Political Finance Regimes in Southeast Asia: Introduction

ABSTRACT

The three articles in this themed collection investigate the interplay between political finance regimes and the quality of democracy in Southeast Asia. Andreas Ufen's piece on political finance in Malaysia and Singapore argues that the semi-authoritarian regimes in both states have blocked the reform of campaign and party funding regulations in order to keep their opposition in check. The article on Indonesia, authored by Marcus Mietzner, showcases the country's dysfunctional political finance system as a major hurdle toward further democratization. In their contribution on Thailand, Napisa Waitoolkiat and Paul Chambers show that weak political finance regulations have contributed significantly to the shallowness of Thai parties. Overall, the collection demonstrates that without meaningful political finance reforms, Southeast Asia's democratic stagnation is likely to persist for many years to come.     

Limited Pluralism in a Liberal Democracy: Party Law and Political Incorporation in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Formal modes of political incorporation in South Korea rest on a foundation of limited pluralism. The notion that the state should impose rigid boundaries on political representation pervades the country’s democracy. This notion is enshrined in law – in particular in the constitution’s Article 8 and in the Political Parties Act – and is upheld and perpetuated by the judiciary, the election commission, and the parties that dominate representative institutions. Labour is particularly disadvantaged by the limited pluralism contained in party laws. The role of party law in shaping modes of political incorporation is frequently overlooked. This account of party law in South Korea echoes this issue’s attention to the quiet ways that the state in Asia has silenced or ignored particular groups while maintaining the formal institutions of electoral democracy. In this case, the effect is to facilitate a rightward drift by the state as left-leaning actors face greater challenges in contesting elections.     

Political Parties,Australia and the U.S. Alliance: 1976-2016

ABSTRACT

What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.     

The 2014 Thai Coup and Some Roots of Authoritarianism

ABSTRACT

Thailand is the only country currently ruled by a coup-installed military government. The 2014 coup aimed not only to abolish the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra but also to shift Thailand’s politics in an authoritarian direction. While the army authored the coup, the professional and official elite played a prominent role in engineering the coup and shaping political reforms. This article examines some historical antecedents of this authoritarian turn, first in the broad trends of Thailand’s modern political history, and second in the emergence and political evolution of the Bangkok middle class.     

The regulation of party switching in Africa

The article presents a complete overview of existing regulations of party switching in Africa since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. While most established democracies do not see any reason for sanctioning with legal restrictions the decision of members of parliament to change their party affiliation, in Africa many countries take a critical stance towards party switching. Frequent party switching is considered to weaken political parties, to hinder the institutionalisation of party systems, and to endanger the stability of government and the legitimacy of democracy. The article distinguishes legal regulations of party switching conceptually by what is prohibited and its enforcement. A preliminary analysis shows that anti-defection laws indeed matter for party system institutionalisation in Africa's emerging democracies.     

Failure of security co‐operation in SADC: The suspension of the organ for politics,defence and security

Political opposition parties are considered crucial to the nurturing, enhancing and consolidating of democracy in every political system. Indeed, their existence is proof of political tolerance, competitive party elections, the provision of choices to the voting public and the possibility of alternation in power. However, the political opposition on the African continent is generally weak, and particularly so in Botswana, resulting in the predominance of the ruling party in political affairs. This article analyses the weaknesses of Botswana's opposition parties by tracing their historical evolution, characteristics, electoral base, and performance against the background of the political and electoral system in Botswana and the strength of the ruling party itself. It concludes that future prospects for the opposition to make greater inroads into the Botswana Democratic Party's support are small because of the fragmented nature of the opposition itself and the relative satisfaction of citizens with the current government's performance.     

The evolution of party images and party system in Taiwan, 1992–2004

This article examines the evolution of party images in Taiwan between 1992 and 2004. It shows that party images are not immutable, as while the DPP gained more positive images, the other parties gained more negative images during the research period. The results show that the Taiwanese parties have quite distinct party images. Taiwanese voters often tend to use ethnic background and the cross-Strait relations to define the parties. Party images also play a significant role in Taiwanese voting behaviour, even when other variables are controlled. Voters tend to vote for the parties that they have favourable impressions of. The results also have implications for how political parties package themselves to attract more votes and on the development of the party system in Taiwan.     

The Challenges of Transitioning from Opposition to Government: Liberal Party Planning for Government 1983 – 1996

Studies examining opposition transition to government processes and planning usually emphasise the responsibility of oppositions as a legislative institution and the role of party leaders. However, such approaches place too much emphasis on notions of responsible opposition and party leaders. They de‐emphasise the importance of partisan considerations that shape transition planning or how party organisations have attempted to assert control over parliamentary parties. Drawing on archival materials, policy documents, and elite interviews, this study examines both public and internal transition to government strategies undertaken by the Liberal Party of Australia during their opposition years (1983–1996). The paper finds that while party leaders became more important over time, the party organisation's involvement remained significant. The Liberal Party transition planning focused primarily on cabinet processes, Australian Public Service (APS) organisation, particularly the senior bureaucratic level, and selecting political staff. In so doing, the Liberal Party anticipated many of the Hawke government's 1987 reforms to the APS. The Liberal Party was motivated by its desire to restructure the machinery and culture of government and to allocate sufficient political staff resources to government. Its aim was to better equip the party to achieve its political and ideological goals when next in government.     

Protesting gender discrimination from within: women’s political representation on behalf of Islamic parties

Abstract

In recent decades, Islamic political movements, and their subsequent political parties, have been increasingly recruiting and nominating women to high-level decision-making positions despite the fact that the ideology they espouse often acts to dissuade women from assuming positions of political leadership. My ethnographic research on religious women’s activism in Iran and Turkey helps explain this unexpected trend by shedding light onto the role of Islamic party women in challenging the gender discriminatory attitudes and behaviours of their male party leaders. In particular, I highlight the role that a number of high-ranking Islamic party women with close ties to the ruling elites played in pressuring their male party leaders to address women’s political underrepresentation in formal politics. Women’s close ties to the ruling elites consisted of formal ties with key Islamic leaders that evolved thanks to women’s long-term devotion to the Islamic movement or learning at Islamic seminaries. I demonstrate that such close ties to the leaders, as well as the presence of a public discourse in favour of women’s increased access to politics, enabled influential Islamic women to leverage a form of ‘internal criticism’ as an important strategy to enhance women’s political rights and status from within the Islamic movements.     

Reign-seeking and the Rise of the Unelected in Thailand

ABSTRACT

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and the minimisation of rent-seeking. This idea has been rationalised in Thailand since the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution resulting in the rise of technocratic and judicial bodies designed to discipline elected politicians and political parties. However, such institutional reconfigurations have consolidated the incentive for people considering themselves to be prospective candidates to “reign” in these organisations. As evident in the 2014 coup, these unconventional political actors – academics, doctors and civil society leaders – made collective efforts to topple the elected government in exchange for gaining selection into the wide range of unelected bodies. Governance reform in Thailand has hitherto reinforced the status quo, although the article further argues that reign-seekers should be seen as contingent, rather than consistent, authoritarians.     

International Intervention and the People's Will: The Demoralization of Democracy in Cambodia

This article examines the deterioration in relations between two Cambodian opposition parties and the “international community” from whom they sought support during the 1998 Cambodian elections. It is suggested that the manipulation, by influential political actors, of internationally promoted political concepts such as “democracy,” “sovereignty,” and “the people's will” is problematic for mutual understanding between international and local political actors. In Cambodia in 1998, liberal views of the “people's will” as an amoral and neutral construct facilitating the delegation of authority were awkwardly but influentially conflated, by the election campaigning of the two parties, with a view of the “people's will” as a moral imperative to liberate the nation from alleged “traitors.” This caused widespread adherence, among the parties' followers, to views of the 1998 elections that were non-liberal and antidemocratic in a number of respects. When sharp differences in understandings of the political situation emerged between local and international actors, following the electoral defeat of those opposition party leaders, the fragile nature of a purported “partnership” between a self-appointed “international community” and the Cambodian people was exposed.     

Communicating with their voters: The use of direct mailing by the SPD and the CDU

One of the key functions of political parties in modern democracies consists of mobilising the voters and thereby integrating them into the political system. Opinion formation and interest representation by political parties are central to linking people and government. This article concentrates on the way in which political parties perform these tasks. Presenting the main findings of an empirical study into the use of direct mailing by the two major parties in Germany, the SPD and the CDU, the paper discusses its effectiveness as a new means of communication between political parties and their voters. More specifically, it shows how direct mailing is put to use and to what extent its themes reflect the themes of relevant election programmes. The paper concludes that direct mailing has been more widely used only since the change in legislation on party finance but has the potential of developing into an important means of communicating party policies to members and potential supporters.     

Minimum Winning Electoral Coalitions Under Presidentialism: Reality or Fiction? The Case of Brazil

This article studies the motivations of party leaders to form "minimum winning" electoral coalitions—alliances that cease to be winning if one member is subtracted. In Brazil, concurrent elections stimulate political actors' coordination, and electoral alliances are allowed. In 2002 and 2006, moreover, the Electoral Supreme Court obliged those parties with presidential candidates to replicate this electoral arrangement in the district. Under "verticalization," parties with presidential candidates could not form alliances with rival parties in the concurrent legislative and gubernatorial elections. Verticalization arguably pushed party leaders to form minimum winning electoral coalitions. This new rule forced them to reconsider the contributions of each possible ally in the elections for president, federal deputy, and governor. Examining the elections from 1998 to 2006, this study finds that under verticalization, while parties did form more electoral coalitions with those partners they considered crucial to win, they did so at the expense of policy.     

Ironic political reforms: elected senators,party-list MPs,and family rule in Thailand

ABSTRACT

An elected Senate and the party-list system are two institutional innovations of the 1997 Thai Constitution designed to support political reforms. This paper sheds light on one unintended effect of these reforms: they have allowed scores of political families to maintain or even tighten their grip on Parliament. Combining aggregate data and case studies, this paper shows that a sizable number of elected senators and party-list parliamentary members are related, by birth or marriage, to other parliament members elected in the post-1932 period. The well-intended reforms have concentrated parliamentary power in the hands of these families, many of which represent the excesses of Thailand’s full-blown electoral democracy. The survival and resilience of these families diminish reform opportunities by further entrenching corruption, clientelism, violence, and electoral fraud, as well as by deepening dynastic rule that militates against political pluralism and inclusiveness.     

Opposition Coordination in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

Recent political science scholarship suggests that when opposition political parties are able to coalesce into a united coalition against an authoritarian regime, they will perform better in authoritarian elections, and can more credibly bargain with the regime for liberalising reforms. Yet, most of this literature pays little attention to the variety of ways in which opposition parties cooperate with each other. Drawing on the literature on the bargaining model of war, the author sketches out a theoretical framework to explain how opposition parties coordinate to develop non-competition agreements. Such agreements entail opposition parties bargaining over which political party should contest or withdraw in which constituencies to ensure straight fights against the dominant authoritarian incumbent in each electoral district. The author then applies this framework to explain opposition coordination in Singapore’s 2015 general elections, focusing on the conflict between the Workers’ Party and the National Solidarity Party.     

Singapore’s 2015 General Election: Explaining PAP’s Resounding Win

Abstract

While Singapore’s 15th general election came about as expected, the ensuing results did not. In view of the opposition’s performance in the 2011 general election and the general sense that the ruling party had done well despite its performance being anything but sterling, the results were somewhat shocking. Even the leaders of the ruling party were caught by surprise at the party’s ability to garner 70% of the valid votes, 10% more than in the previous election. While many factors played a role, it was the opposition parties that lost the election rather than the ruling party that won it. Most of the opposition parties were rejected by the voters on grounds of not being worthy of support. The leading opposition party, the Workers’ Party, also suffered as many voters feared that it might perform too well to the detriment of the ruling party. In the end, the 2015 general elections strengthened the one-party-dominant state in Singapore and the quest for greater political representation was placed on the back burner.     

The Rare Event of Choice: Party Primaries in German Land Parties

The selection of party leaders in Germany has traditionally been characterised by elite agreement behind closed doors. Most often, only one single candidate was presented to the conference delegates. Yet things have changed to some degree since the 1990s. First, most parties have introduced statutory reforms at the national level allowing for intra-party plebiscites. At the national level, this has basically remained paperwork. Second, and more interesting for the purposes of this paper, similar reforms have been introduced at the Land level. In an increasing number of cases, Land parties have chosen their party leader or top candidate for Land elections via grassroots participation. What have been the motives for opening up selection procedures and giving members a say? The article points to electoral images and elite stalemates as main drivers of this development. It shows that party primaries contain elements of uncertainty about outcomes which make party elites hesitant to make more extensive use of membership ballots.     

Allocating Campaign Effort in Spain: Evidence from Four General Elections

Abstract

This paper analyses which districts are targeted by Spanish political parties in their electoral campaigns. We find that the major Spanish parties - PP and PSOE - mobilise districts where they are more likely to win a new seat or are in danger of losing one they already hold. The predicted closeness of the district race is more relevant in the smallest districts. We also find that Spanish parties mobilise their strongholds. We suggest that, apart from the pure office-seeking strategies, political finance motivations might also play a role in the mobilisation choices made by Spanish party elites.     

The Disappearance of Political Cultures in Italy

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Italian party system in 1994, post-war Italian political cultures have all but exhausted themselves, if not disappeared completely. First, the Ulivo (Olive Tree) in 1996–1998, then, the Partito Democratico in 2007–2008, attempted without much conviction to formulate a new political culture combining several traditions and heritages. This article will explore how and why the PD failed in its attempts. It will also look at the status of other political cultures, especially the federalist and the liberal, supposedly relaunched by Berlusconi in 1994. It will conclude with some reflections on the appearance of personalist parties and leaders’ narratives and provide an assessment of the present situation with specific reference to the attempt by the PD leader, Matteo Renzi, to give birth to a so-called ‘Partito della Nazione’. Is there any future for new political cultures in the Italian political system? Will the Italian party system ever be revived?