What underlying logic explains candidate participation in vote buying, given that clientelist exchange is so difficult to enforce? We address this question through close analysis of campaigns by several dozen candidates in two electoral districts in Java, Indonesia. Analyzing candidates’ targeting and pricing strategies, we show that candidates used personal brokerage structures that drew on social networks to identify voters and deliver payments to them. But these candidates achieved vote totals averaging about one quarter of the number of payments they distributed. Many candidates claimed to be targeting loyalists, suggestive of “turnout buying,” but judged loyalty in personal rather than partisan terms, and extended their vote-buying reach through personal connections mediated by brokers. Candidates were market sensitive, paying prices per vote determined not only by personal resources, but also by constituency size and prices offered by competitors. Accordingly, we argue that a market logic structures Indonesia's system of vote buying.

A commonly proffered theory to explain the use of elections in authoritarian regimes is that they help identify talented young leaders who can be groomed for leadership positions. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of obtaining data in authoritarian settings, this hypothesis has not been tested satisfactorily. We examine candidate-level data from the 2007 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election and subsequent selection of candidates for top positions within the VNA and for top ministry positions. We find no evidence that vote share is associated with promotion to leadership positions in the VNA and only limited evidence for vote share association with ministerial posts. Instead, the results indicate that leadership selection takes place within the party rather than through elections. Furthermore, behavior within the assembly suggests that those who were chosen may have been selected based on their loyalty or at least pliancy to the party elites.

To what extent do presidential candidates influence voting in mixed member legislative elections? A sizable literature addresses presidential–legislative coattail effects in the American context, with less attention given to this interaction in non-Western democracies. Nor is the role of past voting behavior adequately assessed in the literature. Taiwan's historic 2016 election allows for an analysis of the extent in which the popularity of presidential candidates influences coattail voting in the more complex electoral environment of two-vote mixed legislative systems. Evidence finds that, controlling for partisanship and previous voting behavior, voters who supported a presidential candidate were more likely to also support the party's legislative candidates, although this influence is stronger in regards to Democratic Progressive Party's Tsai Ing-wen.

Village elections are a democratic institution in one of the most resilient authoritarian regimes in the world. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted village elections over the past twenty years, but not elections at higher levels. I present a game-theoretic model in which candidates would engage in vote buying when competing in a small electorate but not when competing in a larger electorate. The model's equilibrium outcome implies that the logic of China's introduction of village elections inherently limits this democratic reform to the grassroots level. Elections for higher levels of government would be dangerous to the regime because they would lead candidates to create substantive policy platforms and political organizations. Thus, rather than being an experiment that has failed to lead to further reforms, village democracy is self-limiting by design.

Malaysia's twelfth general elections, held on March 8, 2008, dealt a stunning blow to the incumbent Barisan Nasional regime. For the first time since 1969, the coalition did not receive its customary two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament. Moreover, the opposition was able to form governments in five out of eleven peninsular Malaysian states. This article uses electoral, economic, and demographic data to test a number of potential explanations for these outcomes. Evidence indicates that the regime's decreased majority is the consequence of non-Malay voters' rejecting the incumbent regime in favor of secular opposition parties.

The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of democratization theories? We argue that valence considerations—specifically, perceptions of party credibility—are the main factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate, and are critical to explaining the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to substantiate this argument, including a comprehensive quantitative analysis of recent elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits.

In this article we examine the electoral impact of urbanization vis-à-vis ethnicity in Malaysia. We employ a robust econometric technique, the fractional response logit model, on data from the recently concluded thirteenth general election. The findings show that there are both an ethnic effect and an urban effect in determining the distribution of parliamentary seats among the political groups. Strong support for the opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, was evident in urban constituencies, while the ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, continued to enjoy success in rural constituencies. Although Barisan Nasional is still dependent on Bumiputera support, its success is also dependent on non-Bumiputera support from rural constituencies. However, with declining birthrates among the Chinese electorates, this support may not be forthcoming in future elections. We also provide insights for both coalitions to consider in developing strategies for the next election.

In this article I reinterpret Ng, Rangel, Vaithilingam, and Pillay's analysis in this issue of pro-BN voting in Peninsular Malaysia in Malaysia's 2013 general election. I show that the authors' statistical methods are inappropriate for testing whether district ethnicity predicts district-level BN vote share, and that their modeling choices result in tests of hypotheses that do not exist and cannot be derived from standard theoretical approaches to ethnic voting in Malaysia. I then provide a range of statistical evidence that supports three main conclusions: (1) ethnicity and district area (a proxy for urbanization) both predict BN vote shares at the district level, (2) neither the effect of ethnicity nor of district area can be reduced to the other, and (3) there is no interactive effect between ethnicity and urbanization. These results are in direct contradiction with the authors' results, and apply equally in Peninsular Malaysia and the entire country. I also discuss the broader issues that emerge when testing competing theories of BN vote share.

In this article we respond to Thomas Pepinsky's commentary on our article “2013 Malaysian Elections: Ethnic Politics or Urban Wave?” (both in this issue). We confirm that both ethnicity and urbanization play important roles in determining the incumbent ruling party's percentage vote share in the thirteenth general election. In doing so, we address the various econometric issues raised by Pepinsky and clearly explain the advantages of our econometric methodology vis-à-vis the OLS analysis espoused by Pepinsky. Our main results indicate that Barisan National's (BN) vote share from Bumiputera voters, regardless of urbanization levels of the parliamentary constituency, is below the 50 percent threshold. This result is surprisingly compensated by the more than 50 percent support for BN when Chinese voters are a small minority of the electorate. We also argue that Pepinsky's statement that Malay voters are predominantly rural voters is inaccurate and provide evidence to the contrary.