Party Politics in Southeast Asia : Clientelism and electoral competition in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines

Contributing to the growing discourse on political parties in Asia, this book looks at parties in Southeast Asia’s most competitive electoral democracies of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. It highlights the diverse dynamics of party politics in the region and provides new insights into organizational structures, mobilizational strategies and the multiple dimensions of linkages between political parties and their voters.

The book focuses on the prominence of clientelistic practices and strategies, both within parties as well as between parties and their voters. It demonstrates that clientelism is extremely versatile and can take many forms, ranging from traditional, personalized relationships between a patron and a client to the modern reincarnations of broker-driven network clientelism that is often based on more anonymous relations. The book also discusses how contemporary political parties often combine clientelistic practices with more formal patterns of organization and communication, thus raising questions about neat analytical dichotomies.

Straddling the intersection between political science and area studies, this book is of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Southeast Asian politics, and political scientists and Asian Studies specialists with a broader research interest in comparative democratization studies.

Dirk Tomsa is Lecturer in the Politics and International Relations Program at La Trobe University, Australia. His main research interests are Indonesian politics, comparative Southeast Asian politics, democratization and party politics. He is the author of Party Politics in Indonesia: Golkar in the Post-Suharto Era.

Andreas Ufen is Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany, and Professor of Political Science in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. His main research interest is politics in Southeast Asia. He is co-editor of Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia and recently published a book on the evolution of the Malaysian party system.