transition' since for the first time Indonesia introduced optional preference voting. Despite the difficulties candidates had in achieving the requirement of a full quota, the semi-open PR system began to drive candidates to get elected on the basis of personal vote.

In reaction to the low numbers of candidates being elected in 2004 on a full quota, the law was changed to reduce the quota for the 2009 elections. Instead of having to obtain a full seat quota, candidates only had to achieve 30% of it to secure a seat independent of the party list (Butt, 2016: 8; Sherlock, 2009: 6). However, the Constitutional Court annulled the rule and introduced a fully open-list proportional system. According to the Court's verdict, seats won by a party had to be handed to that party's candidates who obtained the most individual votes. This new electoral system, introduced by the Constitutional Court, had strong repercussions for candidates and their strategies. In general, fully open-list PR systems provide a strong motivation for politicians to build personal appeals and networks since their victory (Hicken, 2007a; Allen, 2015). Indonesia was no exception in this regard. Since 2009, many candidates have campaigned for personal votes without relying heavily on their positions on the party list, and an increasing proportion of lower-placed candidates have succeeded in being elected (see Table 1.1).

Given the short time between the Court's decision and the 2009 elections, however, candidates at that time didn't have enough time to fully switch to a personality-centred campaign strategy. By contrast, in the 2014 elections—which also applied a fully open-list PR system they had sufficient time to adjust to the system and prepare their strategies (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016: 13). In this context, it is important to note two patterns emerging under the fully open party list regime: first, despite the open-list system making elections more candidatecentric, all candidates are still concerned with party votes in their constituencies. As Aspinall argued (2014: 549), "the number of seats that each party wins in a district is in proportion to the combined votes for the party and all its individual candidates there." Accordingly, each candidate has an interest in enhancing (or at least stabilising) the party's overall vote and thus the number of expected seats. Doing so increases his or her prospect of winning one of those seats (Samuels, 1999: 495). Second, it is generally rare for each party to win more than two seats in any given electoral district. With many candidates believing—rightly or wrongly—that they can forecast the number of seats their party will win in a specific area, the focus of competition moves from an interparty contest to rivalry between candidates of one party over its expected number of seats (Richard Sualang, interview, 26 April 2014). As a result, the pressure to collect personal votes among copartisans increases the incentives for individual candidates to differentiate themselves from rivals on their own party list, including by buying votes and establishing a personal campaign team.

Preference ballots generally increase the degree to which candidates are elected on the basis of individual votes (Carey and Shugart, 1995: 417). Indonesia has become a particularly prominent example of this trend. To gauge the extent to which Indonesian elections are candidate-centric, I compare total party votes and candidate votes between the 2004, 2009, and 2014 elections. Although in 2004 the electoral system had a more restricted open-list system in 2004 compared to 2009 and 2014, voters equally had the option of indicating a preference for individual candidates in all of these last three elections (Sherlock, 2004, 2009; Butt, 2016).11 The Electoral Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU), the body that organises elections in Indonesia, itself had no official results for the total share of votes collected by all candidates across political parties competing in 2004,12 but Kevin Evans (2004) manually collected the data by comparing the share of votes for both the party and candidates relative to those who voted for parties only. On average, 46% of voters cast their votes by marking both the party and a candidate, though the proportion of personal votes varied across the 24 parties competing in 2004.13 Similarly, a nationwide survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (May–June 2008) estimated that of those respondents who were aware that in 2004, besides voting for a party, a voter could also vote for an individual candidate, 47.2% reported voting for party and candidate from the same party, a total of 35.4% said they voted for the party only, and 17.4% had forgotten what they did. A survey organised by the International Foundation for Electoral System (IFES) provides a slightly

11Another difference is that the electoral law for the 2004 elections stipulated that although voters were allowed to cast a vote for an individual candidate, they also had to vote for the candidate's party. In 2009 and 2014, in contrast, a vote would still be valid even if the voter opted to choose a candidate alone without voting for their party; the personal vote would then be counted for the candidate's party as well.

12Ferry Kurnia, Personal Communication, 3 October 2016.

13For example, Evans (2004: 201) estimated that candidates from PAN and PKS received more individual votes (59% each), compared to PDI-P which 'only' collected 49% of personal votes in total.

higher estimate: 52% of Indonesians during the 2004 legislative elections indicated a preference vote for individual candidates (Wall, 2004 quoted by Sherlock, 2009: 8).

In 2009, when a fully open-list system applied, according to the KPU's estimate, those who voted for candidates only or both the party and a candidate from the same party totalled 69% of all 104,099,785 votes. The LSI's exit poll after the 2009 election, in which 3685 respondents were interviewed immediately after they exited the polling stations, showed that 38.1% of respondents reported having voted for a candidate only, while 34.7% voted for both a party and a candidate from the same party, producing a total of around 72.8% who reported using their ballot to mark a preference for individual candidates.14 In 2014, with a similar electoral system, the KPU estimated that 70% of the 124,972,491 voters marked their ballots for individual candidates and 30% for party only. Clearly, then, over the period of 2004–2014, there has been an increasing trend among voters to vote on the basis of personal candidate preference rather than in response to political party appeals. This increase was particularly evident in the switch from the 2004 semi-open regime list to the 2009 open-list system, but continued in 2014.

The LSI's post-election survey conducted in June 2014 offered a more detailed picture of voters' greater inclination to vote for candidates over parties. In the national DPR election, 44.5% of respondents admitted marking the name of 'candidate only' and 22.5% voted for 'the party and a candidate from that party.' In the provincial and district DPRD elections, the 'candidate only' vote was even higher, at 47.5% and 52.1%, respectively (see Table 1.2). It is therefore reasonable to argue that smaller constituencies incentivise candidates to campaign more on the basis of their individual profiles than do larger constituencies. I will elaborate on this point in later chapters.

Obviously, a number of caveats are in order. Although candidates across parties uniformly chased personal votes relying on what Hicken (2007a: 48) termed 'name and fame,' this doesn't necessarily mean that the influence of political ideology and major political figures has disappeared. While trying to expand their electoral bases, most candidates sought to maintain support from their party's existing religio-political and social

14These data were not initially included in the LSI's exit poll report in 2009 (http://www. lsi.or.id/riset/357/efek-kampanye-terbuka-menjelang-pemilu-legislatif-2009) but were processed for this study.

**Table 1.2** Personal votes in national, provincial, and district legislative elections (%): The 2014 legislative election

Source: LSI post-election national survey conducted in June 2014

constituencies. For example, PKB candidates, especially those running in East Java districts, often produced posters, banners, and stickers that featured a Nahdlatul Ulama—the largest traditionalist Muslim organisation—logo and photos of influential *ulama*, in an obvious effort to highlight their roots in the traditionalist Islamic community (Fealy, 2014). Similarly, many candidates from PAN deliberately targeted the Muhammadiyah constituency, especially in its strongholds like Aceh and West Sumatra. In contrast, many PDI-P candidates presented themselves as 'nationalist' and sent their pluralist messages out to areas inhabited by less religiously observant Muslims and minorities. In short, many candidates presented themselves within the framework of their parties' popular images (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2016). Similarly, many candidates still tried to ride the coat-tails of their party's national leaders. Among presidentialised parties, for example, Gerindra candidates often produced publicity material that promoted their names and photos alongside those of Prabowo Subianto. Even candidates from the more socially rooted PDI-P enthusiastically displayed photographs of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) or Megawati in their advertising materials in 2014.

There is, then, clear evidence that the structural and institutional settings—as well as changes within them—are relevant to the patterns of electoral competition and vote buying in Indonesia. Compared to closed proportional systems, an open-list system provides more opportunities for candidates to determine electoral outcomes—and more incentives to engage in personal campaigning and patronage-based approaches. Declining party attachments and increasing intraparty competition likewise favours clientelist exchanges. The sharp decline of both party identification and party membership over time have further strengthened the move from the party-centric party system of early post-Suharto Indonesia to a more candidate-centred regime, with fundamental consequences for electoral strategizing.

### 1.6 Design and Methods

In this study, I employ mixed methods by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. For the study's main basis, I use survey data to test several hypotheses and conduct statistical analysis. I used qualitative methods to flesh out and explain the survey findings. While the scope of research and analysis focuses primarily on the national level, I also pay considerable attention to the dynamics of vote buying at sub-national levels. This section sets the scene for the interplay between quantitative and qualitative that informs my study and explains how I selected case studies at the subnational level.

#### *1.6.1 Approaches and Methods*

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> Quantitative Approaches*

This study draws data from six different surveys as the primary sources of my quantitative research. Most notably, with regard to establishing the level of vote buying in Indonesia's population, some scholars argue that survey data provide a more sound basis for analysing clientelism than many other approaches because it allows researchers to examine the extent to which vote buying is pervasive and draw inferences about causation (Gonzalez-Ocantos et al., 2012: 203). Survey methods allow us to test competing theories about the determinant factors of clientelist strategies.

But survey methods have their problems. Many scholars argue that quantitative methods are problematic because they miss a lot of the nuance. In addition, using surveys to study vote buying presents structural challenges since many individuals exposed to such practices may not admit to their behaviours (Brusco et al., 2004: 69). In most parts of the world, vote buying isn't morally legitimate and thus attracts a negative social stigma (Hicken, 2007b; Gonzalez-Ocantos et al., 2012; Corstange, 2012). There is, then, a potential social desirability issue in interviewing and surveying respondents on this topic.

In response to this problem, the first challenge in establishing the extent of vote buying in Indonesia is to minimise potential respondents' fear of expressing socially undesirable attitudes or admitting to stigmatised behaviours like vote buying. In order to do so, I used a number of survey items of varying degrees of directness (see Chap. 2). My own survey didn't only rely on a direct question but also used a neighbourhood question by treating respondents as an 'observer' to assess the prevalence of vote-buying incidents in their community. More importantly, I employed a list experiment, an increasingly influential mode of quantitative research in studies of clientelism designed to reduce bias in survey questions.

Hence, this study is expected to offer strong empirical evidence of the extent and patterns of vote buying that is generally absent from the more anecdotal accounts that predominate in previous works on Indonesia's clientelism and electoral politics. This study therefore aims to fill a significant gap in the literature by providing original survey data on vote buying in Indonesia. Using probability-based samples, my surveys include voterlevel, candidate-level, and broker-level data.

As an executive director of a Jakarta-based polling organisation, I have extensive experience in organising surveys through face-to-face interviews in Indonesia. Given the sensitive nature of some questions, notably on vote buying, it was essential to secure trust from respondents. At the outset, my interviewers made clear that the survey institute was independent and non-partisan, and that they weren't affiliated with either any government institution or a particular party. The six surveys that form the quantitative foundation of this study are the following:

1. *National pre- and post-election surveys of voters*: I conducted both pre- and post-election surveys.15 These surveys asked respondents a variety of questions relating to vote buying, such as how prevalent it was; how effective and costly it was; which kinds of voters were susceptible to such exchanges; and how candidates and brokers monitored compliance. My first pre-election survey was administered during 18–30 January 2014; the second one was conducted from

15As will be further explained in Appendix A, I organised three pre-legislative election surveys. The first of the pre-election surveys involved 2039 individuals selected randomly to represent the population of eligible voters in Indonesia. The second pre-election survey interviewed 2050 respondents across Indonesia. The last pre-election survey covered 1220 voters across the country. Meanwhile, the number of respondents in the post-election survey was 1210.

26 February to 6 March 2014; and the third one was organised from 19 March to 24 March 2014, around two weeks before the election. My post-election survey was run between 22 and 26 April 2014, immediately after the legislative election which was held on 9 April, benefitting from voters' recent interactions with candidates and brokers. Some measures of vote buying employed in this study were generated from the 'Money Politics in Southeast Asia' Project.16 In addition to these four surveys, I was also able to draw on the results of massive, multi-year national surveys conducted by the Indonesia Survey Institute (LSI), Indikator Politik Indonesia, and Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting's (SMRC) in order to incorporate trend data—notably with regard to the aggregate levels of party identification and party membership. I have been deeply involved with LSI and Indikator, and I have been granted permission to use SMRC's historical data.

16This multi-year project was a four-country study of money politics across Southeast Asia that included Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand. My thanks to Edward Aspinall and other principal investigators of this project (i.e. Allen Hicken, Meredith Weiss, and Paul Hutchcroft) for allowing me to employ their measures and share the results for the purposes of this study.

between electoral competitiveness and vote buying in each electoral district (see Chap. 7).

information received from the randomly selected candidates during the field interview process. Both candidate and broker surveys were supplemented with qualitative observations and interviews—notably on the reasons behind the responses, providing a basis for the valid interpretations of the collected data. The questionnaire I designed aimed to uncover the modes of organisation of brokers, the mechanisms of vote buying (who was targeted, when, how, and why), and the extent to which the recipients of cash handouts voted for the candidate associated with the benefit. Such data allow me to gauge the dynamics of vote buying as they were shaped and driven by grassroots brokers.

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> Sub-national Case Selection*

The selection of the four provinces for the sub-national surveys of candidates and brokers was guided primarily by the findings of the wide-ranging electoral district surveys of voters conducted by Indikator and SMRC during the run-up to the 2014 legislative election.17 I used these surveys to identify variations among provinces in voters' exposure to vote buying and their levels of party identification (which as already touched on above, I found to be one of the strongest predictors of vote buying). I used these two variables to select cases. My measure of partisanship was based on an additive scale derived from two items: whether respondents felt close to a party and the strength of that feeling. Meanwhile, vote buying also used an additive scale from two items: the extent to which vote buying is reported as acceptable by respondents and the percentage of those who reported to have accepted an offer and voted for the giver.

I used a scatter plot to determine the case selection (Fig. 1.2), selecting one case from each quadrant. I selected Central Java where voters exhibited relatively high levels of both partisanship and vote buying. My second case is North Sulawesi where partisanship is high, but the rate of vote buying is relatively low. The third case is East Java, where voters were more accepting of vote buying, but unlike Central Java, partisan ties were comparatively low. The last case is West Sumatra as a control as the province exhibits relatively low levels of both partisanship and vote buying.

17Given many densely populated provinces consist of several electoral districts, I combine all electoral districts in such provinces to get an additive scale of partisanship and vote buying.

**Fig. 1.2** Province selection for MP and broker surveys. Source: Indikator and SMRC's pre-legislative election surveys in 73 electoral districts during the run-up to the 2014 legislative election

Importantly, these four cases represent the three most populated islands in Indonesia: Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi. There is also significant variation among the four provinces in critical aspects. As I will discuss later, they vary in the type of political players who are most influential, bases of power, party dominance, socio-economic levels, relative presence of religious leaders, and ethnic composition. These similarities and differences make the four provinces a suitable kaleidoscope through which to view Indonesia's electoral patterns and politico-cultural composition.

#### *<IP_ADDRESS> Qualitative Approaches*

After conducting public opinion and targeted group surveys, I integrated my survey results and my large and complex datasets with the insights gleaned from extensive qualitative fieldwork, which lasted for 13 months. By doing so, I was able to capture—in the context of micro-level analysis—variations, mechanisms, and motivations that characterise the actors and networks through which vote buying was distributed. In order to structure the fieldwork, I chose the case study approach—selecting the four provinces mentioned above, for the reasons already explained. The fieldwork relied on qualitative methods using the same methods across four cases that allowed me to develop in-country comparisons. I spent considerable time in several districts in the four provinces. The criteria for district selection were again primarily guided by statistical findings. For example, in East Java, I travelled to Bangkalan, Sampang, and Pamekasan because, according to my historical data, more people in these areas thought that vote buying was a normal business compared to other regencies.

The qualitative approach relied on four primary tools of investigation: interviews, focus group discussions (FGD), close observation and media analysis, and additional document collection. In conducting the interviews, I used a semi-structured format (Wengraf, 2001; Galletta, 2013). That is, I had certain core topics that I wanted to address in each interview, but I was also flexible in responding to specific cases brought up by each of the informants. Because I had already conducted the main surveys and produced preliminary analysis prior to the bulk of my qualitative research, I was able to zero in on issues of particular interest identified through the quantitative research. For example, given the quantitative result that party loyalists were more likely to be targeted by vote buying, I endeavoured to corroborate and explore this finding in greater detail by asking my interviewees about it. For instance, despite vote buying seeming to target party loyalists, little is known about the definition of loyalty in the Indonesian context, where party-based partisan ties are low by international standards. Thus, I asked my respondents about the meaning of partisanship in the context in which a lot of connections between voters and candidates aren't mediated by political parties but by informal brokerage networks. And, of course, I had many other questions to ask in terms of the techniques and problems of vote buying, such as: how do politicians engage in vote buying operations? How do brokers identify their voters, and how do they try to persuade them to be responsive if given rewards? And how do they attempt to rely on their 'loyalists' if they aren't given benefits?

In general, the interviews turned out to be highly effective because despite its illegality, many interviewees talked about vote buying openly, with little obvious sense of embarrassment or guilt. I guaranteed that I wouldn't personally identify them in my research products if they mentioned sensitive matters, and in these circumstances, most were willing to disclose the methods they used to carry out vote buying and explained in detail how they designed their strategies.18 In the following, I describe my qualitative methods more comprehensively.

18Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016) along with approximately 50 researchers involved in 'Money Politics and Clientelism' project also had similar experiences. Many candidates they interviewed were relatively open when discussing how the payments were delivered to the recipients.

activists, and key bureaucrats about vote buying and its impact on electoral competition in Indonesia.

5. *Media content analysis and additional document collection*: My fieldwork didn't rely exclusively on relatively common tools such as interviews and direct observation, but I also collected local and national media reports on vote buying and analysed them qualitatively. Among other sources, the media provide a rich collection of information on the occurrence of vote buying, its location, its timing, and its targets. To ensure a broader range of coverage, I also used 'triangulation of multiple sources' by taking advantage of the increasing popularity of online news websites in Indonesia as sources of data on clientelist strategies. In addition, I collected a number of official documents related to the subject under investigation. I also collected a large amount of official election statistics by the Indonesian Electoral Commission (KPU) and demographic data to enrich my quantitative findings.

#### 1.7 The Book Overview

This book presents the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesia's young democracy, explaining how such exchange is practised and organised, how common and effective is it, and, particularly important, why candidates engage in it while these monetary incentives appear to influence only a limited number of people. My study addresses these central issues in the context of comparative studies of vote buying, arguing that although in *relative* terms, partisan voters are more likely to be targeted, in *absolute* terms, vote buying largely happens among undecided voters (given the relatively small number of party loyalists in Indonesia). Regardless of such a substantial amount of leakage, vote buying remains an attractive strategy for many candidates because the 10% range of vote-buying effects on vote choice is high enough to secure victory. Even so, the dynamics of electoral competition that entangle candidates in a prisoner's dilemma make vote buying as a counter mechanism to neutralise the effects of their rival's handouts. In addition, vote-buying strategies become *relatively* more effective in garnering votes than other electoral strategies.

Following this introduction, Chap. 2 discusses a central question of this study. It attempts to answer how extensive vote-buying distributions are in Indonesian elections. Especially with regard to vote buying, I present estimates of these practices using various measures and techniques. This chapter compares the findings from Indonesia with the level of vote buying in other countries. The chapter focuses on vote buying in legislative elections but also pays attention to evidence of extensive vote buying in local executive contests. Utilising a rich vein of data from 2006 to 2015, I identify inter-regional variation in levels of vote buying over time. The chapter concludes that vote buying has become an increasingly prominent feature of Indonesia's electoral politics at both the national and local levels.

Chapter 3 identifies factors explaining why some individuals are more likely than others to be targeted with vote buying by political operatives. This chapter also provides a complete profile of the typical vote sellers. It rigorously tests the patterns of vote buying based on a survey done after the 2014 legislative election. The findings show that party identification is among the strongest predictors for explaining vote buying. Simply put, the closer the ties of an individual to a political party, the more likely he/ she is to be exposed to vote buying.

Chapter 4 then discusses the relationship between party-based partisanship and vote buying in the context of the debate on whether vote buyers are more likely to target swing or party loyalist voters. It discusses the levels of party identification. Given the centrality of the finding that a high degree of party identification in a voter makes him or her more likely to be the target of vote buying, this chapter engages in further tests of this hypothesis with multiple sources of data. First, it reviews evidence from voter-level data which also indicates the greater likelihood of party loyalists being targeted. Moreover, the chapter presents evidence from a unique survey of politicians and brokers which is strongly suggestive of the party loyalist strategy. After interrogating the evidence, the chapter comes to the conclusion that despite the fact that in *relative* terms party loyalists are more likely to be targeted, in *absolute* terms vote buying mostly happens among non-partisans—largely because the number of voters with high levels of party identification is small.

Chapter 5 explains the gap between politicians' intention of capturing party loyalists and the fact that it is undecided voters who most receive benefits. It offers an additional explanation to the conventionally more party-oriented literature by combining an emphasis on the core-voter argument with a stronger focus on candidates' and brokers' reliance on personal networks. I call this explanation the 'personalist loyalist' argument. I highlight that the concept of loyalty is ambiguous in the Indonesian context, leading many political actors to misidentify (and overestimate the number of) partisan voters. In this regard, institutional and structural contexts matter greatly in shaping the environment in which vote buying can thrive; thus, the chapter begins with a comparison between Indonesia and Latin American countries regarding institutional and contextual factors.

Chapter 6 puts flesh on the bones of my argument about the personal loyalist strategy. It demonstrates how personal networks feed the recruitment and organisation of brokers and help define targeting strategies in settings where party-based partisan ties are weak. The chapter then addresses many of the unanswered questions in the study of electoral clientelism in Indonesia, such as those regarding the demographic profiles of brokers and the logistics of vote buying. Importantly, this chapter argues that the dual-track strategy employed by many candidates, in which they target both party loyalists and persons connected to them through personal networks strategy—not only suffers from misdirected targeting but is also jeopardised by agency loss, that is, leakage of the funds provided by candidates. The discussion shows that, despite reliance on brokerage networks, candidates typically develop weak monitoring and lack enforcement methods, encouraging brokers to engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

Given the widespread leakage and failed targeting, it is crucial to investigate the effectiveness of vote buying. Chapter 7, therefore, begins with discussion of its impacts on both voter turnout and vote choice. It shows that despite targeting strategies being imperfect and despite the unreliability of brokers, vote buying produces greater turnout. This chapter also shows that while receiving money influences the vote choice of 'only' approximately 10% of voters, this 10% matters immensely in Indonesia's highly competitive election settings. It concludes that candidates find vote buying attractive because it serves as an effective mechanism to produce narrow winning margins. The prisoner's dilemma types of situation also make such practice inevitable, especially in a context where vote buying is relatively more efficient than all the other feasible alternatives.

In the conclusion, I discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the findings and point to an agenda for future research. Overall, the comparative literature on vote buying and turnout buying has emerged in contexts different from that in Indonesia. This makes the dynamics of vote buying, especially its targeting, very distinctive.

#### Bibliography

Books, Journal Articles, and Unpublished Papers

Ananta, A., Arifin, E.N., and Suryadinata, L. (2004) Indonesian Electoral Behavior: A Statistical Perspective. Singapore: ISEAS.

———. (2007b) How Effective are Institutional Reforms? In: F.C. Schaffer (ed) Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publisher, Inc.

———. (2007) Clientelism, Credibility, and the Policy Choices of Young Democracies. American Journal of Political Science 51(4): 804–821.

———. (1969) Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change. American Political Science Review 43:1142–1158.

———. (2004) The 2004 Indonesian Elections: How the System Works and What the Parties Stand for. Canberra: Centre for Democratic Institutions.

Tomsa, D. (2008) Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the Post-Suharto Era. London and New York: Routledge.

———. (2014) Party System Fragmentation in Indonesia: The Sub-national Dimension. Journal of East Asian Studies 14: 249–278.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# The Prevalence of Vote Buying in Indonesia: Building an Index

How prevalent is patronage distribution in Indonesia? Although there has been a burst of scholarly and non-scholarly writings on the topic in the last few years,1 little is known about how many voters actually receive material incentives from politicians. This chapter offers a systematic answer to fundamental questions about the intensity of money politics in Indonesia that have vexed scholars for many years. It involves a complex study of patronage politics in Indonesian elections, which draws predominantly on surveys.2

1Among others, Choi (2007), Aspinall (2014), Allen (2015), Aspinall and As'ad (2015), Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016), Aspinall et al. (2017), Amick (2016), and Tawakkal et al. (2017).

2 I used a number of nationwide surveys in this chapter, including an April 2009 survey by The Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) and a December 2013 survey by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC). The LSI survey took place from 20 to 27 April 2009, approximately one week after the legislative election. The sample was 2000 voting-age adults with a margin of error of ±2.4% at 95% confidence level. Meanwhile, the SMRC survey interviewed 1210 respondents, who, like the respondents in the LSI poll, were selected with multistage random sampling, with an estimated margin of error of ±2.9% at 95% confidence level. This chapter also draws from a pre-election survey conducted during 19–24 March 2014. The number in the sample was 1220 voting-age adults who were selected with multistage random sampling proportionally distributed over the 34 provinces. The margin of error was around ±2.9% at 95% significance level. However, this chapter draws primarily from my post-legislative election survey conducted during 22–26 April 2014, around two weeks after the legislative election. I timed the surveys to take advantage of a simultaneous national and sub-national parliamentary election held on 9 April 2014, which would mean that citizens' recent interactions with parties, candidates, and brokers were fresh in their minds. In addition to these national surveys, I also utilised a large amount of data drawn from 963 local surveys conducted by LSI and Indikator Politik along with SMRC from 2006 to 2015.

© The Author(s) 2019 45 B. Muhtadi, *Vote Buying in Indonesia*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6779-3\_2

In this chapter, to measure the intensity of vote buying, I use a votebuying index as the main dependent variable of this study. I argue that vote buying is central to election campaigns in Indonesia. Drawing from a wide range of survey methods, I estimate that the proportion of voters participating in vote buying during the 2014 legislative election was between 25% and 33% (depending on the method and specific question used in the survey). For comparative purposes, I relate this figure of selfreported vote buying with rates from other countries in the world. It turns out that the range between 25% and 33% is comparatively high by international standards, with Indonesia's level of vote buying being the third largest in the world (at least as measured in surveys within the last decade). As vote buying is illegal in most countries, including Indonesia, it is plausible to suspect that respondents directly asked about such exchanges are reluctant to provide truthful answers. However, despite this presumed desirability bias, my findings show that the list-experiment and the straightforward survey questions result in consistent estimates of the aggregate levels of vote buying. The chapter discusses this question extensively.

Finally, although this study puts greater weight on vote buying in national parliamentary elections, it also offers new insights into the underexplored nature of such practices in different election settings. In the last part of this chapter, I present historical survey data, owned by my home institutions (LSI and Indikator Politik Indonesia), to identify interregional variation in levels of vote buying in executive elections at the local level. This chapter concludes that vote buying isn't only widespread during national legislative elections, but that it has also become a central feature of local executive elections, where the prize is the position of district head, mayor, or governor.

### 2.1 Dimensions and Measures

To operationalise vote buying as the dependent variable of this study, I created a series of questions about this individualised form of patronage distribution and asked subjects to respond on a various point Likert-type scale to capture attitudes and opinions with a range of answer choices. Given that vote buying is typically associated with negative stigma and thus is associated with social desirability bias, my research follows the methods developed by Brusco and her collaborators (2004: 69) to approach the targeted issue from several different directions. In the postelection survey (the one conducted from 22 to 26 April 2014), the questions used seven measures of vote buying with different degrees of directness. This was done in the expectation that the response to any single question wouldn't provide a completely accurate picture of such exchanges. Further, I categorised these seven measures into two dimensions: vote-buying operations in the nationwide legislative elections and vote-buying attempts in the national and local executive elections.

In the survey, the dimension of vote buying in the parliamentary elections consists of four measures. The first is a four-point scale of all experiences with vote buying in legislative elections, without concretely mentioning the 2014 elections in the question (hereafter I referred to this a four-point scale of all vote-buying experience in legislative elections). The question asked: "During the last couple of years, related to the legislative election campaign of national parliamentary (DPR) candidates, how often have candidates or success team members offered you food, household items, and/or other goods in order to influence your vote in the election?" I asked respondents to respond on a four-point Likert-type scale (very often, quite often, rarely, and never), which I then recoded into two categories (very often, quite often, and rarely = 1, rare and never = 0). I worded the question in this way to gather all experiences of vote buying, including in the currently ongoing campaign. The strategy of not explicitly mentioning the date was intended to capture greater vote-buying reports. Given the survey was conducted when the election had just been held, I wanted to avoid making respondents feel they were being 'interrogated' on what they had just done in the 2014 election, remembering the vote buying is actually illegal in Indonesia. In addition, as noted above, this measure used a four-point scale to increase variation in this variable of interest and was expected to collect greater vote-buying reports than a simple 'yes-no' question.

Similarly, my second measure of vote buying in legislative elections didn't concretely mention the 2014 election. The prompt was as follows: "These situations sometimes occur during every election in Indonesia. Have you ever experienced these situations below?" The relevant prompt was "Being offered money or goods in order to vote for a certain political party/DPR candidate." The possible responses were 'no,' 'yes, only once or twice,' to 'yes, several times,' and they were recoded to be a two-point scale (yes, only once/twice and yes, several times = 1, no = 0). The main difference to the question above is that while the first measure used a fourpoint scale, the second used a three-point scale of vote-buying experience (hereafter referred to as a three-point scale of all vote-buying experience in legislative elections). We should expect a different outcome since different response options may generate different results. Additionally, the second measure was mixed with a number of other exposures to vote-buying offers in the different election settings that voters could point to, as will be discussed later.

The last two measures of vote buying in legislative elections are on a two-point scale, comprising a pair of questions that explicitly asked about these practices in the 2014 legislative elections. A key difference to the questions above is that respondents might have felt compelled to provide misleading answers in response to questions that directly asked about vote buying in 2014, because this event was still fresh in voters' minds when the post-election survey was conducted and the questions were more specific. Though the question is appealing because it asks directly about the level of vote buying in 2014, it also might drive some respondents to respond in ways that don't reflect their actual behaviour. The question doesn't allow respondents to disguise their answers in terms of past election events. Further, these last two measures are dichotomous scales that are different from the questions above, being a 'yes-no' question which provides a clearer, binary response, but in which bias is more likely.

In this study, the yes-no questions that explicitly mentioned the 2014 elections asked about individual and neighbourhood vote-buying rates. Hence, the third measure inquired about vote buying directed at respondents in 2014 (hereafter referred to as a two-point scale of individual vote buying in the 2014 legislative election). The question reads: "During the run-up to the April 9th 2014 legislative election, did candidates or success team members offer you money, food, household items, and/or other goods (excluding propaganda hats, shirts, and posters)?" The fourth focuses on vote-buying offers witnessed by respondents in their neighbourhood (hereafter referred to as a two-point scale of neighbourhood vote buying in the 2014 elections). The question asked: "During the runup to the April 9th 2014 election, did you observe candidates or success team members offering people in your neighbourhood money, food, household items, and/or other goods (excluding propaganda hats, shirts, and posters)?" These yes-no questions were recoded to scale from 0 (indicating those who responded negatively to both such offers in 2014) to 1 (indicating those who responded positively to both questions).3

3To measure vote buying, I prefer to use 'being offered' rather than 'received' material benefits. Of course, we cannot determine whether voters actually accepted electoral bribes.

Meanwhile, three questions focused on vote-buying attempts in national and sub-national executive elections, as a comparison with the above second measure of general vote-buying experiences in legislative elections. These measures of vote buying in the executive elections are on a three-point scale. The first question reads: "Have you ever experienced being offered money or goods in order to vote for certain presidential/ vice presidential candidates?" (hereafter referred to as a three-point scale of vote buying in presidential elections). The second question asks: "Have you ever experienced being offered money or goods in order to vote for a certain gubernatorial candidate?" (hereafter referred to as a three-point scale of vote buying in governor elections). The third question was: "Have you ever experienced being offered money or goods in order to vote for a certain regent/mayoral candidate?" (hereafter referred to as a three-point scale of vote buying in regency elections). In each case, possible responses were 'no,' 'yes, only once/twice,' and 'yes, several times.' These answers were subsequently recoded to be positioned on a two-point scale ('yes, only once/twice' and 'yes, several times' = 1, 'no' = 0).

In my analysis of the data, I combined those seven measures described above into an aggregate index of vote buying. As indicated above, to facilitate substantive interpretation of these findings, I recoded each of the vote-buying items from their original scale into dichotomous scales that took a value of 1 if the respondent was exposed to vote-buying attempts or experienced being offered such electoral bribes.

#### 2.2 How Prevalent Is Vote Buying?

How widespread is vote buying in Indonesia judged from the measures I have chosen? In this section, I present the main descriptive results of my findings on vote buying, divided into two dimensions: legislative elections and executive elections.

To begin, I demonstrate the findings based on the first dimension of vote buying generated from responses to a battery of four questions that asked about respondents' experiences of vote-buying attempts in legislative elections. Using a four-point scale, as explained above, responses to

But such a question, as Jensen and Justesen (2014: 224) argued, allows us to measure which voters political machines tend to target. By using the word 'being offered,' I intended to avoid social desirability biases that may occur when asking questions about respondents' own behaviour.

the first question suggest that 33.1% of respondents reported that they had been offered electoral incentives 'very often,' 'quite often,' or 'rarely.' Although a substantial proportion of the sample (58%) reported having not been targeted at all, around one-third of the respondents admitting such an experience is a relatively high result (see international comparisons in Sect. 2.4 below), suggesting that such practices have become a conventional strategy in electoral campaigning in Indonesia.

The second measure of vote buying in parliamentary elections produced similar results. Using a three-point continuous scale, this indicated that 29% of respondents reported being offered cash or goods 'once or twice' or 'several times' during legislative elections. Using similar wording, surveys taken between 2009 and 2014 showed an increase in the rate of vote-buying offers during legislative elections.4 In the 2009 legislative elections, only 11.2% of respondents admitted being targeted for vote buying. The incidence increased in December 2013 (several months before the 2014 legislative elections) to 20.6% before rising again to 29% in April 2014 (Fig. 2.1).

Likewise, a descriptive overview of the third and the fourth measures of vote buying in legislative elections, which point to direct individual and neighbourhood vote buying in the 2014 legislative elections, result in consistent findings. Using a dichotomous scale, overall, 25% admitted having been personally targeted by such exchanges during the 2014 campaigns (Fig. 2.2). The fourth measure, the neighbourhood measure, showed a higher result of 28.9% (Fig. 2.2).

Although the difference between the various measures is relatively small, ranging from 25% to 33% (see the first four rows of Table 2.1), one might question about the reasons for these differing results. One probable explanation is that different survey response scales may result in different responses. As noted earlier, individual vote buying in the 2014 legislative election was framed in a straightforward question, asking for a yes-no response, while the first question on overall vote buying in legislative elections was on a four-point Likert-type scale in which those who responded affirmatively ('very often,' 'quite often,' and 'rarely') were categorised into

4 Some of the April 2009 survey findings were reported at the LSI official website (http:// www.lsi.or.id/riset/370/Diskusi%20LSI%20Kualitas%20Pemilu%202009). But the data cited in this study weren't included in the report and were processed for purposes of this analysis. Similarly, the data quoted from the SMRC 2013 survey were initially not included in that organisation's official report, but I was able to analyse them for this study.

**Fig. 2.1** Increasing rates of being targeted for vote buying, 2009–2014 (%). Source: The April 2009 data was drawn from LSI's survey, the December 2013 data was taken from SMRC's survey, and the April 2014 numbers were drawn from my post-election survey

**Fig. 2.2** Individual and neighbourhood vote buying in 2014 (%). Source: My post-election survey, 22–26 April 2014

**Table 2.1** Relative frequency of responses to various measures of vote buying

one category as recipients of vote-buying offers. Similarly, the second question which asked all vote-buying experiences was on a three-point scale, providing an option for respondents to report rarity (i.e. 'once or twice') regarding the frequency of being offered vote buying. Perhaps, these greater ranges of responses captured more experiences than the sharply dichotomous scale. But why did the two-point scale used for neighbourhood estimates also result in higher numbers? As Kramon (2013: 70) points out, the neighbourhood measure is less obtrusive than direct, individual measures, because it asks respondents about others' actions. Another reason that neighbourhood vote-buying totals might be larger than selfreported vote-buying totals is that if such practice is open and common, then a single act of vote buying may be observed by several individuals.

Another possible interpretation is that asking about general votebuying experiences without specifically mentioning the 2014 elections would likely generate higher positive answers than questions that concretely point to 2014. As noted above, mentioning the concrete event can make a psychological difference in that voters may feel pressured to provide truthful answers in response to sensitive questions about a recent act which, in a context like Indonesia, is unlawful. Again, given the timing of the survey, even when posed a question on vote buying that didn't concretely mention 2014, respondents would have included their 2014 experience in their answer. In fact, it was probably their main reference point. In short, mention of the 2014 elections apparently biased the responses of some respondents who were reluctant to report their recent illicit behaviours.

However, as will be explained in the following section, the results of the list-experiment, which is an increasingly influential technique aimed to minimise response bias in survey questions, show that the estimated percentage of people receiving money or gifts was around 27.4%. Thus, the 25% of those who experienced vote-buying offers based on the estimate from a dichotomous scale of the vote-buying experience in the 2014 election sounds about right. However, in order to give a sound estimate that reflects a number of different measures, this study suggests that between a quarter and a third of respondents reported having been targeted for vote buying in nationwide legislative elections.

Considering that the percentage difference in the final results between the first-placed and second-placed parties, PDI-P and Golkar, was only 4.2%, this incidence level of vote buying is significant. Moreover, the percentage difference between PDI-P in the first place and Hanura in the tenth place was just 13.69%—well below the vote-buying levels (The Election Commission [KPU], 2014). And as I will show later, the margin of victory for individual candidates was considerably smaller than the margin between parties, making the prevalence of vote buying even more consequential.

Compared to the pre-election survey carried out in March 2014, which captured only half the campaign period, vote-buying incidents increased significantly from 10.7%. This increase suggests that vote buying was more concentrated in the days or hours before election day, or on election day itself. In the Indonesian context, this phenomenon is popularly known as *serangan fajar* (dawn attack), a term that reflects the fact that material benefits (especially cash) to compensate for votes are sometimes distributed just after the dawn prayer on voting day. Candidates and brokers assume that the closer to voting day they hand things out, the more effective vote buying is in shaping electoral behaviour. These issues, however, aren't unique to Indonesia. The pace of vote buying accelerates as the election date approaches in other countries too, such as in Taiwan (Wang and Kurzman, 2007) or the Philippines (Pulse Asia, 2013).

In order to provide a complete picture of vote-buying practices, those who reported having been offered benefits in the 2014 legislative elections were also asked to name the party or the party of the candidate involved in the transaction. Respondents were allowed to mention more than one party, because they might have been approached by candidates from different political parties (see Chap. 7). In their answers, respondents identified all political parties which ran in the 2014 elections, with varying degrees of involvement. This survey finding corresponds with my qualitative observations. "No party was innocent of vote trading. Even candidates from Islamic parties engaged in such practices," said a one-time national parliament member.  (Interview, 20 April 2014). Although vote buying was also common among Islamic parties, the big four vote buyers were non-Islamic in character: of voters who admitted being offered money or a gift, 32.2% mentioned having received such offers from candidates from Golkar, followed by PDI-P (26.5%), Gerindra (25%), and the Democratic Party (18.4%). Meanwhile, the most common item offered to voters was money (75.5% of all reported attempts), food products (12.8%) such as rice, sugar, and noodles, and household items (11.4%).

As noted earlier, the first three measures consisted of straightforward survey questions about whether individuals encountered offers of material rewards in return for their votes. The fourth measure, however, asked respondents to report whether they observed other people in their neighbourhood or village experiencing such encounters in 2014. Arguably, this question may be less accurate since it is based on perceptions, which can be accurate or not. Nevertheless, asking questions about illegal practices by treating respondents as an 'observer' is less vulnerable to response bias because the question doesn't require respondents to report on their own potentially illicit behaviour (Kramon, 2013: 70). The results of this fourth measure showed that 28.9% of respondents had witnessed or knew that such practices occurred in areas where they lived (see Fig. 2.2). These figures are only slightly larger than responses to the direct question (the third measure), in which 25% of respondents admitted being offered a vote-buying exchange in the 2014 election. The gap between the two is within the margin of error used in this survey and is therefore statistically insignificant.

The results from both the neighbourhood and individual measures are also consistent in terms of the perpetrators and items of vote buying. Among those who reported that their neighbourhood was being targeted, Golkar again topped the list of most frequently mentioned vote buyers (35.5%), followed by PDI-P (30.6%), Gerindra (26.8%), and the Democratic Party (20.6%), repeating the order in the individual vote-buying measure. Similarly, as among respondents who individually observed vote buying, all political parties were mentioned by at least some respondents as engaging in vote-buying efforts in the neighbourhood measure. Money, food, and household items were also again the most frequent goods reported as being distributed in exchange for votes. Of those who witnessed their neighbourhood as having been targeted, 78.9% reported that people in their locations were given cash handouts, followed by food (12.8%), household goods (11.4%), and other items (14.8%). Note that the respondents were allowed to provide multiple answers.

In order to make a direct comparison of different election seasons, my 2014 voter survey also asked a number of questions about the 2009 legislative election, using wording nearly identical to the individual and neighbourhood items. The results confirm my earlier finding (based on 2009 and 2013 surveys) that vote buying was more pervasive in 2014 than in 2009. Only 10.1% of respondents reported having individually been the target of such handouts in 2009. In terms of the background of vote buyers, the vote market was again dominated by non-Islamic parties such as Golkar, PDI-P, and Democratic Party. The most common items distributed to voters in 2009 were also cash payments, foodstuffs, and household goods. When asked about the extent to which vote buying in 2009 happened in their neighbourhood, though statistically insignificant, affirmative responses to this inquiry were a little bit higher (12.9%) than responses to the questions asked about the individual experiences of survey respondents (10.1%).

Having discussed vote buying in the legislative elections, we are now in a position to explore the second dimension of this form of patronage exchange: vote buying in executive elections at the national and local level. Figure 2.3 demonstrates survey estimates of the proportion of voters who experienced being offered electoral incentives in such elections. In terms of presidential elections, my survey in April 2014 (around three months before the presidential elections)5 showed that only 8.1% of those surveyed reported having received vote-buying offers either 'once or twice' or 'several times.'6 In addition, according to the same April 2014 survey, vote-buying reports in the regency and gubernatorial elections were relatively similar, standing at 13.6% and 11.3%, respectively. It is plausible to

5Unfortunately, this question wasn't asked in our surveys that were closer to the 2014 presidential elections, or after it.

6Although this figure was much lower than in legislative elections, based on the LSI postelection survey in April 2009, there has been a significant increase compared with 2009 when only 3.2% reported an acquaintance being offered such incentives.

**Fig. 2.3** Vote-buying offers at the national and local executive elections (%). Source: My post-election survey, 22–26 April 2014

conclude, therefore, that vote-buying attempts were more prevalent during parliamentary elections relative to presidential and sub-national executive elections (I will present additional data from an historical dataset on sub-national elections that confirms this finding at the end of this chapter).

These results are in line with the research of other scholars who argue that constituency size matters in explaining the different levels of vote buying in multiple election settings. Stokes (2007: 86), for example, argues that vote buying decreases as constituency size grows, and vice versa. When the constituency is very large, as in presidential elections, it is difficult for politicians to buy the amount of votes necessary to make a nationwide difference. Presidential candidates instead rely more on the national media in attempting to reach out to a broad audience. By contrast, in direct local elections in smaller rural districts (*kabupaten*) and urban municipalities (*kota*), the cost of vote buying is less expensive and the practical challenges less daunting, thereby creating an incentive for candidates to engage in such practices. In national parliamentary elections—which comprise the national-level DPR, or People's Legislative Council; 34 province-level DPRDs (Regional Legislative Councils); and DPRDs in 508 *kabupaten*/*kota*—vote buying is also widespread because the various electoral constituencies are manageable in size (being concomitantly smaller than the region-wide electorates in the relevant executive government head elections), and because candidates at different levels can coordinate their vote-buying efforts. Aspinall and Sukmadjati highlight the point that since "*kabupaten* and *kota* electoral districts are nested inside provincial electoral districts, which are in turn nested inside national electoral districts…. it is relatively easy for candidates running at different levels to coordinate their efforts in the hope of maximising their individual chances of success" (2016: 14–15).7 This, in turn, increases the likelihood of vote buying in the legislative elections (see Chap. 6).

Another plausible explanation for why vote-buying efforts are more common in legislative elections is that the number of candidates running for national, provincial, and district parliaments is much larger than that of competitors in presidential and regional head elections (see Mujani et al., 2012: 98). The number of seats contested in the 2014 legislative elections was 19,699, which were situated in the national, provincial, and district legislative assemblies. A total of 6608 candidates ran for the 560 seats in the DPR, around 10,000 candidates competed at the provincial level, and hundreds of thousands of candidates stood at *kabupaten*/*kota* level. In a single electoral district, there could be as many as 144 candidates competing at each level of legislative elections. In addition to the DPR and DPRDs, candidates also competed for the 136-seat Regional Representative Council (DPD).8 In the 2014 presidential elections, by contrast, there were only two presidential and vice presidential candidates in the race. Similarly, since 2005 (when direct local elections were introduced), there have never been more than 11 pairs of candidates in such a contest. Thus, the relatively limited number of candidates running for either presidential or local elections reduces the incentive for them to engage in vote buying if compared to their legislative counterparts running in massive, more competitive elections.

7The exception to this general rule is Java where national and provincial electoral districts share the same boundaries. For further discussion, see Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016).