Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Davidson, Jamie

Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia. By Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken and Paul D. Hutchcroft. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Hardcover: 312pp.

Mobilizing for Elections is the capstone to a remarkably productive project led by four influential political scientists of Southeast Asia--Edward Aspinall, Meredith Weiss, Allen Hicken and Paul Hutchcroft (henceforth AWHH). Primarily funded by the Australian Research Council, this decade-long collaboration impressively involved coordinating 200 local researchers in six countries and led to many publications prior to this book. Coordinating the volume's writing among four established scholars probably proved as challenging. Still, the text succeeds as it reads evenly throughout the book, although one can envision which chapters were the primary responsibility of which author. The main cases cover the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Research on Thailand was scuttled by the 2014 coup. As a result, the country was relegated to secondary case status, alongside Singapore and Timor-Leste.

It is not the intent of AWHH to explain why money dominates elections in Southeast Asia. Anyone the least bit familiar with democracies knows the outsized role money plays in determining outcomes. One may argue that a signal difference resides in the distinction between the legal and illegal deployment of money. However, as AWHH point out, the on-the-ground or behind-the-scenes reality, including "loopholes", often blurs such sharp distinctions, in rich and poor countries alike.

Innovatively, AWHH situate their research between the extremes of glitzy, media-blitzed national campaigns, such as presidential contests, and the excruciating detailed case studies of gritty local elections. On the one hand, the volume showcases plenty of fascinating local colour. For example, through candid interviews with politicians, we learn how campaign teams are assembled, how the quantum of money to be circulated are determined, and how candidates agonize over shirking by team members or voters in receipt of their cash. On the other hand, AWHH seek to explain, first, the broad patterns of patronage and political machines across the three cases, and secondly, to analytically account for and categorize the many sub-patterns of processes and practices across as well as within the cases.

Structurally, AWHH situate the three key forms of mobilizing networks and...