In 2014 Indonesia’s parliament adopted a new village law that, when fully implemented, would bring big chances to rural life. The law aims at an empowerment of villages. Or should I say: an empowerment of village elites. The new law stipulates that each village should get 1.4 billion rupiah (about 100.000 euro), to be spend… Read More Informal Politics and Indonesia’s new Village Law

Indonesia’s democratisation process is a case of the half-full glass. Pessimists argue that elections have descended into an ugly spectacle of vote-buying and manipulation that does little to distribute power in a more even fashion. They point to the important role of money in running for elections, ensuring that only well-connected and wealthy candidates can… Read More The revenge of Indonesia’s political class

 One of the main challenges of studying informal dimensions of politics is that the things you are looking for are largely invisible. At least at first. The way in which a businessman uses personal connections to secure a government contract, the informal authority that party workers exert in his neighbourhood or the ways in which… Read More Doing Fieldwork on Informal Politics

In december I published the article below in Inside Indonesia on an election campaign for governor in Central Kalimantan. I highlighted the collusion between politicians and the palm oil industry. Now the election results are in. None of the candidates were appealing, but the outcome is still disappointing. The candidate with the closest ties to… Read More Palm oil wins elections in Central Kalimantan

A very cool device for any language-related curiosity you might have is Google’s Ngram viewer. Using Google’s enormous digitized collection of books, this website shows you the relative incidence of words in their corpus over the last 200 years. This is great because the Ngram viewer reminds us how our concerns and preoccupations change over time… Read More In 1830 everybody talked about patronage politics

If one would have to pick one word to describe the nature of Southeast Asian politics, then ‘clientelism’ would be a good contender – with perhaps ‘oligarchy’ as a close runner-up. The study of political clientelism – the practice of exchanging a personalized, non-policy based access to money and state resources for electoral support –… Read More Clientelism and Political Parties

I used this slide for a class and presentation last week. Informal politics as a root cause of a host of societal problems. You could call that ‘topic imperialism’: seeing (and presenting) my own research field as vital, not-to-be-missed, of-key-importance to understand the world – or at least a host of things. Given the challenges… Read More Selling Informal Politics

Ward Berenschot and Darmawan Purba Sugar Group financed the election of Lampung’s new governor in order to secure the renewal of its land leases.   On 9 April Ridho Ficardo became the new governor of Lampung, Sumatra’s southern-most province. At first glance, the 33 year-old seems an odd choice as he lacks charisma as well… Read More The Politics of Business in Lampung, Indonesia