Ethnic parties make up a significant portion of the electoral landscape in Myanmar politics. In fact, 48 per cent of the political parties that competed in the 1990 general election were ethnic parties, 62 per cent in 2010, 60 per cent in 2015, and 59 per cent in 2020. Between 1990 and 2020, the proportion of female candidates in Myanmar elections also increased. Are these two trends linked? Is there something distinctive about ethnic parties as a type, and do they more effectively facilitate women's political representation than their catch-all counterparts?

Existing literature highlights the important role of political parties in explaining varying levels of women's representation around the world (Caul 1999; Pitre 2003). Parties play a critical role in recruiting and selecting candidates, thereby contributing to the gender makeup of legislatures and political bodies (Tan et al. 2020). As we discuss in greater detail below, existing literature finds mixed results regarding the effect of ethnic parties. Broad studies on women's representation have often concluded that electoral rules and circumstances that benefit women can also be applied to other marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities (Matland and Taylor 1997; Caul 1999). Yet, others find a potential for competition between different under-represented identities (Lien et al. 2007), or express fears over patriarchal attitudes among specific ethnic groups that would disadvantage women candidates (Okin 1999).

Ethnic parties might therefore be less likely than catch-all parties to pay attention to gender inequalities (Goetz 1998; Holmsten, Moser, and Slosar 2010). However, ethnic parties seem to perform differently under different electoral rules. Ethnic parties in single-member districts (SMD), where voters elect a single candidate to represent the constituency by plurality or majority vote, have been found to include more women than their catch-all counterparts. However, ethnic parties appear to exclude women—that is, do not nominate female candidates—at an even higher rate in proportional representation (PR) systems, where parties secure seats in larger constituencies per the share of the popular vote they or their candidates win, without gender quotas (Holmsten, Moser, and Slosar 2010). This is perhaps because the nomination and candidate selection decisions in PR systems are more heavily concentrated among the party elite and provide more opportunity for patriarchal attitudes to dominate (ibid.).

Yet, existing literature also suggests a moderating effect of party institutionalization, rather than just electoral rules.

Section (3) Political and Social Attitudes

1. Please tell me how you feel about the following statements. Would you say you (1) strongly agree, (2) somewhat agree, (3) somewhat disagree, or (4) strongly disagree? (7) *Do not understand the question, (8) *Can't choose, (9) *Decline to answer

1) In a group, we should sacrifice our individual interest for the sake of the group's collective interest.

2) I think I have the ability to participate in politics.

3) When a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law come into conflict, even if the mother-in-law is in the wrong, the husband should still persuade his wife to obey his mother.

4) If one could have only one child, it is more preferable to have a boy than a girl.

5) In politics, women should not be involved as much as men.

6) If a woman earns more money than her husband, it's almost certain to cause problems.

7) I would support my daughter to join parties and participate in politics if she so wished.

8) When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.

2. I prefer to have neighbours who are of the same religion than to have neighbours who are from a different religion.

1) Strongly agree

2) Agree

3) Neither agree nor disagree

4) Disagree

5) Strongly disagree

6) Refuse to answer

Section (4) Political Knowledge and Attitudes

1. I am going to name a number of institutions. For each one, please tell me how much trust do you have in them? Is it (1) a great deal of trust, (2) quite a lot of trust, (3) not very much trust, (4) none at all? [For the enumerator: Mark 97 as “No answer/Don't know” and 98 as “Refuse to answer”]

1) The president

2) State/Region government

3) Political parties (not any specific party)

4) National Parliament

5) Civil service

6) The military

7) The police

8) Ward/Village/Tract Administrator

9) Health care administration

10) Education professionals (teachers, etc.)

2. Could you tell me for each whether you trust people from this group (1) completely, (2) somewhat, (3) not very much, (4) not at all? [For the enumerator: Mark 97 as “No answer/Don't know” and 98 as “Refuse to answer”]

1) Your neighborhood

2) People of another religion

3) People of another nationality

The coup that overturned Myanmar's elected government in early 2021 clearly upended the roadmap to democracy the country had been following, however haltingly, for over a decade. As of this writing, Myanmar's political future is uncertain; the military (called the Tatmadaw) has shown no sign of relenting in its assault on the prior elected government and the broad resistance the coup triggered. One might question the utility of exploring the status quo ante in light of the desperate situation now. We contend that understanding how, and how well, aspects of democracy worked during Myanmar's ill-fated experiment is, in fact, essential. Not only might we still hope for restoration of civilian, elected government, under the National Unity Government (NUG) currently contesting the military junta or otherwise, but the underlying sociopolitical patterns evident in the recent past, reflecting societal attitudes and priorities, remain germane. Especially salient in this vein are attitudes towards women's leadership: while neither women nor men can currently seek or hold elected office, institutional features alone were hardly the only arbiters of women's political standing when they could do so.

This book investigates the extent to which men and women have faced different opportunities and challenges in securing election, especially as members of parliament (MPs), but also at subnational tiers, in Myanmar, and why. For instance, have the relevant hurdles been more at the local or national level, in society or in political parties, and structured largely by gender or more by class or other attributes? Understanding these patterns is essential to knowing the extent to which a return to civilian government will likely empower women, or what attitudinal changes, beyond structural ones, would be necessary. Moreover, this investigation allows us to consider Myanmar in comparative context, to see how sociopolitical attitudes and constraints here align with those elsewhere in the region, coup aside.

To answer these questions, we set out to examine women's political representation and opportunities to participate in party politics in Myanmar. Our findings are based on a three-year (2017–20) project funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) on “Engendering Political Recruitment and Participation at the Party, Local and National Level in Myanmar”.

Party Recruitment, Candidate Selection and Attitudes Towards Political Leadership (Gatekeepers)

Personal Political Experiences

1. Please describe your occupational/educational background (Icebreaking question).

2. Did you have any experience participating in politics or public life before joining party?

3. What were your main motivations for becoming involved in politics/ party?

4. Has anyone else in your family been involved in politics? If so, please give details.

5. How many years have you been an active member of ______________ party? (ask only if you cannot get the information publicly)

6. Has your participation in politics resulted in any difficulties or improvements in your home life?

7. Did you face any harassment or intimidation being a party gatekeeper? (Note to interviewer: this can be in the form of online, social media, verbal harassment, physical threats, attacks or exclusion from places to campaign)

Intra Party Rules and Candidate Selection Procedures

8. Please tell me how people in your party get chosen to be members of central committee (CC) or central executive committee (CEC)?

9. Different levels of candidate selection:

a. Did your Central Committee play an important role in selecting candidates?

b. Did your Township Chairman play an important role in selecting candidates?

c. Were there other individuals who played a key role in the candidate selection process? (please identify gender)

10. Experience in Party Positions:

a. Have you held any position within your party? (e.g. Central committee, township committee, Youth wing, Women's wing)

b. If so, how did you get chosen for that position?

11. How do people in your party get chosen to become members of the party's township committee? (prompt to interviewer: please record separately the process for: i) chairperson, ii) secretary, and iii) other positions)

12. Can you explain more of your party's rules, criteria and procedures in selecting candidates for the last general election? (Please check if there is an internal election process, check if ordinary party members have a chance to be nominated as candidates). Can you describe the process in more detail?

13. Can the ordinary party members decide who the party nominates as a candidate for a general election?

14. If you could change the rules and procedures used by your party for candidate selection, what would you change?

Violence is a constant factor influencing Myanmar politics. The return to repressive, military rule in 2021 demonstrates how relevant violence is—and probably always was—for understanding political participation in Myanmar. This chapter investigates the political and gendered roles that violence plays, and the interlinkages between violence taking place in the public and private spheres. Whether violence is carried out by the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) during an armed conflict or by an intimate partner against another, it follows gendered patterns and contributes to a gendered culture of violence. The relevance of the feminist slogan “the personal is political” is striking in the many examples of how this culture of violence affects the formal political process in gendered ways. This chapter brings together findings from previous parts of the book to shed light on how party politics and political candidates are affected by and experience gendered public attitudes and how a persistent culture of violence—public manifestations of militarization as well as tolerance of domestic violence—shapes gendered politics, even in a period of relative liberalization.

The chapter will demonstrate why and how the culture of violence in general, and domestic violence in particular, is crucial in shedding light on the opportunities and hurdles for “putting women up” in precoup Myanmar. It draws on the findings about violence that emerged from the various data collection efforts of the project as well as on sources external to the project. In doing so, it recognizes that violence is complex and continuous. It operates along a continuum that stretches from armed conflict to legacies that remain in peacetime (Cockburn 2004). The chapter also shows how violence that takes psychological forms, such as harassment and intimidation, and that takes place in the private sphere, such as domestic abuse, also has political and gendered repercussions (Bjarnegård 2018). The more democratic and peaceful period that Myanmar experienced around the elections of 2015 is here seen and analysed in light of the fact that it was both preceded and succeeded by more violent and repressive forms of governance. For a while, the introduction of democratic elections in Myanmar seemed to constitute an important step towards the peaceful resolution of conflict in the violence-ridden country, but political actors nevertheless operated with political violence in fresh memory and the period was not itself free of political violence.

Conventional assumptions about women's representation posit that higher proportions of women will be found at local levels of government where barriers to entry are minimal than at higher levels (Mariani 2008; Eder, Fortin-Rittberger, and Kroeber 2016). Indeed, studies on established democracies have found that the number of women in politics decreases when one moves from local to national governments (Vengroff, Nyiri, and Fugiero 2003; Kjaer 2010). This literature has shown that lower-level offices tend to be more open and accessible to women (Brodie 1985; Lovenduski and Norris 1993; Vengroff, Nyiri, and Fugiero 2003). However, evidence of this trend is inconclusive in less established or newer democracies, where limited formal institutions and lack of political party activity might prevent women from entering local politics (Kyed, Harrisson, and McCarthy 2016; Aydogan, Marschall, and Shalaby 2016).

Existing literature on Myanmar highlights structural, cultural, and institutional barriers to women's political participation at all levels of government (Löfving 2011; Latt et al. 2017). Yet, the discrepancy between the percentage of women represented at the local level and at the national and state/region level in Myanmar in the late 2010s challenges the “pyramid” model of women's representation: that women will be better represented closer to the ground. Following the 2015 general election (GE), women made up approximately 13.7 per cent of all elected members of parliament (MPs) in the Union (national) parliament and approximately 12.7 per cent of all MPs in the state/region parliaments across the country (excluding military seats). Meanwhile, women represented less than 1 per cent of elected ward/village tract administrators at the local level across the country. Why was women's representation so low at the local level in Myanmar? Drawing on extensive qualitative evidence from local interviews and focus-group discussions (see Chapter One for details), along with secondary data on local elections and politics, we investigate how women participated in local politics and why so few female local leaders were elected in Myanmar prior to the February 2021 military coup.

Following the coup, the military suspended national and state/ region parliaments. The military has tried to maintain existing local governance arrangements, as stipulated in the 2008 Constitution. However, the democratic opposition rejects that constitution. In most of the country, the junta-controlled local administration has either completely broken down or is severely weak.

The Myanmar people's revolution against the military resulted not only major political change, but also considerable economic, social, and cultural change.

The Arakan National Party (ANP) was the product of a merger between the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP) and the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) and was registered with the Union Election Commission (UEC) on 6 March 2014. At the time of their founding, ANP's goals were “federalism”, “democratisation”, and “development”, but in practice the party has had a strong focus on Rakhine nationalism. Previously, the RNDP, led by Dr Aye Maung, was registered on 6 May 2010 and won a total of 32 seats in the 2010 elections. The ALD was founded in 1989 and ran in the 1990 election, winning 11 seats. The ALD re-registered with the UEC in 2012, before combining with the RNDP to form the ANP in 2014. The party claimed to have township executive committees (TECs) in 17 townships and more than 20,000 members in 2020.

Dr Manam Tu Ja, former vice president of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), attempted to register the Kachin State Progressive Party with the UEC for the 2010 elections. He was controversially prevented from doing so, like the other ethnic Kachin parties. He then founded the Kachin State Democracy Party (KSDP) in 2013, and, at the second attempt, on 13 January 2014. The KSDP claimed to have around 13,000 members in 2015. The KSDP was merged with three other ethnic Kachin parties to form the Kachin State People's Party.

The LNDP was registered with the UEC on 17 December 2013, with the aim of representing the Lisu people in Myanmar and promoting the development of that ethnicity. The LNDP has a close cooperative relationship with the USDP. The party claimed to have TECs in 18 townships and around 11,000 members in 2020.

The Mon Democratic Front was established in 1988 and ran in the 1990 elections, winning 5 seats. The party re-registered with the UEC after the 2010 elections, using the name the Mon Democratic Party. In 2014, the party joined with a few MPs from the All Mon Region Democracy Party and changed its name to the Mon National Party. In 2018 (overlapping the start of our field research) the MNP merged with other ethnic Mon parties to form the Mon Party.

Whom political parties select for elections is key to understanding how women access elected office. In this chapter, we investigate whom parties nominated as candidates and how the selection process occurred in Myanmar before the coup in 2021, focusing on the nine political parties identified in Chapter One. During Myanmar's short decade of liberalization, political parties flourished and competed in general elections (GE). In the 2020 elections alone, a total of 93 parties competed, 50 more than in 2010. That independent candidates comprised less than 5 per cent of total candidates in 2020's national and local elections indicates that parties are the primary means through which individuals become politicians.

Parties matter as they provide leadership, organization, resources, and name-recognition for candidates (Kunovich and Paxton 2005a; Aldrich 2011). Literature on electoral politics in Myanmar has largely focused on the dominant role of the military, including its politicalparty guise as the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), or on political elites such as Aung San Suu Kyi from the National League for Democracy (NLD). Despite the importance of parties and the role they play in selecting candidates for elections, we know very little about these processes—what Gallagher and Marsh (1988) call the “secret garden of politics”—during Myanmar's decade of liberalization.

Intra-party politics in Myanmar are opaque and clouded in mystery. This chapter aims to demystify a core process by comparing the key candidate-selection methods in nine parties and their effects on women's political participation. In Asia, Myanmar has had one of the lowest levels of female representation in legislatures from 2010 to 2020. Typically, respondents cite cultural factors such as patriarchy as key deterrents that affect the supply of female candidates (Zin Mar Aung 2015). Here, we go beyond cultural reasons by revealing other institutional factors, such as the role of the selectorate—the body that selects candidates—and the criteria each party looks for that affect the demand for women in politics.

Parties are gatekeepers that narrow the list of candidates to a small pool from which the voters will choose. Who selects and how the process is implemented in practice affect not only party cohesion but also its gender and ethnic diversity (Rahat and Hazan 2001; Tan et al. 2020). Typically, parties have a legal or written framework that establishes how they elect or select their candidates.

Focus Group Guide for Field Data Collection

Interview Guide Used for Field Data Collection

INTRODUCTION

This chapter visits Indonesia's latest criminalization against extramarital sex, including commercial sex. I discuss how contextually important it is for Indonesia, as the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, to discourage, if not eliminate, extramarital sex, both commercially and non-commercially. I, then, engage in the scholarly discourse on how the country cannot crack down on its extramarital sex without eradicating the socio-economic and institutional root causes of commercial sex. In Southeast Asia, sex tourism, prostitution and sex trafficking are rampant and normalized to some degree (Curley 2014; Dahles 2009). Eradicating these root causes is the ultimate solution to Indonesia's decision to punitively bar local populations from engaging in extramarital sex. Both intranational and international policies will be highlighted and summarized in this chapter to present how Indonesia can address the issues of sex work and trafficking at its best in the long term.

CONTEXTUAL IMPORTANCE OF CRACKDOWN ON EXTRAMARITAL SEX IN INDONESIA

In Indonesia, per Islamic law, extramarital sex has been religiously and politically seen as immoral, wrongful and socially undesirable (Crouch 2009). Premarital sex, extramarital sex, queer sex and commercial sex have all been labelled as immoral sex in Indonesian society. Owing to gendered freedom restriction and cultural norms, there is a general expectation throughout Indonesia that men will have extramarital sex, as per Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations (Bennett and Davies 2015).

INTRODUCTION

This chapter highlights seven major socio-economic root causes of commercial sex engagement. These are poverty, informal social control, formal social control, a lack of positive socialization, peer influence, cultural deviance and a shortage of education opportunities. The chapter follows by assessing policy development and suggesting policy recommendations that are conducive to mitigating, attenuating and even eradicating these socio-economic root causes of, underage or not, sex work. Understanding the socio-economic root causes of sex work in Indonesian contexts serves as the foundation of the development of Chapter 5, where I will visit Indonesia's anti-extramarital sex law and argue how such criminalization is associated with the country's tolerance of and response to prostitution.

POVERTY

Like other developing Southeast Asian countries, poverty, in both urban and rural forms, has been known as a pressing societal issue that disproportionately affects the vulnerability of people with socio-economic disadvantages in Indonesia (Riswanda, Mills, and Nantes 2017). In this section, I explain how poverty results in the proliferation of prostitution and sex trafficking in Indonesia.

In Indonesia, especially in urban slums and remote, impoverished and rural communities, residents have been subject to significant impacts of poverty (Minnery et al. 2013). Here these residents living in poverty usually face a shortage of basic necessities, including education, food and shelter (Dhanani and Islam 2002; Jones 2017). Their encounters with socioeconomic disadvantages make them very vulnerable to being exploited by, for example, sex traffickers, as briefly discussed in the preceding chapters.

INTRODUCTION

On 13 April 2023, I returned to Taipei City, Taiwan, after spending the preceding months in Boston, Cambridge (United Kingdom), Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. I was appointed as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan and a fellow at Harvard University Asia Centre in Boston in 2022/23. As my research endeavours in Boston had already been wrapped up, I relocated to Taipei City to fulfil my research errands prior to the end of my visiting fellowship appointment contract (i.e., 30 June 2023). On 18 April 2023, I met my native Taiwanese friend who has been a typical digital nomad and usually spends her time in Tokyo, Taipei City and Europe. We were having a conversation over a few cups of ice-drip coffee. I told her I was recently working on a monograph on Indonesia's extramarital sex criminalization—the book that you are now reading. She was taken aback by the topic of my research investigation not only because she had not realized Indonesia has criminalized anti-extramarital sex, but more because she had never expected any Asian country of today would practise such a societally controversial and perhaps “morally outdated and/or conservative” law (note: In Chapter 5, I will explain why passing such a law is contextually important to Indonesia).