Coping by Colluding

Abstract

Democracy forces political elites to compete for power in elections, but it also often presses them to share power after the electoral dust has settled. At times these powersharing arrangements prove so encompassing as to make a mockery of putative partisan differences, and even to wipe out political opposition entirely by bringing every significant party into a “party cartel.” Such promiscuous powersharing arrangements undermine representation by loosening parties’ commitments to their core constituents, and threaten accountability by limiting voters’ capacity to remove parties from power via the ballot box. In the otherwise deeply disparate cases of Indonesia and Bolivia, the origins of promiscuous powersharing can be traced to similar periods of high political uncertainty surrounding crisis-wracked transitions to democracy. Party elites coped with the uncertainties of transition and crisis by sharing executive power across the country’s most salient political cleavages. These arrangements forged an elitist equilibrium grounded in informal norms and networks, allowing collusive democracy to outlast the uncertain crisis conditions in which it was forged. Yet they have ultimately proven self-undermining by triggering distinctive popular backlashes, returning both countries to the political uncertainty that promiscuous powersharing was initially intended to alleviate.

The intervention of oligarchy in the Indonesian legislative process

“…Mainstream scholarship proposes that contemporary Indonesia is characterized by a political landscape in which political parties operate as cartels (Ambardi, 2011(Ambardi, , 2009Hargens, 2020;Slater, 2018Slater, , 2004, and where oligarchic power decides political outcomes (e.g. Mietzner, 2015Mietzner, , 2013Slater and Simmons, 2012). However, what remains poorly understood is how oligarchy dictates the policy-making process at the legislative level; instead, we are left with an opaque picture of the current political process in the parliament, particularly its policy-making process, and thereby we are left with the baffling picture of those with power as being undifferentiated, untamed and all-powerful.…”

Power-sharing, conflict resolution, and the logic of pre-emptive defection

“…There are extensive literatures available on bargaining for peace (Licklider, 1995;Mason & Fett, 1996;Mason, Weingarten & Fett, 1999;Powell, 2002) and on institutional variation across power-sharing democracies (Lijphart, 1969(Lijphart, , 2004(Lijphart, , 2012Roeder & Rothchild, 2005;Norris, 2008;Gates et al, 2016;Slater & Simmons, 2013). However, the analytical focus of this study is on the role of power-sharing during the intermediary period, when signatory parties make important decisions about whether to comply with their commitments to the terms of peace, or else defect back to the battlefield.…”

“…First, given the advantage of incumbency, political power-sharing provisions should only help to secure rebel commitment where they diminish the imperative of mobilizing majority support. That a trade-off often exists in plural societies between electoral accountability and political stability has long been recognized by comparativists (Horowitz, 1993;Andeweg, 2000;Lijphart, 2004Lijphart, , 2012Slater & Simmons, 2013). The literature on democratic 'crafting' and 'pacting' reveals case-specific strategies that worked to achieve elite buy-in during Third Wave transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America, which often came at the expense of pure representativeness (O' Donnell & Schmitter, 1986;Di Palma, 1990).…”

Populists and Technocrats in Latin America: Conflict, Cohabitation, and Cooperation

“…Some populist politicians will have a more defined ideological profile than others, but all populists who rise to power do so in a context that binds them to a mandate. Their ascent is usually preceded by some kind of crisis and the convergence on the part of established parties around a similar programmatic position to confront it, blurring the differences between them and leaving an opening for populist challengers to outflank them from the right or left (Lupu, 2016;Roberts, 2015;Slater & Simmons, 2013;Weyland, 2002). Hence, the nature of the crisis, and the choices made by established parties to confront it, shape the kind of mandate populists are likely to be given when voted into office.…”