4 - Targeting Individuals: Don’t You Forget about Me

Summary

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.