The Roots of Resilience

Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia

Meredith L. Weiss

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501750052
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In The Roots of Resilience Meredith L. Weiss examines governance from the ground up in the world's two most enduring electoral authoritarian or "hybrid" regimes—Singapore and Malaysia—where politically liberal and authoritarian features blend, evading substantive democracy.

Weiss explains that while key attributes of these regimes differ, affecting the scope, character, and balance among national parties and policies, local machines, and personalized linkages, the similarity in the overall patterns in these countries confirms the salience of those dimensions. The Roots of Resilience shows that high levels of authoritarian acculturation, amplifying the political payoffs of what parties and politicians actually provide their constituents, explain why electoral turnover alone is insufficient for real regime change in either state.

1

PARTIES, MACHINES, AND PERSONALITIES

In 1996, Singapore’s prime minister, Goh Chok Tong of the People’s Action Party (PAP), cautioned voters before impending elections, “You vote for the other side, that means you reject the programmes of the PAP candidate, you won’t get it. This is going to be a local government election.… If you reject it, we respect your choice. Then you’ll be left behind, then in 20, 30 years’ time, the whole of Singapore will be bustling away, and your estate through your own choice will be left behind. They become slums.”¹ He could make these threats—and be assured of their sting—thanks to two key innovations: his party’s prioritization since the early 1960s of public housing, such that over 80 percent of Singaporeans lived in Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats, and a structural change in the late 1980s that gave members of parliament (MPs), overwhelmingly from the PAP, managerial authority over HDB estates. Singapore’s few opposition MPs played the same role, but without benefit of PAP machinery or access to the resources afforded ruling-party MPs. However assiduously they built rapport on the ground, opposition candidates for national office faced a stark disadvantage at the local-government level.

This dilemma highlights a comparatively little-remarked aspect of how Singapore’s PAP has remained in office since 1959: not just coercion (though Goh’s threat entails that, as well), but close management of local government specifically. Micromanagement of mundane aspects of citizens’ lives, and particularly the municipal services on which they most rely—including public housing—undergirds regime durability and offers a highly granular indicator of the “performance” that accords a regime political legitimacy. In neighboring Malaysia, too, cultivated dependence on state and federal legislators at the local-government level personalizes politics and grants parties and politicians concrete relevance to citizens’ lives.

In this book, I examine governance from the ground up in the world’s two most enduring electoral-authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes—regimes that blend politically liberal and authoritarian features to evade substantive democracy. (As explained later, while elections in 2018 ousted Malaysia’s dominant party, the regime arguably persists under new leadership.) I find that although skewed elections, curbed civil liberties, and a dose of coercion help sustain these regimes, selectively structured state policies and patronage, partisan machines that effectively stand in for local governments, and diligently sustained clientelist relations between politicians and constituents are equally important. While key attributes of Singapore’s and Malaysia’s regimes differ, affecting the scope, character, and balance among national parties and policies, local machines, and personalized linkages, the similarity in their overall patterns confirms the salience of these dimensions. Taken together, these attributes acculturate citizens toward the system in place. As the chapters to come detail, this authoritarian acculturation is key to both regimes’ durability, although weaker party competition and party–civil society links render Singapore’s authoritarian acculturation stronger than Malaysia’s. High levels of authoritarian acculturation are key to why electoral turnover is insufficient for real regime change in either state.

The Terrain of Hybridity

In 1965, the tiny island state of Singapore became independent of the Federation of Malaysia after a stormy two-year marriage. The divorce marked the end of a geopolitical experiment but also signaled the beginning of the end for domestic political experimentation on either side. Until that point, uncertainty about the shape of these polities had left open a gamut of ideological and policy options; after parting ways, Singapore’s and Malaysia’s polities ossified. As late as 1968, political scientist Thomas Bellows (1967, 122) could write of Singapore over the preceding decade as having been “characterized by a relatively open and competitive party system,” unlike its Southeast Asian neighbors.² By that point, we now know, Singapore’s competitive political moment had passed; Malaysia’s ruling coalition was similarly entrenched. As independent Singapore and independent, Singapore-less Malaysia pushed on through the decades, it was with the same governments in power as during their two-year union: the communal Alliance, later rebranded the National Front (Barisan Nasional, BN), headed by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in Malaysia and the PAP in Singapore. This book probes not just how these parties secured and sustained preeminence, but how they changed politics in the process, entrenching a particular style of contestation and outreach even among their challengers.

In order to become dominant, both UMNO and the PAP had to engage in strategic coalition building and careful institutional design and cultivate a conducive political culture. Both parties fought their way into power and still face rivals. Although both battled left-wing challenges in the 1960s, the PAP more effectively quashed its chief nemesis than did UMNO; some of the same parties from that era still contest in Singapore, however, joined by new ones. UMNO, too, has faced a mix of social democratic, Islamist, and other noncommunal challengers since Malaysia’s first elections. Several of these parties consistently secured footholds at the state level—a tier unitary Singapore lacks—and the latest coalition bested the BN nationally in 2018. For both regimes, this formal contestation, repeated at regular intervals, has constituted a key prong in their assertions of legitimacy: both claim a popular mandate and call their polities “democracies.” Yet both parties have used the power so gained to consolidate their own position, grading the playing field first laid out to a postcolonial British pattern with a pronounced slope. Democracy, yes; liberal democracy, no.

The chapters to come disentangle the ways these parties have restyled their respective environments to their own advantage. These polities are ostensibly similar, on account of their shared British heritage, illiberal political leanings, strong parties, and heavy reliance on performance legitimacy. However, it is the important divergences between them—the character of the nexus between state and society, the space for ideological competition, and the potential for a turnover in government—that sparked this investigation into what features of the political landscape matter, and in what ways, to how politics plays out on the ground.

Internationally, around one-fifth of contemporary regimes are electoral-authoritarian, but their extraordinary longevity distinguishes Singapore and Malaysia (Diamond 2002, 23). Singapore’s PAP has held power since 1959, and the Alliance or BN, from Malaysia’s inaugural general elections in 1955 until 2018. A simple structural explanation goes far toward explaining that resilience: both Singapore and Malaysia have sampled multiple items on Andreas Schedler’s “menu of manipulation” (2002), from prolific gerrymandering of electoral districts to aggressive curbs on civil liberties. Yet over time, the governing parties have buttressed these structural features with less visible and less readily supplanted normative and cultural attributes, the legacy of long-term hybridity.

Most contemporary citizens in both states have never participated in anything but electoral authoritarianism. The parties that challenge the PAP and BN have likewise competed at least since the 1960s only in the framework of single-party dominance.³ As Beatriz Magaloni notes of dominant-party regimes, “The ‘tragic brilliance’ of these systems is that the population plays an active role in sustaining them, often despite corruption, inefficient policies, and lack of economic growth. Citizens’ choices are free, yet they are constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compel them to remain loyal to the regime” (2006, 19). Both Singapore’s and Malaysia’s dominant parties have informally institutionalized premises for accountability and loyalty oriented more around local outreach and management than national politics. How closely these efforts touch citizens’ lives, as well as the resources they require, makes alternatives difficult for challengers to develop or citizens to trust; voters come to see the party in office not as modular and replaceable, but as built-in and inevitable.

Indeed, over decades, structure molds (political) culture, understood as “the attitudes, sentiments, and cognitions that inform and govern political behavior in any society” (Pye 1965, 7). Political culture, comprising ideals and norms inherited but incrementally transformed over generations, “gives meaning, predictability, and form to the political process,” guiding individual political behavior and institutional performance (Pye 1965, 7–8).⁴

As Singapore’s earlier electoral history suggests, its citizens are not naturally averse to adversarial politics, even if low levels of participation have, in fact, featured since early days. Recurrent heated electoral contests in Malaysia confirm that here, too, citizens embrace competition. However, since the 1950s, Singapore’s and Malaysia’s leading parties have trained citizens in both states to expect a reliable partisan machine and expeditious personalized outreach from the politicians they elect—even though many voters do still weigh heavily candidates’ ideology or party programs. This relational, more instrumental than ideological approach to governance and accountability is difficult and slow to dislodge.

Rather than simply “electoral authoritarian” (fleshed out more fully later), these two perennially hybrid systems feature political machines: a well-organized party takes on and personalizes roles in political socialization, distribution, and governance normally left to the state. Strong grassroots machinery allows a party to identify supporters and opponents, monitor their behavior and leanings, and distribute rewards and punishments accordingly. To speak of a machine, though, indicates not just an operational electoral network, but an apparatus for governance. Machine politics leaves the average citizen little ground on which to distinguish clearly among party, state, and civil society. The ties between citizens and elected officials in a machine environment are structured substantially, if not around individual-level patronage, contingent on voters’ reciprocated support—what Hutchcroft (2014, 177–78) labels “micro-particularism”—then around impersonally distributed, or “meso-particularistic,” patronage, benefiting targeted blocs of voters. The drive to compete, especially once voters have become habituated to machine politics, presses opposition politicians and parties to replicate that approach. Through close analysis of Malaysian and Singapore politics over time, I argue that a linchpin to the extreme durability of electoral authoritarianism in these two states is their purposeful cultivation and maintenance of personalized, partisan political machines, sufficiently formally and informally institutionalized over time to shape political culture broadly.

In such a system, transforming the regime requires more than just electing a new government. I define the regime less in terms of elections than of broader, if fuzzier, dimensions of policy processes, access to decision making, and norms and metrics for accountability, as well as paths to public office (cf. Schmitter and Karl 1991, 76). This conceptualization helps particularly in understanding what happens between elections, making those aspects part of the central concept. Regimes include both formal and informal institutions, and regime actors respond to both formal and informal incentives and rules. Norms and other informal institutions are harder to pin down than electoral data or even party platforms, but help to structure behavior, with implications for representation, accountability, and governance; it is not analytically helpful to give these dimensions short shrift or simply assume they will transform postelection. Perhaps most important, meaningful democratization would normally entail a shift in bases for political legitimacy and accountability. While structural manipulation clearly helps a dominant party continue to win elections, the real staying power of electoral-authoritarian governance rests in the transformation of state-society relations. Hence, while an election has transferred power to new hands in Malaysia, regime change writ large lags that shift.

Adopting this lens on regime durability⁵ requires a novel, historically grounded approach, moving away from a literature on political regimes and transitions heavily focused on how dominant parties win (or lose) elections (see chapter 2). My account centers around three primary arguments. The first concerns institutional makeup, particularly political parties and how they and their policies structure the political economy and society. Dominant parties are only part of this story; just as important to understanding regime persistence is grasping how opposition parties as well as groups within civil society organize, in turn. The second argument homes in on the primary interface between citizens and state: local government. The literature on regimes is overwhelmingly national in focus, yet it is at the lowest tiers of governance that we see better how citizens understand and engage with both states and partisan machines. My third and final argument addresses individual actors: the linkages between actual or aspiring politicians and their constituents. Exploring these three dimensions not only illuminates why UMNO and the PAP have remained so entrenched, but also how their challengers have adapted to their political environment, to the point of perpetuating some of its defining tenets. Throughout, I develop a concept of (authoritarian) acculturation, or the process by which citizens become acclimated over time to a particular mode of politics, conditioned by the nature of competition and the structure of both political parties and civil society. Singapore’s higher level of authoritarian acculturation, propelled by political actors’ accommodation to structural turns over time, I propose, is a critical factor in the greater resilience of its regime than Malaysia’s.

Two primary analytical goals drive the work: to recommend a new way of conceptualizing regimes broadly and to present a new, empirically driven explanation for electoral-authoritarian persistence. While I delve into two specific cases in great detail, that exploration has wider theoretical significance. The study adds to a sparse literature on the “nuts and bolts” of politics in postcolonial polities, including “the everyday behaviour of politicians” (Lindberg 2010, 118). For Southeast Asia, apart from a minor flurry of behavioralist and related works in the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Scott 1968; Chan 1976a, b; Ong 1976), scholars have given these mundane workings of politics far less attention than they have more macrolevel institutional features—which is far less than they deserve. And scholars of any region still tend to study politicians’ praxis from the perspective of the center, notwithstanding our awareness of its distance from the constituents who elect them.

The study also adds to a newly resurgent literature on clientelism and machine politics, adding an at least partly redemptive twist by homing in on the responsiveness and underlying accountability such politics fosters. Much of the literature on clientelism remains tightly bound to electoral processes, such as vote buying (e.g., Schaffer 2007), the role of brokers in securing votes (Stokes et al. 2013), and the balance of particularistic and other appeals in election campaigns (Aspinall and Berenschot 2019; Weiss 2014a). My wider focus, situating elections among larger institutions and longer-term, iterative relationships, gives a different picture. It suggests not only how electoral authoritarianism becomes embedded, but also what would need to shift for that regime truly to change.

My analysis draws on intensive and extensive interviews and observation, building on two decades’ close study of Malaysian and Singaporean politics.⁶ I have interviewed dozens of current, past, and aspiring politicians, visited service centers, attended constituency events, and observed election campaign activities from across parties in both countries. For earlier periods, I rely heavily on archival records, particularly the British National Archives and the remarkable Oral History Interviews collection in the National Archives of Singapore. To avoid reading past events through the lens of present-day assumptions, I have referred as much as possible, too, to contemporaneous academic, political party, media, and other accounts, rather than later retellings—though I do draw, too, on more recent scholarship. And throughout the work, I engage with theoretical literatures on patronage and clientelism as part of electoral processes, as well as a more varied literature on regime hybridity and transitions. These resources allow me to delve into the early foundations and initial development of political parties, electoral and other institutions, and politicians’ strategies for outreach and service-delivery in Malaysia and Singapore. The specific steps identified in these states might be sui generis, or limited to tutelary transitions such as those under the British in Southeast Asia. However, the broader pattern should hold elsewhere—the stabilizing role of partisan machines and the premise that linkages among politicians, parties, and voters take on the character of informal institutions—as do key questions such as for what citizens look to the state versus elsewhere, as well as how representation is understood and structured.

Three Core Arguments

My discussion of Malaysia’s and Singapore’s political histories tracks three core arguments, representing three overlapping dimensions of the polity. I develop this analysis through a historical-institutionalist approach of considering configurations of institutions and processes, over time, and with close attention to context. By homing in across dimensio...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Terms and Acronyms
• 1. Parties, Machines, and Personalities
• 2. Regimes and Resilience Reconceptualized
• 3. The Convoluted Political Path to Malaysia
• 4. Edging toward Sovereign Singapore
• 5. Competitive Authoritarianism in Malaysia
• 6. Hegemonic Electoral Authoritarianism in Singapore
• 7. Drivers of Stasis and Change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index