Chapter 9 concludes Mobilizing for Elections by reiterating the volume’s core arguments and contributions, then by exploring the potential extension of its framework to other cases, including the possibility of expanding the typology of electoral mobilization regimes. Next, it reviews the implications of the book’s findings for democratic governance and discusses the opportunities for and limits of reform measures with potential to curtail patronage politics and improve the quality of democracy, including electoral-system reform to help shift polities from a candidate-centric to a party-centric focus. Additional reforms are also important, whether promoting bureaucratic capacity and autonomy or creating a more level electoral playing field.

Chapter 4 focuses on micro-particularism: distribution of money, goods, or services to individual voters and households in hopes of obtaining their electoral support. The chapter finds this practice is extremely common in Indonesia and the Philippines but is not entirely absent in Malaysia (especially East Malaysia). The micro-particularistic practice given the greatest attention in the literature is cash handouts; the chapter confirms that candidates in the Philippines and Indonesia devote much attention to how to distribute cash effectively. Despite the ubiquity of the term “vote buying,” the chapter finds that micro-particularism rarely involves straightforward market transactions, either in how disbursement is expressed culturally or in anticipated outcomes: these payments are generally not contingent patronage. The chapter reveals that candidates find cash handouts most valuable as a means of signaling that they are serious contenders (a process the chapter calls credibility buying) and protecting their presumed turf; most voters being targeted have, at best, tenuous loyalties to the candidates targeting them.

This chapter provides a historical-institutional account of the emergence of distinct electoral mobilization regimes in Southeast Asia. It does so by surveying the sequencing and development of the bureaucracy, parties, and electoral systems across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In the Philippines, the focus is the early twentieth century, when US colonial authorities introduced elections before establishing a strong bureaucracy, enabling elite families to capture power and build local machines. Malaysia's regime is traced to its transition to independence and rise of an ethnically defined party that subordinated the bureaucracy to its patronage purposes. And in Indonesia, the key era is authoritarian rule in 1966–98, when patronage was centralized in the bureaucracy and parties marginalized. Over time, electoral and bureaucratic reform have tempered, but not displaced, those legacies. Only through comparative analysis of historical patterns of state–society relations, the chapter shows, can we understand cross-national differences in patronage and the networks through which it flows. The chapter also provides key context for readers unfamiliar with Southeast Asia.

This chapter introduces the research questions and framework that guide the volume. Explaining that the volume aims to understand variation in patterns of patronage politics across Southeast Asia, what causes that variation, and how patronage politics works on the ground, it begins by conceptually untangling patronage and clientelism. The chapter defines patronage as a material resource disbursed for particularistic benefit and political purposes, and clientelism as a personalistic relationship of power. It distinguishes among three types of patronage (micro, meso, and macro), the first involving disbursement of benefits to individuals, the second to groups, and the third referring to large-scale programs that are “hijacked” for particularistic purposes. The chapter also stresses that politicians draw on different types of political networks when distributing patronage, producing a logic whereby different mixes of patronage and networks cohere as distinct “electoral mobilization regimes.” The chapter introduces three such regimes found in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and highlights the volume's theoretical contributions and scope and methods.

Africa may be home to the youngest population on earth, but its leaders are among the oldest; many are in their 80s. Most Africans, and especially young Africans, think their governments are doing a bad job at addressing the needs of youth, but young people struggle to gain access to power because ruling elites remain entrenched for decades. Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari seems woefully out of touch with his young electorate: in 2018 he accused young Nigerians of being lazy and uneducated. Young people are responding. In the Nigerian capital, Abuja, a thriving civic society led by young people encompasses everything from promoting good governance and increased transparency to increasing young voter registration and mentoring the leaders of tomorrow. But cultural norms and systemic barriers make it difficult for young people to be elected and monetisation of elections is a further issue: the cost of nomination forms for office is high and vote buying is endemic. The upcoming 2023 elections are likely to be a key moment for young people in Nigeria, when it will become visible if the impetus of recent social movements can be translated into an electoral force.

Africa may be home to the youngest population on earth, but its leaders are among the oldest; many are in their 80s. Most Africans, and especially young Africans, think their governments are doing a bad job at addressing the needs of youth, but young people struggle to gain access to power because ruling elites remain entrenched for decades. Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari seems woefully out of touch with his young electorate: in 2018 he accused young Nigerians of being lazy and uneducated. Young people are responding. In the Nigerian capital, Abuja, a thriving civic society led by young people encompasses everything from promoting good governance and increased transparency to increasing young voter registration and mentoring the leaders of tomorrow. But cultural norms and systemic barriers make it difficult for young people to be elected and monetisation of elections is a further issue: the cost of nomination forms for office is high and vote buying is endemic. The upcoming 2023 elections are likely to be a key moment for young people in Nigeria, when it will become visible if the impetus of recent social movements can be translated into an electoral force.

Chapter seven investigates what voters in Kenya, Ghana and Uganda think about different forms of electoral malpractice – what is seen to be morally wrong, and what can be justified? In particular, we focus on the exchange of money and gifts around elections – a particularly powerful lens through which to understand the complexity of moral claims making. We find that money is more likely to be handed out where political parties are institutionally weaker and politics has become more personalised, as in Kenya. We also find that the way voters think about the distribution of money is shaped by their understanding of the candidate and the meaning of the gift. Leaders who are seen to be authentic and who have a sustained relationship with an individual or a community can have their reputation bolstered by making handouts; in this context, gift-giving is usually seen as an act of generosity and evidence of “good” leadership. By contrast, those who lack moral authority are vulnerable to being accused of “vote buying” – a largely illegitimate activity in all three countries. In this way, a focus on gift-giving reveals why some leaders do not benefit from handouts, and hence why the individuals who hand out the most money do not always win.

When rural populations hold land without property rights, this has important and wide-ranging economic, social, and political consequences. Property rights gaps keeps land reform beneficiaries dispersed across the countryside working in agriculture, slowing urbanization. Property rights gaps distort incentives to invest in improvements and inputs due to land tenure insecurity and a lack of access to credit, slowing growth in agricultural productivity. And property rights gaps are linked to urban policy bias by disadvantaging rural dwellers from accessing the same basic services such as education and opportunities for employment by the state that urban dwellers enjoy. These dynamics fuel economic inequality and they sow the seeds of underdevelopment and slow economic growth. Property rights gaps also have direct political consequences that shape the nature of access to power, the ability to translate preferences into policy, and contestation within society. They inhibit the ability of rural groups to exercise political power relative to cities. And they They are foster clientelism and vote buying rather than programmatic linkages between parties and voters.

The presidential elections of 1896 and 1900 established the GOP as the majority party across most of the United States for the better part of the next three decades. But while the Republicans expanded their dominance in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, the South remained almost exclusively Democratic throughout this period. As a result, the traditional argument that a GOP revival in the "Solid South" remained a possibility – which, in part, validated the sizable Southern presence at Republican National Conventions – rang increasingly hollow. That is, Republican leaders mostly concluded that the cost of maintaining a party organization in the South that was fit to compete electorally with an implacable Democratic majority outweighed the increasingly slim chances at GOP electoral success there. Republican administrations continued to use their control of patronage in the South to produce a reliable and sizable voting bloc that played a significant role in the selection of presidential candidates in 1908 and 1912. At the same time, however, several moves were made by competing factions to reduce the size of the Southern delegations. Not all of these moves were entirely genuine; rather, some were threats to (successfully) force compliance on other issues. Additionally, Republican leaders were far from consistent in their support of Southern delegates and were prone to changing their positions depending on whether they were the ones who controlled federal patronage. Thus, as the GOP moved into a position of national political domination, its Southern political organizations increasingly became pawns in a game of national-level party politics.