aspinall, when brokers betray; clientelism, social networks, & electoral politics in Indonesia

Critical Asian Studies
46:4 (2014), 545–570

Aspinall / When Brokers Betray
WHEN BROKERS BETRAY

Clientelism, Social Networks,
Downloaded by [Colorado College] at 16:11 01 April 2015
and Electoral Politics in Indonesia
Edward Aspinall
ABSTRACT: Research in many countries shows that where voters and campaign work-
ers are motivated by material rewards, the brokerage networks delivering those
rewards can be highly unstable. Brokers often exercise considerable autonomy,
shifting between candidates, disobeying their directives, or stealing the cash or
goods they are supposed to pass on to voters. What determines whether brokers be-
tray their candidates in such ways? This article answers this question by focusing on
elections in Indonesia, where candidates construct ad-hoc “success teams” to orga-
nize brokers and mobilize voters. In proposing a model to explain broker behavior,
the author proposes the division of team members into three categories: activist
brokers, who support a candidate based on a political, ethnic, religious, or other
commitment; clientelist brokers, who desire long-term relations with the candidate
or with more senior brokers, with the goal of receiving future rewards; and oppor-
tunist brokers, who seek short-term material gains during the course of a campaign.
Two problems of broker loyalty are then discussed, specifically: predation, where
brokers misappropriate resources intended for voters or lower-level team mem-
bers, and defection, where they desert one candidate in favor of another. Explaining
the incidence of these phenomena, the author examines two key factors: the mate-
rial endowments of candidates and broker evaluations of their prospects of
electoral victory. Well-resourced candidates with poor prospects are most likely to
experience predation, whereas less materially endowed candidates will experience
defection. The article concludes by addressing the implications for studies of
clientelism and brokerage.
An encounter with a man, let’s call him Khalid, who lived on the fringe of the city
of Mataram, in Lombok, the island to the east of Bali, helps introduce us to the
topic of this article. During a wide-ranging conversation, we started to talk
ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 04 / 000545–26 ©2014 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2014.960706
A ballot is cast during the parliamentary elections in Indonesia on 9 April 2014. (Photo by
Eduardo Ramirez Catari)
about “money politics” (politik uang), the Indonesian term for vote buying and
related phenomena. Khalid said it was rife in Lombok, and recalled a time when,
on the eve of a recent election, he was awoken late at night by an old friend he
had not seen since school days. The friend was involved in a tim sukses, the
“success team,” of a candidate running for a seat in the local district legislature.
He said he wanted one hundred votes from residents of Khalid’s kampung, or
neighborhood. Together, they drew up a list of near neighbors and people on
the next street. The deal was that 75,000 rupiah (about US$6.40) per person
would be allocated for the votes of each of the 100 residents—7.5 million ru-
piah ($640) in total. Of this amount, Khalid could keep 25,000 for each vote.
Voters would be given 25,000 each immediately, and 25,000 more if the candi-
date won the kampung’s polling station. The friend brought 2.5 million rupiah
that night as a first installment. When he left, Khalid split the money among
some friends, giving them 10,000 rupiah for each voter he assigned them. But
he kept the equivalent of 15,000 rupiah per voter, pocketing 1.5 million ($130)
that evening. The candidate didn’t win the booth, so Khalid and his friends saw
no more cash. But Khalid didn’t care. He had just made easy money, a “wind-
fall.” He explained: “If you are woken in the middle of the night by someone
asking for help, it makes you angry; if they wake you to give you money, you’re
happy.” Moreover, this event was par for the course. At election times, there is “a
flood of money in the kampung.” He laughed as he explained how his neigh-
bors viewed these periods: “One candidate comes and he’ll slaughter a goat [for
the kampung residents to feast upon]. So, the next one has to slaughter a cow.
But what he doesn’t realize is that even if he slaughtered an elephant, we might
not vote for him!”
We have the impression from this anecdote that Khalid’s candidate was not a
546 Critical Asian Studies 46:4 (2014)
savvy or well-connected politician. He left the recruitment of campaign workers
until late in the electoral cycle, and used rather casual methods to select them.
Presumably, the impression of disorganization so generated—and the fact that
Khalid did not know him personally—helped Khalid make up his mind to re-
nege on the deal the moment he made it. Even so, as I explain in this article,
such problems are all but ubiquitous in the organization of election campaigns
in Indonesia. Campaign workers often cheat and deceive their candidates,
keeping money or goods that are meant for voters, threatening to defect, or ac-
tually doing so. Over the last several years of interviewing candidates for
executive and legislative office in Indonesia, almost every candidate I have met
has explained that team loyalty is a major concern for them, and they often
worry terribly that their campaign workers will betray them (berkhianat is the
Indonesian word).
We learn from a magisterial book written recently by Susan Stokes and her
collaborators that such agency problems are integral to clientelist politics every-
where. As they put it, the “sense that one’s operatives in the neighborhoods,
towns and boroughs may be ‘parasites’ and traitors” is “omnipresent, festering
in the minds of party leaders from 19th century Britain, to Gilded Age America,
1
to contemporary Argentina or India.” Politicians who rely on clientelism to cap-
ture votes, they explain, have no choice but to rely on brokers who are
embedded in local communities and therefore know the preferences of individ-
ual voters. But these brokers can, and often do, have interests that differ from
those of their patrons, not least in capturing part of the resources they are ex-
pected to distribute to voters.
But what makes brokers sometimes serve their political masters loyally but at
other times betray them? This article takes the insights of Stokes and her col-
leagues and builds on them by burrowing deeper into the varieties, motivations
and strategic logics of brokers themselves. To explain the varieties and inci-
dence of betrayal, I develop a model of broker behavior that is inductively
arrived at from my fieldwork findings, but that also borrows from literature on
civil wars. The model categorizes brokers according to the interests that moti-
vate them, but also considers the effects of the differing endowments possessed
by the candidates they serve.
The argument proceeds through three steps. First, it elaborates on the kinds
of principal–agency problems Stokes and her colleagues identify, distinguish-
ing between two types of broker loyalty problems. The first type is predation,
when brokers expropriate resources that are intended for voters or other team
members. Some, though not all, of this predation takes place in contexts where
brokers are simultaneously working for more than one candidate (a sub-type I
label the double game). The second type is defection, which occurs when bro-
kers make a clean break and simply desert to support a rival candidate. Broker
defection, though rarely considered in the comparative literature, is a serious
problem for candidates in places like Indonesia, where parties play a secondary
1. Stokes et al. 2013, 20.
Aspinall / When Brokers Betray 547

role in organizing election campaigns. Second, I propose a typology of brokers
by distinguishing them on the basis of the differing motivations that attract
them to a candidate. Three categories are proposed. Activist brokers are de-
fined by a political, ethnic, religious, or some other loyalty to the candidate that
motivates them independently of patronage calculations. Clientelist brokers
and opportunist brokers, by contrast, are primarily motivated by material bene-
fits, but while the former have an eye to the long-term relationships they might
build with the candidate, the latter are more interested in reaping immediate
payoffs. Third, I argue that the degree to which predation and defection occur,
and in what mix, is a function of the distribution in the team of the three types of
brokers mentioned above, as well as of candidates’ endowments in two senses:
the material resources they possess and their electoral prospects, as under-
stood by the brokers. Well-resourced candidates with strong prospects of
electoral victory might experience some predation, but will otherwise be able to
establish effective teams. Predation is a crippling problem, however, for rich

candidates with poor prospects of victory. Candidates who both lack resources
and are assessed as having little chance of being elected will find that many of
the brokers they manage to recruit will defect as the campaign progresses.
These arguments are developed by drawing on the Indonesian case. In Indo-
nesia, problems of broker loyalty are arguably especially severe because of the
highly fluid and informal nature of the organizations that candidates establish
to help them win elections. These organizations, usually called tim sukses, are
networks of political brokers that can involve a wide range of community lead-
ers, fixers, businesspeople, activists, religious leaders, and the like. As we shall
see, though these teams organize a candidate’s campaign writ large, much of
their function concerns the targeted delivery of cash and goods to voters. And
2
although Indonesia has a moderately well-institutionalized party system, at
least for a new Asian democracy, parties are often surprisingly marginal in these
structures.
There are several reasons for the relatively marginal role often played by po-
litical parties in success team structures. One critical factor is institutional. As
has been explained at length in the Indonesia literature, since the introduction
of electoral democracy in 1999, several changes in electoral architecture have
3
promoted candidate-centered campaigning. The notable changes were the in-
troduction of direct elections of local government heads in 2005 and of
open-list Proportional Representation (PR) in Indonesia’s legislative elections
in 2009. With regard to the first change, the introduction of direct elections
(previously local government heads were elected by local legislatures) weak-
ened the role of the parties because successful candidates tended not to be
long-term party cadres but local notables who had the resources or political
connections to mobilize support in their home regions. Especially early on,
cash-hungry parties literally sold nominations to wealthy nonparty candidates;
2. Mietzner 2013.
3. Buehler and Tan 2007; Buehler 2009; Mietzner 2010.
later, parties began to use opinion polling to select candidates, which also had
the effect of favoring nonparty figures. With regard to the second change, in the
legislative election of 2009, the introduction of open-list PR meant that candi-
dates from the same party effectively competed against each other, running
their own campaigns and establishing their own success teams.4 Deeper social
structural factors are also at play in promoting personal campaign teams rather
than party machines. For example, especially in relatively underdeveloped, ru-
ral parts of Indonesia local notables and bosses are the key actors in politics and
rely mostly on clan structures and other personal networks to advance their po-
5
litical careers. As we shall see, another factor that makes candidates reach
beyond party structures is their need to recruit brokers who are embedded in
local communities, wield influence in formal and informal grassroots institu-
tions, and can exercise moral suasion in backing up the material inducements
they distribute to sway voters.
The frequent irrelevance of parties in this story is important because much of

the writing on political clientelism and brokerage, drawing heavily on Latin
American examples, assumes that political parties are the principal vehicle for
the delivery of material benefits to voters. Indeed, as Tina Hilgers notes, the
6
terms “machine politics” and “clientelism” are often used interchangeably. De-
spite the problems of broker opportunism and disloyalty that have been
identified in this literature, in fact parties have various means to discipline their
broker-members. As Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson put it, “We can
think of mass party organizations as highly effective group devices for surveil-
lance and mobilization, in which local party bosses closely monitor individuals’
7
conduct.” As well as being under surveillance by their superiors, party mem-
bers may also have expectations of long careers within their party and will
therefore often be constrained in their opportunism by their desire to demon-
strate loyalty. Their willingness to defect might also be limited by ideological or
other differences with rival parties. Of course, parties vary greatly in the tools
they have at their disposal to discipline brokers, and many parties are simply pa-
tronage machines. Nevertheless, almost everywhere political clientelism has
declined, that decline has been associated with the emergence of more effective
8
and disciplined parties. Where party machines play a minimal role in monitor-
ing and disciplining brokers, problems of predation and defection can be
especially severe. In Indonesia, we shall see that problems of broker discipline
4. In open-list systems such as those used in Indonesia voters in multi-member districts either
vote for an individual candidate or for a party. The number of seats each party wins in a district
is in proportion to the combined votes for the party and all its individual candidates in that dis-
trict. But it is the candidate (or candidates) with the highest individual vote total(s) on the
party list who claim the party’s seat(s). Although each candidate is nominated by a party, this
system creates a strong incentive for individual candidates to focus their energies on cam-
paigning for themselves rather than for their party and even to compete most vigorously
against fellow candidates from their own party.
5. Allen 2014; Aspinall 2013, 40–41; Buehler 2007; Tomsa 2009, 187; Tomsa 2013.
6. Hilgers 2012, 178. In their 2013 book, for example, Stokes and her coauthors assume that
party machines are integral to the delivery of clientelistic benefits.
7. Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, 17.
8. Stokes et al. 2013, 21.
and loyalty are widespread within campaign teams, where members cheat their
candidates in varied and inventive ways.
The research upon which this article is based falls in two categories. First, be-
tween 2010 and 2014 I made a series of research trips that focused on elections
for executive government positions at the subprovincial, or district, level. These
positions are bupati (heads of rural districts, or kabupaten) and walikota
(mayors, the heads of urban districts, kota). These are direct elections in which
a few (typically three or four, but it can be more, or less) pairs of candidates
(deputies run alongside the main candidates) compete in first-past-the post
contests (if the vote for the first placed candidate pair is less than 30 percent,
there is a runoff between the top two candidate pairs). There are about 500 dis-
tricts in Indonesia, with populations ranging from a little over 10,000 (though
ones so small are rare) to around 2 million. About half of this research was con-
ducted in two provinces: Aceh at the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, and
Central Kalimantan in Borneo island, where I visited ten and eight districts re-
spectively, interviewing candidates and success team members, and, where
possible, observing their activities. Less extensive research (typically, in two or
three districts) was conducted in nine other provinces: South, West, and East
Kalimantan, West Java, Yogyakarta, West Nusa Tenggara (specifically, the island
of Lombok), East Nusa Tenggara (Timor island), North Sumatra, and South Su-
matra. These districts differed greatly in terms of their economic structures,
ethnic and religious composition, and other demographic features, though
most were rural rather than urban. Overall, between five and twelve candidates
and success team members were interviewed in each of thirty-eight districts.
Second, during intensive research trips in the lead-up to and immediately
following Indonesia’s legislative election of 9 April 2014, I spent about three
months visiting research sites in fourteen provinces (Yogyakarta, Central Java,
West Java, East Java, Banten, Jakarta, North Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara, Aceh,
North Sumatra, South Sumatra, Bangka Belitung, South Kalimantan, and Cen-
tral Kalimantan), interviewing candidates running for seats in national,
provincial, and district parliaments. In this period I interviewed about 120 can-
9
didates and campaign workers, and observed many campaign events. As noted
above, these elections are in a very different format than district head elections.
In the latter, a small number of candidate pairs run head-to-head in single dis-
trict. In the legislative election under Indonesia’s open-list PR system, voters
choose between literally hundreds of candidates. It is not only that candidates
for national, provincial, and district parliaments contest simultaneously, but
each constituency is multiple member, containing between three and ten seats
for the national level DPR (People’s Representative Council) and between three
and twelve seats in the provincial and district DPRDs, Regional Representative
Councils. In turn, each of Indonesia’s twelve officially registered parties (plus
an additional three local parties in Aceh Province) could each nominate candi-
9. During this period I was working with a team of fifty researchers under the coordination of the
Research Center for Politics and Government at the University of Gadjah Mada. I thank my
colleague Mada Sukmajati and the many field researchers for their insights and guidance.
dates in each constituency equivalent to the total number of seats there (in
Aceh, each party could field up to 120 percent of the seat allocation). Voters
were then allowed to vote either for a party or for an individual candidate at
each of the three parliamentary levels. Thus in some constituencies voters were
potentially choosing three out of as many as 408 candidates (or in Aceh, even
more).
These different institutional settings create some important differences in
the nature of political competition between the two sorts of campaigns. Be-
cause of the much greater density of candidates during legislative elections—
there could often be several candidates from a single village running for office in
a local district parliament—the intensity of success team activity tends to be
much greater around legislative elections than in local government head elec-
tions. More teams are active, seeking greater numbers of brokers. Even so,
despite the variety in institutional, as well as geographic and cultural, settings,
the research uncovered striking uniformity in the organizational form of tim

sukses across the country and in the patterns of clientelist politics these bodies
engage in. Accordingly, rather than presenting case studies, I describe a general
pattern, noting deviations from the pattern where appropriate.
The article proceeds as follows. Two sections introduce the Indonesian con-
text. The first explains the structure of success teams, noting their affinity with
brokerage pyramids elsewhere, and the roles of team members. The next sec-
tion explains the functions of these teams in funneling patronage to voters,
where patronage is understood simply, following Martin Shefter’s definition, as
“a divisible benefit that politicians distribute to individual voters, campaign work-
10
ers, or contributors in exchange for political support.” The third section delves
further into broker motivations and explains the typology of activist, clientelist,
and opportunist brokers introduced above. The fourth and penultimate section
distinguishes between predation and defection and advances an explanation for
when and under what conditions these varieties of broker betrayal occur. Finally,
the conclusion considers implications of the findings, including the need to more
carefully distinguish between clientelism and brokerage.
“Success Teams” as Social Network Machines

The success team (tim sukses) is a distinctive method for organizing election
campaigns that took shape after the first post-Suharto elections in Indonesia in
1999. Almost every candidate who seriously wants to win a legislative seat at any
level or who seeks to be elected as head of a region (province or district) will
form such a team. A success team typically consists of close associates of the can-
didate, including party members, close relatives, friends, and business
associates. Usually, there is a pyramidal structure so that, for example, a district
head (bupati or walikota) candidate forms an apex success team at the district
level, with further sub-teams or individual coordinators in each subdistrict, who
then recruit and manage networks of brokers in the villages (desa) or neighbor-
10. Shefter 1994, 283, n. 3. See also Hutchcroft 2014.

hoods (kampung) within those subdistricts. The village coordinators in turn
recruit grassroots brokers (“volunteers,” relawan, is one commonly used term,
though there is much regional variation) in the villages and kampung. At the
bottom of these pyramids there can be considerable fluidity: sometimes, indi-
vidual vote getters are officially sworn in as team members and issued with
documents attesting to their status; elsewhere the teams gradually blur into lo-
cal social networks, and there is little distinction between recruitment of team
members per se and recruitment of voters. In the most organized team struc-
tures, the grassroots brokers are charged with recruiting a limited number (as
few as five or ten) citizens each, typically from among their household mem-
bers, relatives, neighbors, or other close associates, and ensuring that they vote
for the candidate.
The success team will manage everything to do with the campaign, including
the candidate’s schedule, campaign events, advertising, legal support, and mo-
bilization of campaign workers. Local government head candidates or national

DPR candidates often establish sub-teams at the apex to deal with specialized
tasks, such as media relations (district parliament candidates can rarely afford
such sophistication). At other times, the formally registered success team itself
will manage the pyramidal structure of coordinators and volunteers described
above, as well as the distribution of money or goods to voters through it. Some-
times, especially in executive government elections, more informal and
secretive networks do this job, shadowing the official team. These informal
teams are usually called tim relawan (volunteer teams). Typically, the informal
teams do most of the real work of organizing the campaign at the grassroots
level and, often, of buying the vote. Indeed, the parallel structure is established
precisely in order to absolve the candidate should anyone be caught breaking
election rules. The term “success team” is thus used as shorthand for what is typ-
An incumbent member of the DPR meeting with constituents in the lead-up to the April
2014 legislative election. Tangerang, West of Jakarta. (Credit: Edward Aspinall)

ically a complex web of parallel and interlocking structures. Two aspects are
almost always present, however: a core team that coordinates the constitu-
ency-wide effort and a pyramidal structure that reaches down, though with
varying success, to the villages and neighborhoods. In this regard, the success
team structure mirrors the pyramidal networks of brokers that are established
11
in many countries, though usually by party machines.
In constructing success teams, political candidates and their assistants typi-
cally say that they look for people with varying skills and capacities. First, at least
for candidates who lack sufficient wealth to finance their own campaigns, are
people who can provide funds. As a result, construction contractors or other
businesspeople who hope to attain economic rewards if the candidate is
elected will often be members, though just as often they simply fund the cam-
paign without participating actively in it. Much research so far on Indonesian
local elections has focused on this aspect, demonstrating the informal financing
mechanisms that candidates rely upon, the predatory oligarchic interests they
12
empower, and the cycles of corruption they feed. The second group consists of
people with organizational and strategic skills. These people will typically plan
the campaign strategy, establish campaign structures, and take care of technical
issues, occupying apex positions in the success team. Often they are local party
or nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, lawyers, academics from lo-
cal universities, or the like (again, however, much depends on the resources
available to the candidate: a poor district parliament candidate will often just
rely on one or two close relatives for such support). The third and largest group
is recruited to fill lower-level positions in the pyramid. These are people who
possess intimate connections to local communities, networks and neighbor-
hoods. Throughout Indonesia, political candidates and organizers use similar
language to describe ideal team members in the villages, saying they look for
people with “roots in the community.” As one member of the district legislature
in Central Lombok explained it,
[y]ou have to choose success team members who are trusted in the com-
munity, who have followers in the community. For example, school
teachers. People who are popular with the people. They don’t have to be
party members, but they have to possess authority. For example, you’ve
got to look for people who, let’s say, hold the votes of one thousand peo-
ple. For example, they run an Islamic boarding school with one thousand
students in it.
A district head candidate in Bener Meriah district, Aceh, explained that the
best members of success teams are people “who have backgrounds that suit
them for this type of work, so it’s usually people who have worked in proyek
[development projects], in NGOs, in election committees in the villages, any-
13
thing they can use as a base for building a network.” Sometimes, when they
discuss such matters, candidates and campaigners frankly admit that the people
11. See, for example, Bjarnegård 2013; Wang and Kurzman 2008.
12. See, for example, Hidayat 2009; Mietzner 2011.
13. Interview, 22 June 2012.
they recruit to their teams are calo or makelaar (brokers) or agen (agents), re-
ferring to their willingness to sell their networks to the highest bidder, a
phenomenon we turn to below. More commonly, they use the term tokoh
masyarakat, or “community leader,” a designation with more positive conno-
tations, but that can refer to persons with an almost infinite variety of roles.
Sometimes, tokoh masyarakat are leaders of village cooperatives, communal
savings groups, farmers’ groups, or other formal organizations at the village
level. In the towns or peri-urban zones they might be heads of ethnic associa-
14
tions, cultural organizations, or gangster (preman) organizations. Others are
religious leaders, heads of educational institutions, village heads, or holders of
other positions in the village or neighborhood government (though, officially,
civil servants are supposed to be neutral in elections and have to disguise their
involvement). Most are men, but women are frequently recruited as well. The
women might be, for example, coordinators of women-only Quranic recitation
groups, a religious organization that proliferates in Indonesia. (Indeed, it is a

commonly held view among candidates that women are more trustworthy and
reliable brokers.) Other recruits are not affiliated to any formal body, but are
simply recognized as influential figures in their communities, as people whom
others turn to for advice or to resolve disputes. In the more densely contested
elections, notably parliamentary competitions, success teams can densely pop-
ulate local communities, and the lowest-level vote brokers may mostly be
ordinary citizens who are expected to deliver the votes only of their closest per-
sonal acquaintances. Overall, however, three characteristics are most sought
after: a wide circle of acquaintances and intimate knowledge of the local com-
munity; influence within that community; and, usually, leadership in formal or
informal social networks whose members can be drawn into the campaign.
In this regard, Indonesian success teams are similar to electoral machines in
many parts of the world, where “candidates often recruit intermediaries who
are respected members of their communities, or others to whom recipients feel
15
bonds of personal accountability.” In Taiwan, for example, the Kuomintang
chose grassroots brokers largely on a residential basis, seeing that “many neigh-
bors had preexisting social relationships of friendship or kinship”; however,
“sometimes a strong relationship might win out over residential proximity, for
16
example if the broker and voter were brothers.” In Thailand, in one recent
study, grassroots “vote canvassers” were “often medium-level government offi-
cials, small- to medium-sized shop owners, moneylenders, traders, and monks
17
or religious leaders that are well known to the communities.” Candidates re-
cruit such people not merely to exercise generalized moral suasion, but to
18
“reinforce norms of reciprocal obligation” when it comes to clientelist ex-
change: put crudely, voters will be more likely to feel bound by a gift of money
14. On the density of Indonesian civil society at the neighborhood level, see Lussier and Fish 2012.
15. Schaffer and Schedler 2008, 22. See also Stokes et al. 2013, 19.
16. Wang and Kurzman 2008, 70.
17. Chattharakul 2010, 74.
18. Schaffer and Schedler 2008, 22. See also Callahan and McCargo 1996.
or goods if it is given by someone they know and respect. Such examples point
to a form of political machine that is widespread across the developing world
and that might be called a social network machine, where campaign structures
piggyback on existing formal and informal institutions to influence voters.
Getting Out the Vote

The pyramidal structure of the success team is designed for three purposes: to
ascertain the preferences of voters, both at a community and individual level; to
deliver information about the candidate to them; and (in most, though not all,
campaigns) to deliver cash or other material incentives. In some local govern-
ment head elections, the better-organized success teams are able to collect data
on virtually all the voters in the district and identify how each of them intends to
vote. In a legislative election, under open-list PR, a candidate does not need to
be so ambitious—he or she simply needs to be confident that his/her party and
all its candidates will win a party quota and that his/her individual vote will be
greater than those of intra-party rivals. Every legislative candidate will thus usu-
ally have a clear idea of a target personal vote, and will accordingly need
information about just a slice of the electorate (often focusing on a core vote in
their home village, subdistrict, or district). It is typically the job of village or poll-
ing booth coordinators, in cooperation with subdistrict coordinators, to collate
the required information. They do so either by mobilizing their village canvass-
ers to go door to door or by relying on their existing networks and knowledge
about their neighbors. Very often, the information is collated in the form of lists
held by subdistrict coordinators or even centrally: candidates use the Eng-
lish-language term “by name, by address” for these lists, and they typically
record the names, basic address data, and, sometimes, signatures and mobile
telephone number of voters who have committed to support the candidate.
Other candidates and their teams discuss their target voters verbally, but do not
keep lists, or they just keep written lists of influential brokers and the number of
voters each is expected to swing the candidate’s way.
In this respect, Indonesian success teams resemble election campaign teams
and brokerage structures in other parts of the world. Professional election cam-
paigning always requires ascertaining the preferences of voters and working
out how to target them with the most effective appeals. In countries in which
delivery of patronage is important in elections, personalized knowledge about
individual voters is critical because it helps campaigners tailor their gifts. As
Stokes and her colleagues explain, clientelist politics requires voter targeting:
“Parties must know which voters and families need what kind of help: a bag of
rice for Juanita won’t be helpful if what she really needs is medication for a sick
19
child.”
In Indonesia, too, a major function of voter targeting and the lists is to facili-
tate the delivery of patronage. Straightforward vote buying, in which small
amounts of money or material goods (basic commodities such as rice, cooking
19. Stokes et al. 2013, 24.

20
oil, items of clothing, and the like) are handed to voters, is commonplace. The
so-called dawn attack (serangan fajar) in which money or goods are distributed
—straight after the dawn prayer on voting day or in the few days leading up to
it—was particularly common during the recent April 2014 legislative election
(immediately afterward, in one national survey conducted by Indikator Politik
Indonesia a third of voters said they had been offered cash, goods, or gifts at
least once by legislative candidates over the last few years). In my own observa-
tions, almost every candidate who hands out cash to voters does so on the basis
of a systematically compiled list.
Even so, political campaigners often admit that providing cash or goods to a
voter with a request for support does not guarantee success. Everywhere, one
hears that voters often take the money but vote with their conscience; indeed
candidates borrow from English the term “margin error” to describe the pro-
portion of recipients of cash from their voter lists they expect will not vote for
them (thus, in parts of Central Java where I was conducting research in April
2014 it appears that most candidates received only about 30 percent of the votes
they paid for).
The success team structure is supposed to help overcome this problem in
two main ways. The first benefit is technical: because a well-organized team al-
lows for the systematic collection of data on voting intentions, it can be a
mechanism for minimizing voter leakage. Rather than handing out cash willy-
nilly, the better organized success teams are able to use the lists to repeatedly
check on the voting intentions of people targeted for patronage. (I have several
times seen lists where coordinators have crossed out the names of voters who,
on “verification” of the list, have been found to have switched their allegiance to
a different candidate.)
The second benefit is social: teams are commonly constructed by buying the
support of leaders of social networks, who are then expected to deliver vote
banks for the candidate. As explained above, candidates try to recruit influential
religious, ethnic, or other community leaders. Such community leaders view
their participation in an election campaign as an opportunity to acquire mate-
rial benefits for the formal or informal institution they represent. Sometimes,
promises or expectations of future support are sufficient, but most will expect
some delivery before the election. Typically, assistance is provided when the
candidate, or a close associate such as his/her spouse, visits the community and
makes a donation: to renovate the mosque, establish a new credit program, pay
for a public event, fix a sporting field, and so on. The payment is presented as a
donation and a sign of the candidate’s munificent character rather than as a pur-
chase of votes. Having received such a gift, however, the community leader is
formally or informally designated as being part of the success team, and it is ex-
pected that his or her followers will vote for the candidate.
It is important to note that success teams are not always entirely constructed
from above, with leaders seeking promising recruits and inviting them to partic-
20. For a survey of such techniques in the 2014 elections, see Aspinall 2014.
ipate. They also come from below, with community leaders themselves
approaching politicians and offering support. This is especially the case in local
government head elections, when community leaders know that election times
are a moment when they can leverage their social influence for material bene-
fits, either personally or for their group. For example, in South Kalimantan, an
academic who was a coordinator in a success team of an unsuccessful guberna-
torial candidate explained that he was almost overwhelmed by offers, once it
became widely known that the campaign was well funded:
Lots of people would come to me, wanting this or that. The typical pattern
was that they would come with a proposal [in Indonesia, this word refers
to a formal proposal for a government or NGO project, complete with
costings], asking for donations. It could be a proposal for a mosque, for a
communal lavatory, a road, for a youth organization, all sorts of things. We
looked at the value of the proposal and would usually not pay the whole
thing. For instance, if they asked for 50 million [about $4,300], we’d give
them 15 million. You’d need to check: do they really have a mass base, or
are they just trying to put one over you. So we had a verification team to
21
check all of that.
In neighboring Central Kalimantan, a broker in a district executive campaign
had a similar story, saying that he had established a sub-team with the job of eval-
uating proposals: “People would come to us saying, for example, we need
fifteen trucks of soil to fill holes in our village road. We’d send someone out
from the team to check it out before arranging it. Usually, that’s quite an effec-
22
tive way of getting votes. We did well in most of those villages.”
In legislative elections, the intensity of competition is so great that the dy-
namic is typically reversed: there are so many candidates seeking brokers that
influential local figures may receive multiple offers from different candidates. In
either case, however, the economic opportunities for brokers can be consider-
able. As Khalid, the individual whose story begins this article, explained,
elections can be a good time for enterprising individuals to make money. Yet
this situation makes success teams vulnerable to predatory attack.
A Typology of Brokers
To understand why brokers loyally serve political candidates in some cases, but
betray them in others, we can find useful guidance from a perhaps unlikely
23
source: literature on civil wars. In recent years, a new literature has emerged to
explain the behavior of insurgent groups in civil wars by referring to the
microfoundations of rebel motivations, the contexts in which rebels operate,
and the potential those contexts provide for differing sorts of rewards. Ele-
ments of this approach can readily and productively be transported to the study
of vote brokers.
In explaining why some rebel groups behave in a predatory and abusive man-
21. Interview, South Kalimantan, 14 April 2013.

22. Interview, Kuala Kapuas, 24 April 2013.
23. My thanks to Colm Fox for first pointing out this parallel.
ner toward the populations in which they operate, while others continue to
treat them respectfully, Weinstein emphasizes two factors: the motivations of in-
dividual recruits and the environment in which rebel recruitment takes place.
He distinguishes between different kinds of recruits: “High-commitment indi-
viduals are investors, dedicated to the cause of the organization and willing to
make costly investments today in return for the promise of rewards in the fu-
ture. Low-commitment individuals are consumers, seeking short-term gain
24
from participation.” However, a second factor, context, is also key. Rebel
groups sometimes emerge in conditions that facilitate rebellion and make par-
ticipation immediately rewarding for recruits: for instance, when natural
resources are available that rebels can easily loot. Other rebellions occur in con-
ditions in which participation will be risky and unlikely to generate rapid
material advancement for participants. In conditions in which rebellion is low
risk and promises rapid rewards, “consumers” will flood into rebel groups, pro-
ducing “opportunistic rebellions” that can be highly abusive toward civilians.

Rebellions that begin under less promising initial conditions will produce what
he calls “activist rebellions,” in which rebels are both more ideologically com-
25
mitted and dependent on civilian support. In her analysis of the bewildering
alliances and realignments warring groups can enter into during civil wars,
Christia adds a third consideration: rebel predictions of victory. She argues that
“alliance formation is tactical, motivated by a concern with victory and the maxi-
mization of wartime returns as anticipated in the political power sharing of the
26
postconflict state.” Without the space to go into this literature in detail, but
borrowing freely from it and the language it uses, I suggest that three consider-
ations will be relevant for explaining how people recruited as brokers in an
election campaign might behave: their initial motivations, the endowments
possessed by the leaders they support, and their calculations of those leaders’
electoral prospects.
Let us begin with brokers’ motivations. (Candidate endowments and broker
calculations of victory are taken up below.) Participants in Indonesian election
campaigns freely admit that people join success teams for widely varying rea-
sons. Apex members are typically linked to the candidate by family, clan, party,
friendship, home district, village, or some other close tie. Village coordinators
might also be connected to the candidate by clientelist, ethnic, religious, or re-
gional networks, though typically less directly. Some team members are
motivated by ideological affinity, or by enthusiasm for the candidate and aspects
of his or her personality or program. (Candidates who promise to clean up cor-
ruption and improve governance after the reign of a particularly venal or
ineffective official often garner significant voluntary support.) However, it is all
but universally acknowledged that most individuals participate in success
teams in anticipation of material rewards, either for themselves or for the social
network they represent.
24. Weinstein 2007, 9. Emphasis in original.

25. Ibid., 9–10.
26. Christia 2012, 6.
Whether a team member expects to gain materially during or after the elec-
tion varies. Most serious candidates will have enough funds to pay core team
members some sort of retainer for the duration of a campaign, as well as cover-
ing their costs. As we shall see, some success team members do aim at
immediate payoffs. Legislative elections can be especially rewarding because
there are so many candidates vying for positions that canny brokers can multi-
ply their earnings by working for more than one candidate at a time.
Accordingly, many jokes circulate about how profitable election time can be for
brokers: it is a musim uang (“season of money”), the only people who have
“success” are success team members, and so on.
More frequently, brokers will expect their greatest rewards to come later, if
their candidate wins. Some of the richest candidates make the largest payments
for their brokers conditional on victory: I have heard of motorbikes being
handed out to team members if they exceed a target vote in their village or sub-
district. In most cases, expectations will be less formal. If they are contractors,
success team members will want public construction projects funded by the dis-
trict budget. If they are public servants they will want promotions. If they are
village heads, they will want access to local government programs for their vil-
lage; if they are an aspiring village head, they may simply want financial
assistance when it comes to organizing their own election campaign. Other in-
dividuals may seek appointment of themselves or family members as civil
servants. Still others will expect financial assistance from the local government
budget for their religious or social institution or for their farmers’ or fishers’ co-
operative. The possibilities are all but endless. Accordingly, in the first year or
two of a new district head’s term, predatory raids on the local budget can spike
A candidate in a district parliament race with a “political contract” he offers all his success
team members, April 2014. Kapuas, South Kalimantan. (Credit: Edward Aspinall)

as legislators work to repay their debts during their first couple of years in office.
This phenomenon is well known; for present purposes, it is important to note
that this dependence on future recompense makes maintaining the loyalty and
enthusiasm of success teams a challenging task for candidates who, in the
course of a campaign, come to be viewed as having poor prospects of victory.
Only the very wealthiest candidates are able to pay regular honoraria for suc-
cess team members at the village level. But it is normally expected that all
candidates will pay for village brokers’ “costs,” a term that is typically inter-
preted loosely to include plenty of spare change, as well as covering
expenditure on logistics and campaign events. There is usually a huge gap be-
tween the best- and worst-funded campaigns, starkly visible in the campaign
meetings they organize: the poorest will supply just bottled water, the wealthi-
est will provide lashings of nice food, drink and cigarettes. Some members of
wealthy teams will at least be able to consume freely for the duration of the cam-
paign; many will also mark up their expenses and make profits that way.
Thinking through this range of motivations, it becomes useful to group suc-
cess team members—and brokers more generally—into three categories. As in
Weinstein’s account of rebel recruits in civil wars, we can distinguish between
recruits to electoral machines whose primary motivations are political, under-
stood broadly, and those who are more concerned with a material payoff.
Activist brokers are those who support a candidate by virtue of a political affilia-
tion or loyalty. Every candidate in Indonesian elections will attract at least a few
team members who will remain loyal even if that candidate lacks serious pros-
pects of victory and has few resources to fund the campaign. Some brokers will
remain loyal because of commitment to the candidate’s program or because of
some family, religious, ethnic, or other affective tie with the candidate. Ex-
tending Weinstein’s approach, it is possible to divide materially oriented
brokers according to when they expect to be rewarded. Clientelist brokers are
those whose primary concerns are the building of long-term relations with the
candidate or his/her core supporters in order to attain material benefits after the
candidate is elected; many will have received support from the candidate in the
past. Opportunist brokers, in contrast, are also motivated by material consider-
ations, but with a shorter time frame: they aim to use the election campaign in
order to reap immediate rewards. Candidates freely admit that many of their
campaign workers are motivated simply by a short-term desire for material gain.
Of course, these categories are ideal types and overlap in practice. It is rare,
for example, that activist brokers will not simultaneously consider the material
benefits their participation might produce. Those who are loyal to a candidate
because of an identity affiliation are particularly likely to think in material terms
precisely because that identity might signal where a candidate is likely to direct
27
jobs, contracts, or other patronage if elected. Nevertheless, thinking in terms
of this typology helps us to understand better some of the principal–agency
problems that afflict brokerage structures. Moreover, while it may be hard to
27. Chandra 2004.

distinguish brokers’ motivations during good times (when their candidate is
well funded and has a strong chance of victory), brokers are often tested if their
candidate turns out to be impecunious or unelectable.
Explaining Predation and Defection

We are now in a position to consider the loyalty problems that can occur within
brokerage networks. As noted above, most literature on the principal–agency
breakdown in clientelist politics focuses on brokers who operate in party ma-
chines. Where electoral machines are largely located outside parties, lack the
disciplining effects that parties can provide, and are as ad hoc, fluid, and
transactional as in the Indonesian cases discussed here, it is to be expected that
problems of broker discipline will be especially severe.
Candidates worry a great deal about two particular problems in their success
teams: predation and defection. Before considering these two problems in fur-
ther depth, we should first note that whether a campaign is afflicted by these
problems—and by which one—is a function, above all, of two factors. Analo-
gous to the differing enabling contexts in which rebel groups can initiate civil
war, the material resources the candidate possesses and devotes to the cam-
paign will be critical to broker calculations and behavior. Material wealth is a
necessary but not sufficient condition of political success in Indonesia. Very few
candidates who lack access to significant resources are elected to executive or
legislative office. However, even candidates who are able to massively support
their campaigns with funds do not always win, if they are disadvantaged by any
one of a range of factors: for instance, having the “wrong” ethnic background
for the district, facing a local elite that has united against them, or being popu-
larly believed to be excessively corrupt. In fact, the candidates who are most
vulnerable to manipulation and deception by their own supporters are often
the wealthiest. This is because a second factor, broker calculations of candi-
date electoral success, is also
Fig. 1 critical, including for brokers
whose primary interests are in
patronage. As explained
above, many brokers (those I
label activists) will remain
loyal to their chosen candi-
dates regardless of their
prospects or resources. The
free-floating, opportunist
brokers who are a critical fac-
tor in many Indonesian
elections will tend to be at-
tracted to the wealthiest
candidates and prioritize im-
Weak Strong
mediate benefits from their
Broker Assessments of Candidate engagement, whatever the
Electoral Prospects circumstances. Just like rebel
fighters in civil wars, however, many brokers have an eye on the eventual out-
come and how they will be positioned after it. Clientelist brokers will defer
immediate rewards during the campaign if they can be confident of a greater
payoff if their candidate wins. But their attitudes might change—they might, in
effect, become opportunists—if they believe their candidate is doing badly elec-
torally and will not be in a position to offer them the future benefits they expect.
The overall logic is presented in figure 1 (above).
Predation can be defined as appropriation by brokers of patronage resources
that are intended to be distributed through the brokerage chain to community
leaders or voters. Some predation will be found in almost all brokerage struc-
tures for reasons explained below. However, predation is especially severe for
candidates who are well resourced but who are evaluated by their supporters as
having poor prospects of victory. In such circumstances, success team members
may decide that they stand little chance of benefiting from public service em-
ployment, construction projects, or other rewards after the election, and will
therefore cut their losses and take what profits they can during the course of the
election. Opportunist brokers will try to embezzle resources that pass through
their hands whatever the circumstances, but even otherwise loyal clientelist
brokers might do the same if they believe their candidate is heading for electoral
defeat. Success team members who occupy key nodal positions in success team
structures, for instance as subdistrict coordinators, are especially well posi-
tioned to appropriate large amounts of campaign resources. The fact that the
teams handling the distribution of cash and logistics are mostly established on
an informal basis—precisely in order to avoid legal oversight—means that can-
didates will have no avenue for legal recourse if team members abuse their
trust.
It is certainly not difficult to find examples of predatory behavior within suc-
cess teams. Almost everyone has a story to relate (depending on the
perspective) of deceit or cunning. One academic who worked for a wealthy
mining magnate who made an ill-advised run for local government in South
Kalimantan (he was from a minority ethnic group and lost badly) recalled his ex-
periences thus:
A lot of success team members, whether or not their champion wins, they
want to earn an income. A lot of them came out of it with a new motorbike,
a new car, renovations to their house, a lot of stuff. It worked like
this—they’d get 1 billion rupiah [about $86,000] for their subdistrict, and
they kept 700 million for themselves. A lot of them did that.… The prob-
lem was [the candidate] completely lost control of distribution of money.
Lots of people in the network thought, “I’ve got a lot of money here, why
on earth would I pass it all on?” One person I know got 3 billion, but he
only divvyed up a fraction of that. Quite a few took half of the money they
received. You just can’t monitor this.
Reflecting more generally on local elections in his province, the same infor-
mant explained, “It’s very easy to cheat bupati candidates here.” He added that a
lot of success team members think mostly in the short term: “They think like
this: ‘Even if he is elected as bupati, it’s not certain he’ll remember me.’ That’s
28
the mindset. They think it’s safer to take instant money.”
It should also be noted that wealth is relative; in rural Indonesian elections,
even the least materially endowed candidates can be targeted by scams and
petty theft. As a result, at least a low level of predation will be present in virtually
all campaigns, and at all levels: village coordinators keeping rice that is sup-
posed to be divided among their neighbors, local volunteers inflating the costs
of campaign functions, religious leaders pocketing money meant for their con-
gregations, contractors failing to deliver on promises to build village
infrastructure, and so on.
The scope for deceit is especially great given that, as explained above, team
structures are sometimes built as much from below as they are from above. Dur-
ing elections, local community leaders often see affiliating to a success team as a
chance to profit and they will take the initiative to offer their services. Political
campaigners have many stories of such people taking advantage of candidates’
gullibility. For one example, take the following account by a candidate for mayor
in one of Aceh’s towns:
Often there are people in the community, say, a group of five to ten people
who set out to come to each candidate or team and promise support. One
will come to you and say they really like you, and say that, for example,
there are one thousand voters in their village and that they can provide
you with five hundred votes. That person will then invite you: “Come to
the village and see. Send people from your team to my village!” Then, of
course, you will give them some money to cover their costs to get back
home, just a little, 20,000 or 50,000 thousand rupiah [US$1.70–4.30]. The
next day, the person will return, bringing a couple of other people from
the village, community leaders, perhaps a woman leader, or a religious
leader. They will say, “I am from hamlet A. I am from hamlet B. We want to
work for you.” It sounds great. When they go home, you give them money
again. Each visit must be converted into money. This will go on for a time
and, then, the next step: they will say they want to hold a meeting for you
in the village, with a party. Of course, they will need money for transport,
for food, drink and so on. They will be very enthusiastic. Before you know
it, you’ve spent 3 or 5 million rupiah [$260–430]. Then when you, the can-
didate, go there, the people will kiss you, they will cheer you, and that’s
when you are convinced. But on D Day—you don’t get one single lousy
vote from the village. So someone has organized this. They really show
you what we need to win—right in front of your own eyes. But, sorry, they
don’t do it just for you, they are doing the same thing for all candidates.
This is a colorful account, but it underlines the point that brokerage structures
assembled in an ad hoc manner from below can be especially vulnerable to ma-
nipulation.
Much of the most flagrant predation takes place in the context of what might
be labeled the double game, which is a halfway house toward defection. This oc-
28. Interview, 14 April 2013.

curs when a success team member takes payments from more than one
candidate running for the same body, but decides to distribute the payments for
only one, pocketing the rest. The double game most often occurs during legisla-
tive elections, because the sheer volume of candidates competing means that
capable brokers are likely to receive multiple invitations to work for more than
one candidate simultaneously and, especially if a candidate’s monitoring mech-
anisms are weak, they can often get away with doing so.
During the April 2014 legislative election, I and the larger research team I was
part of met many vote brokers—and heard stories of many more from candi-
dates—who worked for more than one candidate at the same time, especially in
rural constituencies in Central and East Java. For example, one vote broker in
the East Java district of Madiun, cheerfully pointed to a motorbike parked in the
corner of his porch. He explained that on the night before the election he had
been preparing to hand out cash for a candidate from Partai Demokrat in his vil-
lage when he was telephoned by a rival candidate from the same party who
offered him a larger sum to distribute, and also suggested that he withhold the
first candidate’s cash. He did so, and made a tidy sum as a result, buying the mo-
torcycle with the proceeds. Similarly, one candidate who, despite handing out
10,500 envelopes containing 50,000 rupiah notes, was defeated in his attempt
to recontest a seat in the district parliament of Rembang, Central Java, com-
plained that one of the problems he confronted was that many of his
village-level brokers deserted at the last moment. Partly this was because rival
candidates were handing out bigger sums. Though some of his brokers con-
tacted him and begged him to increase his own payments, others simply
pocketed the cash when they saw that he was unlikely to be successful. Many of
these also distributed cash for his rivals: “Many of our success team betrayed
29
me.… It was mostly the new ones who did this.”
Defection proper occurs when a broker simply deserts a candidate and
openly shifts support to a rival during the course of a campaign, taking his or her
network of community leaders, social institutions, and voters with him or her.
Virtually all political candidates and senior success team members I interviewed
agreed that maintaining the loyalty of success team members was a serious chal-
lenge, and everyone has stories of individuals who “betray” or “defect” from the
team. Those who defect tend not to be brokers located near the apex of the suc-
cess team structure who work closely with the candidate. Instead, they are
brokers who are entrusted to mobilize the vote in a particular village or social
network. This is not surprising given that success teams reach down into subdis-
tricts and then villages, seeking out the most influential local leaders with access
to the largest social networks. As a result, community leaders are often ap-
proached by several teams to participate in their campaigns and have multiple
options for engagement, especially in legislative elections, but also often in lo-
cal government head elections as well.
Some candidates, however, are more vulnerable than others. Defection is a
29. Confidential interview, 29 May 2014.

particular challenge for candidates who are poor in resources, especially if they
are judged as also having poor prospects of electoral victory. If the candidate is
well resourced, brokers will tend to remain loyal and continue to attach them-
selves to the campaign to the last, regardless of the candidate’s electoral
prospects, because they will still be able to use the campaign as an opportunity
to extract resources through predation (as in the examples of double-game pre-
dation above). Only a few clientelist brokers will make a clean break if their
hopes are particularly tied to expectations of electoral victory (contractors, for
example, may be especially concerned to attach themselves to the victor). If the
candidate is poorly resourced, but still has strong prospects of victory (for ex-
ample, as a reforming executive government candidate in a district where the
community is known to be angered by the depredations of the incumbent), bro-
kers will also remain loyal, either because they are activists with a sense of
commitment to the campaign or because they clientelistically have an eye to the
advantages they will gain once the candidate is elected.

Mid-level brokers typically defect early in a campaign, as soon as they realize
that an alternative candidate offers greater prospects. Lower down, as noted
above, persons who are influential in their local communities will often be ap-
proached by more than one team, and such people “will often respond to those
30
invitations, just to see if the other candidate is more promising.” One candi-
date who confronted a powerful incumbent in a district election in Aceh
recalled that many members of his success team were bought off: “Officials were
tempted with gifts of positions. Businesspeople were tempted with gifts of pro-
31
jects. Parents were tempted with gifts of civil service jobs for their children.”
Right at the base of the success team structure, people can jump ship very late or
even keep playing the double game right till voting day. One common form of
desertion, most feared by candidates, is when ballot box witnesses are paid off
by rival candidates, abandoning their posts and facilitating electoral fraud.
In executive government head elections, before they defect, brokers may at-
tempt to extract payments from the candidate. A revealing illustration in this
regard also comes from Aceh Province, this time from a highland district where I
asked an unsuccessful candidate to describe the most important thing she had
learned from her campaign:
Often people who are members of success teams, or who seek to be, are
really brokers [makelaar]. Let’s say someone builds a network through
twenty-five villages, and in every village has five or so people they can rely
upon to mobilize the vote. They’ll collect all the documents [photocopies
of their ID cards] of those people and bundle them up, but not give them
to us. Instead, they’ll show them to us, and flick through the documents in
front of us to prove that they have a network. Then they’ll bargain and say
that they’ve worked on this for months, it’s been very expensive, and then
ask for cash up front. This happened a lot. In fact, in the last week of the

A candidate (right) and her success team. Palembang, South Sumatra. (Credit: Edward Aspinall)
campaign it happened to us in every subdistrict…. That’s what happens

here: the success team members really work the candidates over. Maybe
they have learned from their own experiences, after having worked for
32
candidates who did not repay them or did not show gratitude.
Such attempts at predation can readily lead to defection:
One man came to me and asked for twenty-three grams of gold. He said
he’d been working for months coordinating three subdistricts for Mr. A
[another unsuccessful candidate]. He had not been paid by Mr. A, so he
approached me instead. He said that Mr. A wasn’t willing to pay for the
work that he had done, so if I wanted to buy it instead, he would hand over
all his network. But I didn’t have the money and said so. So I heard he
33
went to Mr B [the successful candidate] and joined his team.
This candidate explained that virtually all the volunteers who joined her
campaign after she announced her candidacy left her in the days before the poll,
and she ended up relying on only family members and close friends in a cam-
paign that garnered under 10 percent of the vote. The brokers who abandoned
her may have been simple opportunists (the candidate accused them of being
interested only in “fast money”), but the fact that they left their desertion so late
suggests they might have been willing to stick with her had they believed she
had a stronger chance of winning. Both opportunist and clientelist brokers
abandon candidates who are judged as being poor and unelectable.
Almost all candidates try to create mechanisms to ensure that success team
members keep working in accordance with their initial commitments. In this
32. Interview, Bener Meriah, 20 June 2012.

33. Ibid.
respect, too, Indonesian politicians are hardly unusual: Stokes and her collab-
orators note that “leaders are inventive when it comes to monitoring brokers.”34
These mechanisms, which may be viewed as ad hoc versions of the more system-
atic disciplinary mechanisms available in parties, are based mostly on
monitoring broker compliance at the community level. The methods can be
simple, such as visiting a village broker’s neighbors and asking if they have
heard of the candidate (if the answer is no, it means s/he has been doing nothing
to promote the campaign). But they can include more elaborate surveillance
mechanisms, such as special “intelligence” or “invisible” teams that operate
without the knowledge of other team members. Candidates who collect voter
lists (“by name, by address”) will often choose random samples of the persons
on those lists to visit and check if they have really been approached by a vote
broker (fictitious lists, which brokers simply write up without speaking to vot-
ers or intending to pass on payments to them, are one of the most common
techniques of predation).
However, most candidates and success team members admit that it is difficult
to monitor their own teams effectively during the heat of a campaign. The only
true remedy is success: when a candidate has plenty of material resources, pro-
vides payments that are greater than those of rivals, or for other reasons is a
solid favorite, he or she will attract strong broker support. But the smell of fail-
ure will make brokers desert or, if the candidate is wealthy, engage in an orgy of
predation, and candidates can do little to prevent this.
Conclusion
In recent times scholarly interest in the role played by brokers in clientelistic ex-
35
change has grown. Early literature emphasized the dyadic and face-to-face
nature of clientelistic relationships, with one widely cited definition by James
36
Scott referring to clientelism as an “instrumental friendship.” Growing interest
in brokers is in part a product of the “upscaling” of the focus of inquiry. Scholars
have moved from making close observations of face-to-face interactions be-
tween individual patrons and clients to endeavoring to understand clientelism
as a complex system, in which patron-client pyramids can stretch “from the
37
summits of national politics down to the municipal level.” In order to under-
stand how such attenuated links between candidates and voters can function to
successfully deliver material rewards down to voters—in exchange for the polit-
ical support delivered upwards—it is necessary to focus on the role played by
intermediaries. Hence the interest in brokers.
Few attempts have been made to theorize the roles of brokers distinctly from
clientelism as a broader system despite the recognition of their importance. In-
38
stead, brokers are seen, as Muno puts it, to “perform as patrons and clients.” In
other words, they are portrayed as playing the role of clients to those who are
34. Stokes et al. 2013, 121.

35. Beck 2008; Hicken 2011, 291; Kitshcelt 2000, 849; Stokes et al. 2013; Muno 2010.
36. Scott 1972, 92.
37. Kitschelt 2000, 849. Cited in Hicken 2011, 291.
above them in the patronage pyramid and as patrons of those who are lower
down. At the same time, most studies of clientelist politics assume the presence
of political parties, which in most contexts limit the ability of brokers, at least
somewhat, to engage in some of the more flagrant forms of manipulation dis-
cussed in this article. Brokers, Voters and Clientelism, the recent book by
Stokes and her collaborators, is a breakthrough, emphasizing the agency of bro-
kers and the frequency with which their interests diverge from those of the
politicians they ostensibly support, but this study focuses on only some forms of
broker misbehavior, notably rent-seeking and misallocation of patronage re-
sources to loyal supporters rather than to swing voters.
The analysis I present in this essay suggests that, at least when relatively un-
constrained by party discipline, brokers’ disloyalty to their patrons can take
even more flagrant forms than those anticipated by Stokes and her coauthors.
And Indonesia is not the only place where such phenomena are widespread. In
Thailand, for example, vote-canvassing networks exhibit many similarities to In-

donesian success teams. According to one recent study:
Many vote-canvassers are not loyal to any electoral candidate in particular
and can be bought on an election-by-election basis. In most cases, vote
canvasser networks are set up temporarily a couple of months prior to
election and discontinued after the announcement of election results.
Some vote-canvassers put their networks up for “auction”; some even use
39
personal networks to canvas for more than one candidate at a time!
In addition to such defection, there is also predation, whereby “The candidates
and campaigners realised that a large part of the money they gave to core
vote-canvassers was deducted along the vote-canvassing chains before reaching
40
the voters.” A similar example is the Pacific Ocean state of the Solomon Islands,
where parties are all but nonexistent and candidates must therefore work
through networks of agents in the villages. Frequently, these individuals are
41
“double agents, ‘working’ for two or more candidates at the same time.” Wood
writes of one candidate “who was duped by various conmen into thinking he
was doing well across his constituency, only to discover at the end that he won
42
hardly any votes except in his home village.”
One implication of the analysis presented here, therefore, is that we need to
more clearly tease apart the concepts of brokerage and clientelism. The defini-
tion of clientelism, like most concepts in political science, is contested. But
most definitions require at least three components: contingency or reciprocity,
in which the “delivery of a good or service on the part of both the patron and cli-
38. Muno 2010, 5. See also Beck 2008, 11–18.

39. Chattarakul 2010, 73.
40. Ibid., 87. Predation is a particularly common problem; it is the main form of broker disloyalty
implicitly acknowledged and discussed in Stokes et al., though they prefer the term “rent seek-
ing” (2013, 115–19). Many studies of vote buying note in passing that embezzlement is a
challenge for campaigns that use it. See, for example, Wang and Kurzman 2008, 70.
41. Wood 2012, 15.
42. Ibid.
43. Hicken 2011, the quotation is from p. 291.

ent is in direct response to a delivery of a reciprocal benefit by the other party”
(typically, a material resource exchanged for a vote or other form of political
support); hierarchy, emphasizing the unequal power relations between the pa-
tron and the client; and iteration, implying that the clientelistic exchange is
never one-off, but part of an ongoing relationship.43 For the Indonesian success
team members discussed in this essay, the first two conditions normally apply,
but not all team members end up in—or even seek—ongoing and mutually ben-
eficial relationships with the political candidate, or even with the more senior
brokers who recruit them. Certainly, the individuals I have defined as clientelist
brokers do seek such long-term relationships, and these brokers tend to be
more tightly bound to their candidates by way of personal, face-to-face, and, es-
pecially, iterative relations. But opportunist brokers, while also playing the
same intermediary role in the distribution of patronage resources as their
clientelist equivalents, are less interested in long-term relationships and are
thus more unconstrained in pursuing their immediate interests. These brokers

act in ways that do not seem very clientelistic. There is a tendency in the litera-
ture to conflate clientelism and brokerage, or at least to view the latter as merely
a component of the former. The analysis presented here suggests that while bro-
kerage and clientelism are allied phenomena, they are not identical.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Research for this article was conducted with funding from the Aus-
tralian Research Council (grants DP120103181, DP140103114 and FT120100742). My
thanks to my colleagues on the project “Money Politics: Patronage, Political Networks
and Electoral Dynamics in Southeast Asia,” Allen Hicken, Paul Hutchcroft, and Meredith
Weiss for their important input, and to participants in various seminars and conferences
where earlier versions of this article were presented. All errors are my own responsibility.
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Critical Asian Studies

46:4 (2014), 545–570

WHEN BROKERS BETRAY

and Electoral Politics in Indonesia

1. Stokes et al. 2013, 20.

Aspinall / When Brokers Betray 547

establish effective teams. Predation is a crippling problem, however, for rich

The frequent irrelevance of parties in this story is important because much of

the research uncovered striking uniformity in the organizational form of tim

“Success Teams” as Social Network Machines

10. Shefter 1994, 283, n. 3. See also Hutchcroft 2014.

bilization of campaign workers. Local government head candidates or national

552 Critical Asian Studies 46:4 (2014)

groups, a religious organization that proliferates in Indonesia. (Indeed, it is a

Getting Out the Vote

19. Stokes et al. 2013, 24.

21. Interview, South Kalimantan, 14 April 2013.

ducing “opportunistic rebellions” that can be highly abusive toward civilians.

24. Weinstein 2007, 9. Emphasis in original.

Aspinall / When Brokers Betray 559

27. Chandra 2004.

Explaining Predation and Defection

28. Interview, 14 April 2013.

29. Confidential interview, 29 May 2014.

advantages they will gain once the candidate is elected.

30. Interview, 16 June 2013.

campaign it happened to us in every subdistrict…. That’s what happens

32. Interview, Bener Meriah, 20 June 2012.

34. Stokes et al. 2013, 121.

Thailand, for example, vote-canvassing networks exhibit many similarities to In-

38. Muno 2010, 5. See also Beck 2008, 11–18.

568 Critical Asian Studies 46:4 (2014)

thus more unconstrained in pursuing their immediate interests. These brokers

Aspinall / When Brokers Betray 569

its legacy: Essays in honour of Harold Crouch, Canberra: ANU ePress.

570 Critical Asian Studies 46:4 (2014)

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aspinall, when brokers betray; clientelism, social networks, & electoral politics in Indonesia

aspinall, when brokers betray; clientelism, social networks, & electoral politics in Indonesia