A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

Double standards: the verdicts of western election observers in sub-Saharan Africa

This article tests whether Western election observers apply a “double standard” to elections in sub-Saharan Africa. It demonstrates that they do: Western election observers were statistically less likely to allege that significant fraud had occurred in an election in sub-Saharan Africa, than an election of the same quality held elsewhere, throughout the period from 1991 to 2012. This discrepancy exists despite controls for other factors commonly thought to influence the verdicts of observers, such as the strategic interests of Western countries. Yet, there is variation over time. Between 1991 and 2001, the double standard is partly explained by “progress bias,” a tendency to tolerate flawed elections that improved on those held previously. From 2002 to 2012, observers’ application of a double standard is much harder to explain. In that period, the analysis points to several factors that discourage Western observers from alleging fraud, including the risk of triggering electoral violence and a desire to protect relationships with strategic partners. It also identifies factors that make allegations of electoral fraud more likely, including the precedent set by past allegations of fraud and – unexpectedly – higher levels of foreign aid. None of these factors, however, account for the regional discrepancy.     

Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe stood at a crossroads. This period of imbalance and uncertainty affected the violent interaction in newly reformed electoral arenas with serious consequences for legitimizing democratic change. Despite the well-documented tension that existed in the region, the importance of violence in the electoral arena is rather neglected. The article approaches this gap as the first attempt to map electoral violence in a new typological environment where the process of transformation has affected political pluralism and the patterns of political contest. It argues that electoral violence is not a rare phenomenon in the region of post-Communist Europe and the dynamic varies on a great scale. Moreover, the article presents a picture of electoral violence occurring in different settings with potentially different contextual preconditions that need to be studied separately.     

Ethnic politics and election campaigns in contemporary Africa: evidence from Ghana and Kenya

Why do some political parties in new democracies base their campaigns on promises of national public goods while others do not? Parties in new democracies often eschew programmatic policy proposals in favour of appealing to voters’ ethnic identities, distributing non-programmatic benefits, or emphasizing the personalities of their candidates. However, this is not universally the case. This article examines recent campaign strategies in two nascent democracies in Africa: Ghana and Kenya. The findings suggest that programmatic campaigning is much more common than is assumed, but that parties have different preferences for how much programmatic content they include in their campaigns. The article argues that differences in campaign strategies are largely due to differences in the composition of ethnic support for competing parties. Parties that draw a majority of their support from a single large ethnic group are more likely to develop campaign strategies based on programmatic, policy-based appeals in the form of specific proposals for national public goods than are parties with a more diverse ethnic base of supporters. I argue that these appeals serve as a pre-election commitment to counteract fears among the electorate of domination by the large ethnic core of the party.     

What a Little Democracy Can Do: Comparing Trajectories of Reform in Malaysia and Indonesia

Economic crisis sparked political mobilization in both Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1990s, but with very different results. Reformism in competitive electoral authoritarian Malaysia took a largely electoral route, yielding marginal, top-down institutional change and the enhancement of democratic norms. The hegemonic electoral authoritarian regime in neighbouring Indonesia, on the other hand, was toppled by a sudden upsurge of grass-roots protest, encouraged by elite factionalism. Changes to Indonesian political institutions and personnel since then have disappointed many reformers, and mounting cynicism endangers the entrenchment of democratic political culture. The article argues that a relatively more democratic system grants more space for autonomous challengers to organize and mobilize over the long term than a less open system does. Specifically, civil society agents in the former may accumulate both social capital and its organizational-level counterpart, coalitional capital, facilitating mobilization. Such a regime, though, is better able to contain or otherwise defuse protest than is a more autocratic variant. The latter is thus more vulnerable to dramatic collapse, despite its fragmented political opposition, and faces serious hurdles in subsequent democratic consolidation.     

On the front lines of democracy: perceptions of electoral officials and democratic elections

Electoral officials play a crucial role in instilling confidence in elections and democracy. They are involved in the most important tasks of running elections, from registering voters to counting the ballots. This article employs survey data from 35 countries from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (2010–2014) which asks respondents about their perceptions of electoral integrity and the quality of democracy in their country. The analysis demonstrates the relationship between perceptions of the fairness of electoral officials and two important outcomes: confidence in the fairness of the vote count, and perceptions of the overall quality of democracy. It additionally considers under which circumstances this relationship is most pronounced and shows that the relationship between an individual’s perceptions of electoral officials and perceptions of electoral integrity is more pronounced in countries where there is a low liberal democracy index.     

印度尼西亚华人及其资本发展现状

印度尼西亚是东南亚地区华人数量最多的国家,由于历史原因,华人在印尼大多从商。本文以印尼官方公布的数据和部分权威统计资料为主要依据,对印尼华人和华商资本数量进行推估,指出印尼华人约达1000万,华商资本达1638亿美元。自1980年印尼政府放宽华侨入籍条件后,绝大部分印尼华侨通过入籍成为印尼公民,而华侨经济也自然演变为华人经济,成为印尼国民经济的重要组成部分。但目前印尼华商资本仍面临诸多困境,发展前景不容乐观。     

Measuring the quality of election administration

How do we distinguish between a ‘genuine’, ‘free and fair’, or ‘legitimate’ election and an election that is something less? In this article, we offer an answer to this vexing question: the Election Administration Systems Index (EASI). EASI is a practical, transparent, and sustainable tool for measuring the quality of elections in the developing world. The following pages describe the current limitations in measuring election quality, detail the EASI approach, and provide a comparative analysis of the results of its pilot implementation. EASI scores are drawn from a survey of experts on elections in the target country following a recent nationwide election. The analytical framework is comprised of three electoral dimensions: participation, competition, and integrity of the process. We also divide these dimensions temporally according to the electoral cycle: either pre-election, during the election, or post-election. The final product is a set of six primary scores displayed across dimension and time. By aggregating the survey data in this fashion, we provide for a nuanced assessment of an election by each dimension and across the cycle. As our pilot results demonstrate, EASI is a diagnostic tool for identifying electoral strengths and weaknesses and serves well for comparative assessments.     

Between entrenchment,reform and transformation: ethnicity and Lebanon's consociational democracy

Consociationalism has become a key institutional mechanism for managing conflict after civil war. Proponents argue that a period of consociational influence can contribute to the erosion of ethnic cleavages and even a society where ethnicity is depoliticized. Critics, however, are sceptical of this claim and argue that consociationalism institutionalizes ethnic identities and stymies the transition to a healthier democracy. In response, proponents outline a liberal model of consociationalism which limits the pre-determination of ethnicity in social and political structures. Yet, problematically, consociations in postwar societies often provide guarantees of ethnic representation in order to entice belligerents to abandon violence for democracy. This issue of transitioning from a corporate consociation to a more liberal form requires sustained analysis. This paper examines this conundrum by examining contemporary Lebanese consociationalism. Given that ethnicity is central to debates about revising consociationalism, via qualitative interviews with Lebanese political elites and civil society activists, the paper analyses how these subjects conceptualize ethnicity in contrasting ways which generate different approaches to consociationalism but which ultimately frustrate meaningful reform. It does this by exploring various debates to entrench, reform or transform Lebanese consociationalism.     

Assessing democracy from below: A framework and indonesian pilot study

The emerging crisis of both elitist and popular strategies of democratization calls for assessments of the problems and options in such a way that different arguments may be put to the test while facilitating debate on improved agendas. This article first discusses the development of a framework for such assessments in the context of the most populous of the ‘third wave democracies’, Indonesia. The best audit of institutional performance, that of Beetham, is developed further by adding the scope of the institutions and the will and capacity of the local actors to improve and use them. This is followed by a presentation of the salient results from a thus designed survey comprising 330 questions to about 800 experienced democracy workers in all 32 provinces. Indonesia's actually existing democracy is surprisingly liberal and accepted as ‘the only game in town’. It suffers, however, from defunct instruments to really facilitate political equality and popular control of public affairs. This is due to monopolization of most rights and institutions by the establishment and the political marginalization of the democratic agents of change. The problems, however, are not all ‘structurally inevitable’. The article concludes by specifying the potential for improvements.     

Blogging in the Shadow of Parties: Exploring Ideological Differences in Online Campaigning

Blogging is an increasingly important practice in election campaigns, showing interesting variations across contexts. Recent research has shown that the adoption and use of blogs is strongly shaped by national institutional settings, that is, the different roles given to parties within political systems. However, intra-national differences in the practice of political blogging are yet to be explained. This article investigates the variation in usage of blogs in electoral campaigns in Sweden, a country characterized by strong political parties and a party-centered form of representative democracy. The central argument is that different parties utilize blogging in different ways. Just as blogging is shaped by how institutions support persons or parties, we propose that political blogging is shaped by party affiliation and ideological positions on individualism and collectivism. The empirical analysis, based on a survey among over 600 blogging politicians, confirms that ideological positions towards individualism and collectivism have a great impact on the uptake and usage of political blogs, portraying political blogging as a strongly ideologically situated practice of political communication.     

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]     

A Watershed in White House Journalism: Explaining the Post-1968 Rise of Aggressive Presidential News

Presidential journalism is known to have grown substantially more aggressive through the 1970s and beyond, but a definitive explanation for this trend remains elusive. Some suggest that events surrounding Vietnam and Watergate transformed the professional norms of journalism. However, the trend could also be a more superficial and transitory response to other circumstantial factors that converged in the same time period, such as president-level characteristics (the prevalence of Republicans, Washington outsiders, and more vigorous news management efforts), the political environment (the rise of official discord), and the economic environment (a downturn in the business cycle). This study disentangles these various factors and assesses their relative success in explaining trends in journalistic conduct in the postwar era. Data are drawn from a large sample of presidential news conferences from 1953 through 2000, focusing on the aggressiveness of journalists' questions. The results strongly support the normative shift hypothesis, although economic factors have also been consequential. These results suggest a punctuated equilibrium model of journalistic change in relations between the White House press corps and the presidency.     

Social media and protest mobilization: evidence from the Tunisian revolution

This article explores how social media acted as a catalyst for protest mobilization during the Tunisian revolution in late 2010 and early 2011. Using evidence from protests we argue that social media acted as an important resource for popular mobilization against the Ben Ali regime. Drawing on insights from “resource mobilization theory”, we show that social media (1) allowed a “digital elite” to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media; (2) provided a basis for intergroup collaboration for a large “cycle of protest”; (3) reported event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders, and (4) provided additional “emotional mobilization” through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regime's response to the protests. These findings are based on background talks with Tunisian bloggers and digital activists and a revealed preference survey conducted among a sample of Tunisian internet users (February–May 2012).     

苏西洛执政以来印尼外国直接投资(FDI)流入结构变化及其原因分析

本文从外国直接投资(FDI)增长趋势、投资来源国以及产业部门分布三个角度介绍苏西洛执政以来印尼FDI的流入状况。并对这一时期印尼FDI流入发生重大变化的原因作具体分析,笔者认为投资基础条件的改善、政策法律的完善以及区域合作的深化是印尼FDI流入结构变化的主要原因。文章分析了目前印尼仍存在的主要投资障碍。     

Constraining political corruption: an empirical analysis of the impact of democracy

The present article addresses the relationship between democracy and political corruption. Extending past studies, this article introduces important refinements that respond to theoretical and methodological concerns. The theoretical framework proposed here is developed based on an electoral conception of democracy, which makes it possible to avoid the potential endogeneity problems associated with substantial definitions of democracy. I argue that despite the influence of other important aspects of democracy, elections and inter-party competition per se help to constrain political corruption. The article examines two analytical dimensions of democracy, the current level of democracy and its degree of consolidation over time. Unlike previous studies, a cross-national empirical analysis of a sample of more than 100 countries reveals that when tested together, the level of democracy and its degree of longitudinal variation are both significantly related to the control of corruption. The level of democracy affects corruption in a non-linear way. Hybrid regimes that are more autocratic than democratic show a lower level of corruption control than democracies, near-democracies, and closed dictatorships. The analysis also confirms that, despite having adopted different measures, more consolidated democracies are more powerful in constraining corruption.     

进入21世纪的印尼政治经济形势

在20世纪80-90年代,印尼政治经济取得长足进展。但是,1997年的金融危机破坏了印尼稳定的政治和欣欣向荣的经济。进入21世纪后,虽然苏哈托的专制政治瓦解了,但各党派的政治斗争错综复杂,政府更迭频繁,地区和种族分裂主义猖獗,宗教冲突此起彼伏。2001年7月23日梅加瓦蒂取代执政23个月的瓦希德,继任印尼第五任总统。因此,梅加瓦蒂将何时引领印尼走出政治经济危机的双重难困境引人关注。     

Tools of single party hegemony in Tanzania: evidence from surveys and survey experiments

Political systems dominated by a single party are common in the developing world, including in countries that hold regular elections. Yet we lack knowledge about the strategies by which these regimes maintain political dominance. This article presents evidence from Tanzania, a paradigmatic dominant party regime, to demonstrate how party institutions are used instrumentally to ensure the regime's sustained control. First, I show that the ruling party maintains a large infrastructure of neighbourhood representatives, and that in the presence of these agents, citizens self-censor about their political views. Second, I provide estimates of the frequency with which politicians give goods to voters around elections, demonstrating that such gifts are more common in Tanzania than previous surveys suggest. Third, I use a survey experiment to test respondents’ reaction to information about corruption. Few voters change their preferences upon receipt of this information. Taken together, this article provides a detailed picture of ruling party activities at the micro-level in Tanzania. Citizens conceal opposition sympathies from ten cell leaders, either because they fear punishment or seek benefits. These party agents can monitor citizens’ political views, facilitating clientelist exchange. Finally, citizens’ relative insensitivity to clientelism helps explain why politicians are not punished for these strategies.     

Procedural justice and perceived electoral integrity: the case of Korea's 2012 presidential election

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of scholars focusing on why voters around the world differ in their evaluations of electoral integrity. One group of scholars contends that perceived electoral integrity is determined by partisan status according to election results. Another group claims that individual perception of election quality is influenced by such political cues as institutional support for election management bodies. Although the two groups have developed this subject differently, they both underestimate the degree to which the election process affects electoral integrity. Based on the theory of procedural justice, this study argues that the more problems citizens see in the electoral process, the more negatively they tend to rate elections. An analysis of a public opinion survey conducted immediately after the December 2012 presidential election in South Korea provides credible evidence for our theoretical expectations and presents an important implication for elections of new democracies in a comparative perspective.     

Economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism: insights and evidence from qualitative and quantitative research

A growing body of subnational comparative research on democracy has focused attention on ‘subnational authoritarianism’, in tandem with increasing interest in local politics across the developing world. Unsurprisingly, this evolving field of study has been characterized by a diversity – if not a dichotomy – of approaches, with quantitative and qualitative research proceeding along parallel and sometimes intersecting tracks. But scholars working in diverse contexts and with diverging approaches have begun to converge on a set of explanations for the patterns of variance observed in subnational authoritarianism within and across national settings. Drawing on studies of Russia, the United States, southern Italy, Argentina and West Africa, this article shows how scholarship has identified the underlying economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism. Combining the findings of recent qualitative and quantitative studies with the author's own research in the Philippines, this article spells out a set of hypotheses which may help to explain patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism. Variance in subnational authoritarianism, it is suggested, stems from varying local economic conditions and possibilities for accumulation and maintenance of control over local economies. Further ‘mapping’ of subnational authoritarianism thus requires local fieldwork to complement the strengths – and overcome the limitations – of quantitative research.