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Diversity, patronage and parties: parties and party system change in Indonesia

University of British Columbia

The dissertation asks why some political systems have many parties and others only a few. Existing research on regime survival confirms that an excess of parties can generate regime instability. Because party systems affect key political outcomes, institutional engineers have sought to tweak electoral systems in order to produce favourable patterns of political competition. In particular, institutional designers in diverse states have attempted to curtail party system expansion by banning ethnically-based parties. Despite the growing popularity of such techniques, analysts know little about how these institutions work in practice. To address this issue, the dissertation explores a puzzle from the Indonesian case: the number of effective political parties in an electoral district strongly correlates with ethnic diversity, yet there is a de-facto prohibition of ethnic parties. Established theories linking ethnic diversity and party system size assume both the existence of ethnic parties and clear patterns of ethnic voting. However, neither one is present in the Indonesian case. The dissertation demonstrates that ethnic diversity has an indirect effect on party systems. It generates sub-national rent-seeking opportunities, a combination of high state involvement in the economy and weak constraints prohibiting the abuse of state resources for personal and political gain. In diverse electoral districts, the livelihoods of voters and elites are tightly linked to the control of the state. Elites have more opportunities to engage in rent-seeking behavior, affecting the way they participate in the political sphere. First, the opportunity to manipulate state resources draws elites into the electoral arena, increasing the number of viable candidates. Second, the intense focus on local goods distribution diminishes the value of national party platforms, allowing candidates to pursue political office under minor party labels. Third, voter demands for particularistic goods distribution lead them to disregard party labels and form tight patron-client linkages with candidates. The electoral consequence of these three phenomena is the expansion of the vote attained by minor parties, which act as vehicles of convenience for locally oriented rent-seeking networks. In high diversity / high rent electoral districts, the expansion of the vote attained by the minor parties fragments the party system.

Text

2012-12-20

Attribution 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43738

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/