Ithaca and London: Southeast Asia Program Publications (imprint of Cornell University Press), 2022. xi, 200 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$30.00, paper; US$20.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501764059.
The literature on electoral campaigning in Indonesia has grown exponentially in recent years. Apart from other prominent trends such as rising populism and a resurgence of religious identity politics, a widely documented characteristic of Indonesian elections is vote buying, or “money politics” as it is commonly known in Indonesia. Several studies have already analyzed the mechanics of this practice, its clientelistic underpinnings, and its efficacy as a strategy to win votes. Adding to this burgeoning literature, Elisabeth Kramer’s well-researched book, The Candidate’s Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns, shifts the focus to the campaign experiences of three individual candidates who regard themselves as anti-corruption candidates and therefore face a dilemma when confronted with the deeply entrenched norms and practices of vote buying.
The book examines how the three candidates navigate this dilemma and respond to external pressure to engage in money politics. Through detailed ethnographic accounts of the three different campaigns, Kramer considers how contextual factors such as institutions, campaign norms, salient issues, resources, and identity and values shape the candidates’ personal journeys on the campaign trail. Significantly, as the campaign unfolds, only one of the three candidates remains steadfast in his commitment to shun vote buying whereas the other two resolve to hand out significant amounts of cash and other gifts during the course of the campaign.
The book is divided into eight chapters. In the introduction, Kramer presents a typology of strategies which candidates can choose to apply when deciding whether or not they want to engage in vote buying. The typology is informed by two main factors: “the candidates’ personal commitment to rejecting money politics and the perceived utility of an anti-corruption identity” (15). Where both the personal commitment to rejecting vote buying and the perceived utility of appearing as an anti-corruption candidate are low, vote buying is almost certain to occur because candidates will simply accept the practice as normal. Candidates whose commitment is low but who see a high level of utility in appearing clean may integrate vote buying into their campaign while at the same time preaching anti-corruptionism. A third type of strategy is described by Kramer as “acquiescence.” Here we find candidates who initially demonstrate high levels of commitment to reject vote buying but ultimately see little utility in remaining clean and so succumb to external pressure to engage in the practice. The fourth and final category in the typology—rejection—is reserved for candidates who demonstrate strong commitment and see value in persisting with anticorruptionism even in the face of immense pressure to distribute gifts and cash. As mentioned, only one of the three candidates shadowed by Kramer during the 2014 campaign ultimately ends up in this category, illustrating just how strong the allure to engage in vote buying is.
Apart from presenting her typology, Kramer also uses the introductory chapter for a passionate defence of qualitative, ethnographic research methods. She writes: “In pushing back against quantitative gatekeeping, I contend that political ethnography has much to offer in studying politics, power relations, and decision making and can meaningfully contribute to attempts to understand the political world” (17). Indeed, the book illustrates the strengths of political ethnography vividly. Chapters 3 to 5 present extremely detailed and fine-grained accounts of the campaigns of the three candidates, providing valuable insights into the complex decision-making processes these candidates had to go through as they manoeuvred through the election campaign. These chapters are the heart of the book and were only possible due to the chosen ethnographic approach of shadowing three candidates.
In chapter 3, Kramer introduces Ambo (not his real name), the only candidate who begins and finishes the campaign consistently rejecting the use of money politics. Ambo’s experience is then contrasted with that of Ayu, the only female candidate featured in the book, who is initially committed to an anti-corruption stance, but later succumbs to the temptations of vote buying as she realizes that her campaign is not going well. The third and last candidate is Bontor, who is portrayed as a candidate who seeks to cultivate an image as an anti-corruption candidate but at the same time integrates vote buying into his campaign strategy. The book is rounded out by two literature review chapters on elections, campaigning, and corruption (chapters 1 and 2) and two somewhat repetitive concluding chapters that sum up the findings from the ethnographic analysis in chapters 3 to 5. One chapter would probably have sufficed here.
All in all, I found this to be an interesting and at times intriguing read, especially the chapters at the heart of the analysis in the central part of the book. I did wonder, however, why Kramer did not interrogate more critically the candidates’ claims that the parties they ran for would be cleaner than other (older) parties. Corruption is a systemic problem in Indonesia’s House of Representatives and not one restricted to the Democratic Party, Prosperous Justice Party, and Golkar, which are singled out in chapter 2 as the most heavily affected by corruption scandals during the Yudhoyono years. I also wondered whether Bontor’s campaign could have been framed slightly differently as it seems that he did not actually face any dilemma at all during his campaign. As Kramer concedes, “Bontor’s campaign had an embedded duality from the very beginning” (151), as he was prepared from the outset to distribute money. If the dilemma identified in the title was about candidates facing challenges to their moral compass when confronted with demands for money, there would have been no dilemma for Bontor, as his compass was apparently never challenged (if indeed he had one).
These minor criticisms notwithstanding, I would certainly recommend this book to students and scholars of Indonesian politics as well as those interested in electoral campaigning more broadly.
Dirk Tomsa
La Trobe University, Melbourne