Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia

Mobilizing for Elections is an exciting and ambitious mapping of the contours of modern patronage in the region. The book provides a conceptual framework to understand patronage in the context of electoral mobilization and answers a variety of questions about the mechanics and patterns of patronage in Southeast Asia: what kinds of patronage are distributed and how, the response of voters to patronage, and variation within and across the cases they consider. The authors examine patterns of what they call “electoral mobilization regimes” in three primary cases: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, with additional evidence provided from Singapore, Thailand, and Timor Leste.