Power Broking in the Shade: Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Toha, Risa J.

Power Broking in the Shade: Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia. By Wolfgang Sachsenroder. Singapore: World Scientific, 2018. Hardcover: 191pp.

Despite the multitudes of political parties in Southeast Asia, and their immense expenses and financing needs, there is surprisingly little information in the existing literature on how political parties in the region raise money. While recent studies have examined party politics, election campaigns and money politics in individual countries in the region, an in-depth study on political party financing across Southeast Asia was lacking. Wolfgang Sachsenroder's Power Broking in the Shade is a welcome attempt to fill that gap.

How do political parties support themselves? What are the consequences of political parties' financing practices on governance and policies more generally? Is Southeast Asia particularly unique compared to other regions? Although Sachsenroder does not explicitly articulate these questions as the central inquiry of his book, his observations bring us closer to answering them.

The book, with nine country chapters, an introduction and a conclusion, offers a broad survey of political parties' financing strategies in Southeast Asia. Relying on newspaper articles, reports published by governments, local and non-governmental organizations, and existing scholarly works, Sachsenroder sketches a picture of political parties' incentives, constraints and strategies that contribute to the pervasive practice of money politics in Southeast Asia. Each country chapter starts with an overview of the country's political history, key institutions, social and economic indicators, and is followed by a discussion of country-specific features of money politics and party financing.

Sachsenroder describes that the "basic pattern" across the countries he studied as one of a "skillful move to blur the distinction between big businesses, state funds, and political parties, in order to control and manipulate cash flows as the main instrument for securing power" (p. 1). Among other strategies, political parties in Southeast Asia raise money by recruiting wealthy entrepreneurs to become party members, leaders and candidates (pp. 144, 175), running government-linked corporations that provide transfers and contributions to the party (p. 84), extracting revenues from business projects in exchange for licences and state protection (p. 109), and placing party members on company boards and...