How Clientelism Varies: Informal Politics in India and Indonesia

Clientelistic vote mobilisation is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s democracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this practice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains underdeveloped, as the comparative study of contemporary democracies focuses largely on formal dimensions of politics. Addressing this challenge, I will argue in this presentation that clientelistic politics takes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for understanding democracy, elections and governance. I will do so by drawing almost twenty years of fieldwork on election campaigns and governance in India and Indonesia. Drawing on these studies, I will show that election campaigns in both countries can be fruitfully compared in terms of the character of the networks that facilitate clientelistic exchange, the benefits that politicians offer in exchange for votes, and the degree to which politicians, and especially parties, control the distribution of state resources. These comparisons suggest that community-centered and party-centered varieties of clientelism might be identified. In presenting these findings, my main proposition is that the comparative study of informal dimensions of politics offers considerable analytical promise for an understanding of the challenges facing contemporary democracies.