Elections as Popular Culture in Asia

Elections as Popular Culture in Asia

Conventional political science depicts legitimate elections as rational affairs in which informed voters select candidates for office according to how their coherently presented aims, ideologies and policies appeal to the self-interest of the electorate. In reality, elections, whether in First World democracies, or in the various governmental systems present in Asia, can more realistically be seen as cultural events in which candidates’ campaigns are shaped, consciously or unconsciously, to appeal to the cultural understanding and practices of the electorate. The election campaign period is one in which the masses are mobilized to participate in a range of cultural activities, from flying the party colours in noisy motorcycle parades to attending political rallies for or against, or simply to be entertained by the performances on the political stage, and to gambling on the outcome of the contest. The chapters in this book analyse electioneering activities in nine Asian countries in terms of popular cultural practices in each location, ranging from updated traditional cultures to mimicry and caricatures of present-day television dramas. In presenting political elections as an expression of popular culture, Elections as Popular Culture in Asia portrays electoral behaviour as a meaningful cultural practice. As such, this book will appeal to students and scholars of political science and cultural studies alike, as well as those with a more general interest in Asian studies. Chua Beng Huat is Leader of the Cultural Studies Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute and Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

Politics in Asia series Formerly edited by Michael Leifer London School of Economics ASEAN and the Security of South-East Asia Michael Leifer

Hong Kong China’s challenge Michael Yahuda

China’s Policy towards Territorial Disputes The case of the South China Sea Islands Chi-kin Lo

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India and Southeast Asia Indian perceptions and policies Mohammed Ayoob Gorbachev and Southeast Asia Leszek Buszynski Indonesian Politics under Suharto Order, development and pressure for change Michael R.J. Vatikiotis

Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism National identity and status in international society Christopher Hughes Managing Political Change in Singapore The elected presidency Kevin Y.L. Tan and Lam Peng Er Islam in Malaysian Foreign Policy Shanti Nair

The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia David Brown

Political Change in Thailand Democracy and participation Kevin Hewison

The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore Michael Hill and Lian Kwen Fee

The Politics of NGOs in Southeast Asia Participation and protest in the Philippines Gerard Clarke

Politics in Indonesia Democracy, Islam and the ideology of tolerance Douglas E. Ramage Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore Chua Beng Huat The Challenge of Democracy in Nepal Louise Brown Japan’s Asia Policy Wolf Mendl

Malaysian Politics under Mahathir R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy Indonesia and China The politics of a troubled relationship Rizal Sukma Arming the Two Koreas State, capital and military power Taik-young Hamm

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Elections as Popular Culture in Asia

Chua Beng Huat

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Editorial selection and matter; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elections as popular culture in Asia / [compiled by] Chua Beng Huat. p. cm. — (Politics in Asia series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Elections—Social aspects—Asia. 2. Political culture—Asia. I. Chua, Beng Huat. JQ38.E42 2007 306.2095—dc22 2006100813 ISBN 0-203-94676-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-42570-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-94676-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-42570-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-94676-3 (ebk)

Contents

Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: political elections as popular culture chua beng huat 1

2

22

Popular protest and electioneering in a partial democracy: the case of Hong Kong wan-chaw shae and pik-wan wong

38

The performance factor in Indonesian elections jennifer lindsay

4

Betting on democracy: electoral ritual in the Philippine presidential campaign filomeno v. aguilar, jr.

6

1

The festive machine: Taiwan’s 2004 elections as popular culture ko yufen

3

5

ix xi xiii

Middle-class ironic electoral cultural practices in Thailand: observing the 2005 National Assembly Election and its aftermath pitch pongsawat Engaging the 2004 general election in Malaysia: contrasting roles and goals loh kok wah francis

55

72

94

115

viii 7

Contents Fun with democracy: election coverage and the elusive subject of Indian politics m. madhava prasad

139

8

Net power and the politics of the Internet media in South Korea keehyeung lee

155

9

The depersonalized is politically correct: Japanese electioneering practices in mid-life crisis kaori tsurumoto

172

Index

191

Notes on contributors

Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. is Professor in the Department of History at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is the current Chair of the Philippine Social Science Council and editor of Philippine Studies. He has taught at the National University of Singapore and James Cook University. Chua Beng Huat leads the Cultural Studies Research Cluster in the Asia Research Institute and is Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He is founding co-executive editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Yu-Fen Ko received her PhD from the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She is now Assistant Professor of the Department of Journalism, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her major research area is the popular television cultures. Keehyeung Lee is an Assistant Professor in media and cultural studies at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. He has published on the politics of culture, new media, and visual images in contemporary South Korea. Jennifer Lindsay is currently Senior Visiting Fellow in the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has taught at Cornell University, NY, and the University of Sydney. An Indonesian specialist, she writes on performance; cultural policy, media and translation. Loh Kok Wah Francis is Professor of Politics in Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. His latest publication is Southeast Asian Responses to Globalisation: Restructuring Governance and Deepening Democracy (2005, co-editor). Pitch Pongsawat is a Lecturer in the Department of Government, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, where he teaches modern Thai politics and ideologies of developing countries. He is a regular columnist for newspapers, magazines, and online magazines in Thailand. M. Madhava Prasad is a Lecturer in film and cultural studies at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India. He is the author of Ideology of the Hindi Film (OUP, 1998). His recent work has been in the areas of star studies, political theory, and questions of linguistic identity.

x Notes on contributors Shae Wan-chaw is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is interested in cultural studies and social theory, among other things. Kaori Tsurumoto received her PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, the University of London, in 2001 and now lectures on gender and cultural studies at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, School of Contemporary International Studies. Wong Pik-wan is a Lecturer in the General Education Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her main research interests are in the areas of Hong Kong politics and gender studies.

Preface

Electoral democracy, albeit with varying degrees of fairness, openness and level playing field, of freedom or violent coercion to vote, is in the twentyfirst century the hegemonic ‘legitimate’ political system in the world. Any country, including single-party states, that does not conduct some semblance of popular election of its government is treated as a ‘pariah’ in the community of nation-states. In Asia, a wide range of definitions and practices of electoral democracy can be found: full democratic polities such as Japan and India; newly democratizing polities such as Taiwan, Korea and Indonesia and stable semi-democracies such as Malaysia and Singapore and special administrative regions such as Hong Kong and Macau. With such a range of differences, comparative analysis should improve significantly our understandings of electoral democratic practices. Wherever there is an election, an election campaign is necessary. Indeed, election campaigning has become a ‘science’ in itself, spawning experts who travel the world to help different politicians for a very significant fee; witness, in 2004, the campaign manager of the successful re-election of American President G.W. Bush crossing the Atlantic to manage the re-election campaign for British Prime Minister Tony Blair. There is no shortage of ‘how to conduct a successful election campaign’ textbooks used in departments of media and public relations studies. ‘Ideally’ in an election campaign, contesting candidates and political parties would clearly state their respective positions on major social issues and public policies; citizens as electorate would evaluate and weigh up the ‘reasonableness’ and ‘viability’ of the promises made, then, calmly cast their secret votes according to their own reasons and interests on polling day. If this were the measure, then even First World democracies are disrupted by ‘irrationalities’ such as fundamentalist commitment to certain beliefs and values, personal dislike or attraction to particular candidates and other idiosyncrasies of specific regions and groups of individuals. Nevertheless, the necessary failure has not prevented analysts from implicitly or explicitly using the ‘ideal’ in negatively evaluating the ‘failures’ of Asian nation-states in various terms, particularly ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’ and violence.

xii Preface Alternatively, electoral processes must be viewed as embedded in the cultural milieu in which they are conducted. An election is a cultural ‘event’, distinct but nonetheless in continuity with the flow of everyday life of the local population. The campaign activities through which candidates standing for election aim to motivate and mobilize the masses to vote, which together constitute much of the electioneering activities, must be culturally ‘sensible’ to the electorate itself. If a candidate is to appeal to the electorate for votes, his/her campaign activities must draw on elements of the ‘popular’ culture, the cultural practices of the masses, in order to draw emotional and rational resonances from the electorate. So conceived, instead of being framed and delegated to procedural irregularities and social-moral deviances, differences in electoral practices would be fore-grounded; they are the substance of the research and analysis. Such an analytic framework has seldom been undertaken; an exception is the small body of material on symbolic politics. It is the approach taken in this volume. 2004 was a year of elections across Asia, providing a rare opportunity to conduct comparative research on electioneering activities as popular culture. Obviously, the research could not be undertaken by a single researcher. It necessarily had to be multi-sited and conducted simultaneously. No single researcher could traverse this range of geographic, language and cultural boundaries; the geographical spread – from India to Japan, the multiple mutually non-comprehensible language boundaries – from Hindi to Thai to Cantonese to Taiwanese, and the cultural boundaries implied by the geography and languages. The research therefore had to be collaborative work done by different individuals in situ in the different locations across the continent. Analysis was to be undertaken from the ‘inside’, by individuals who appreciate their own contexts, ironies, lamentations and hope in the less-thanideal democratic systems. Individual social scientists were contacted early in the year to undertake the research as elections unfolded in their respective locations – India, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan (municipal elections), Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia. Some of the invited immediately grasped the idea, others were surprised by the suggestion but quickly saw its exciting possibilities. These reactions are recalled in the end of the editor’s Introduction in this volume; the Introduction is also the concept paper that frames and loosely guides the individual in situ country research. A workshop was held in February 2005 at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Once the researchers had gathered and presented their findings, it was obvious that there was no such phenomenon as a completely ‘rationalized’ election. The electioneering activities in each country were determined by local cultural practices, ranging from images and characters drawn from popular television series to traditional practices of wedding ceremonies and gambling practices, to classical idioms and poetry, written in Chinese ink calligraphy. The richness of the differences was amazing. To compare these essays is to get a glimpse of the varied cultures of Asia across the continent. This volume is the result of the workshop.

Acknowledgements

The workshop was organized under the auspices of the Cultural Studies Research Cluster, the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Members of the research cluster, particularly Chen Kuan-Hsing and S.V. Srinivas, provided valuable comments during the workshop. The administrative assistance of Valerie Yeo of the events organizing team at ARI was indispensable. Laavanya Kathiravelu provided valuable editorial assistance for the final manuscript. Funding from ARI is gratefully acknowledged.

Introduction Political elections as popular culture Chua Beng Huat

By the end of the twentieth century, the hegemony of ‘democracy’ as the only ‘legitimate’ form of government in the contemporary world had allowed the United States of America to use the ‘promotion’ of democracy as its foreign policy and justified its use of military force in removing ‘dictators’, as in the case of its attack on Iraq in 2002. Fundamental to a ‘democracy’ is the use of general elections as the means to select citizen representatives who will constitute the government. Elections held at periodic intervals to change or to re-elect the incumbent government for another term in office is, therefore, presumed to be the means by which the masses ‘influence the choice of a nation’s governors’ and, as such is ‘the central institution of popular participation in government’ (Rose 1980: 1). Countries that stubbornly refused to maintain some semblance of electoral representative politics, such as the military state of Myanmar and the one-person-totalitarian-cult state of North Korea, are treated contemptuously as ‘pariah’ states by all the other nations. In political science theories of democracy, elections are rational procedures by which competing candidates for public offices present themselves to the electorate as the persons best able to execute a set of proposals for future developments, invoking their past records of achievements as evidence of competence and social responsibility. Within the contest, all political activities that lead up to the final casting of votes on election day are considered ‘necessary’ activities that serve to disseminate information regarding the candidates and their respective proposals for a better future to the electorate, so that the latter can make informed and rational choices. Members of the electorate are to rationally weigh the truthfulness of all the information received, the desirability and feasibility of the respective proposals of each of the candidates, before casting votes for their preferred candidates. The statistical result of the election, which tallies up all the votes cast for the contesting candidates, is considered the ‘popular will’, as in the common refrain after the result is announced, ‘The people have spoken.’ Such a picture of reason regarding the most fundamental process of selecting members of a government in a modern democracy is a necessary fiction, without which there would be little faith in the government that is subsequently installed.

2 Introduction It is fictional, first, because in contemporary democracies election alone has never been sufficient to give the elected political legitimacy. Political legitimacy of an elected government rests on the acceptance of other conditions that prevents the election result from being contested. If contested, political instability would ensue which, unfortunately, happens frequently in many ‘democracies’ in the developing world of Asia and Africa (Dahrendorf 2005). Second, in most developed and mature democracies, particularly in the West, voters’ turnouts have been declining. Governing bodies are increasingly elected by minorities of the electorate. The low turnout reflects increasing scepticism among citizens regarding the election process for different reasons, including the fact that public office has become a contest of the rich and powerful, an elite game, because running in elections have become very expensive undertakings. The low turnout also raises questions about the degree and quality of representation of those elected and thus, the government so constituted. Third, in polities that are federations of states with parliamentary systems where, generally, the leader of the political party which won the most number of contested seats also becomes the prime minister, general elections often expose the very fragility, if not instability, of the very idea of the ‘nation’ and the ‘national’. In such instances, national parties with declining popular support often become increasing dependent and thus beholden to regional and/or state-based political parties which are oriented to local rather than national interests, to form a ruling coalition as the federal national government. The ‘nation’ is thus a fragmented entity and the ‘national’ is elusive if not illusory. As Prasad points out in Chapter 7 of this volume, in his analysis of the 2004 Indian general election, ‘there is no way of translating the complex voting patterns, party loyalties, regional and caste interests, etc., into an expression of the national political will’. Finally, in practice, activities during and after the election campaigns are seldom merely about information dissemination. In politically less savoury conditions, political campaigns often involved rampant physical violence to properties and people, with supporters of competing political parties and candidates intimidating and physically abusing, including murdering, each other. Electorates are often threatened with violence and coerced to vote for particular candidates. Apart from violence, competing candidates may use money and other material enticements to ‘buy’ the votes from electorate and the latter are often equally keen to ‘sell’ their votes in exchange for material advantages. In such circumstance, election time is a time of ‘gift’ exchanges and a brief period of modest ‘redistribution’ of wealth in otherwise highly unequal economic environments. Conventional political scientists see the untidiness of these campaign activities as ‘corrupt’, ‘undesirable’ and ‘irrational’ aspects of election that should eventually be eliminated, to be replaced by the ‘rational’ process of choosing the best individuals who would govern the nation for the fixed period of years until the next election. The ‘informed choice’ model of elections seeks to separate the political sphere and its activities from the larger cultural environment in which the

Introduction

3

election takes place. It seeks to domesticate the election process by suppressing all the unwieldy untidiness of electioneering activities as ‘irrationalities’. Ultimately, election is supposed to be a set of ‘universalistic’ practices that is carried out in similar, orderly manner everywhere in the world, with the entire process being driven by the arrival of an outcome by aggregation of individual votes.1 As Anderson observes, ‘normal voting is in many ways a peculiar activity’: [O]ne joins a queue of people whom one does not typically know, to take a turn to enter a solitary space, where one pulls levers or marks pieces of paper, and then leaves the site with the same calm discretion with which one enters it – without questions being asked. It is almost the only political act imaginable in perfect solitude, and it is completely symbolic. It is thus almost the polar opposite of all other forms of personal political participation. Insofar as it has general meaning, it acquires this meaning only by mathematical aggregation. (1996: 14) The desire to separate a ‘universalized’ politics of election – in which electioneering activities are tolerated as necessary inconveniences and only the aggregated outcome matters – from the larger cultural sphere in which elections take place is, of course, practically unrealizable. This dream of a set of unsullied universal procedures constantly rubs up against, and is disrupted again and again by local popular cultural practices. First, in each and every location, the modes and reasons of electioneering practices are never random but unavoidably embedded in and hewed from the local cultural milieu. Second, although election to public office is an elite game which confines ‘active and regular political participation to specialists – professional politicians – who not only have a strong interest in their institutionalized oligopoly, but who are largely drawn from particular social strata, most often the middle or upper middle classes’ (ibid.: 14), electioneering activities need to mobilize the masses. To engage the masses, electioneering activities must be able to tap into their sentiments which are shaped by the local ‘popular culture’. Popular culture is socially ontologically prior to elections and electioneering activities must necessarily draw resonance from it if the activities are to be ‘successful’ in pulling in and persuading the crowds. The constellations of activities of popular participation in elections must therefore be framed and analysed in terms of local cultural practices in their own right. Such analyses are the subject of interest in this collection of essays.

Popular culture The dichotomous division between elected office as an elite game and electioneering activities as popular cultural practices of the masses embraces the analytic focus on ‘popular culture’ developed by the Birmingham Centre for

4 Introduction Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which may be characterized as one that is ‘deeply committed to defending the cultural creativity of subordinated groups’ (Gunster 2004: 172), reflected in Stuart Hall’s simple declaration (1994: 460): ‘ordinary people are not cultural dopes’. The ‘ordinary’, embracing all the ‘subordinated’, generically designates ‘the popular’, against the definition of ‘culture’ as the possessed of the elite and the learned, namely, the ‘cultured’ classes or in Stuart Hall’s term, ‘the dominant classes’ (1994).2 The dichotomous structural division constitutes ‘the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference: roughly, between what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not’ (ibid.: 461). Consequently, the division domination/subordination remains stable, while the actual inventories of cultural content keep changing. The analytic concern is the politics of cultural change, under historically specific ‘relations that constantly structure [the cultural field] into dominant and subordinate formations’ (ibid.: 462), as cultural objects and practices move either in ascendancy from the popular to the dominant or descend from the dominant and appropriated or absorbed into the popular. The interchangeable use of the term ‘subordinated’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘popular’ invariably refers symbolically and substantively to the vast majority of the non-elite population as an statistical empirical reality. Symbolically the ‘ordinariness’ of cultural practices of ‘ordinary’ people refers to practices that one acquires as part of living the everyday life rather than through specialized and learned practices. For example, the emphasis on ‘ordinary cultural practices’ has led to studies of the popular consumption of broadcast media as subjective meaningful activities, including re-imagining the political structures, of daily life under capitalism; in contrast to suggestions that such consumption is a numbing of political consciousness. On the whole, the productivity of focusing on the ‘ordinary’ is reflected in the expanding research fields of Sociology and Cultural Studies of the ‘everyday life’ (Gardiner 2000). The constitution of everyday life of ordinary people can be conceptualized as a series of stable routines that are repetitive and cyclical of varying durations, from daily cycles to annual and even longer calendar cycles. The longer the interval between routines in a cycle, the more the activity will appear as ‘occasional’ and takes on the appearance of an ‘occasion’, an ‘event’, as in the celebratory and ritualistic cultural festivals and other events. These occasional events periodically disrupt the stable, recurrent, seemingly unchanging daily features and cycles of social life that maintain social continuity. The occasional bear a simple relation to the routinized: each periodic event ‘is a noisy interruption of everyday public life’ (Humphrey 2001: 1). Analytic attention to the occasional and eventful, such as all forms of rituals, is central to anthropological interest in general. It is also a concern of an earlier moment in the study of popular culture in particular; namely, the study of medieval festivities as part of the popular culture of Europe.3

Introduction

5

These festivities were culturally significant because, like all rituals, they were occasions in which elements of the normal, hierarchical symbolic social order were inverted through transgressive acts that disrupt and challenge the established norms and order. In the immediate duration of their performance, these transgressive activities minimally served to release the repressed frustrations, indignations and injustices suffered under during normal times (Humphrey 2001: 1). However, the outcome of transgression is never entirely certain. With the right inflammatory conditions, it could lead to radical social change or its effect could smoulder over a longer period of time and might become a catalyst of future cultural change. Occasional events that disrupt the flow of the mundane in everyday life, therefore, bring into relief, thus focus our analytic attention, on the ‘more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor’ which ‘must be the starting point for any study, both the basis for, and the transformations of, popular culture’ (Hall 1994: 455).

Political election as occasioned event In a world that configures societies as nation-states, one significant periodic event in contemporary social political life is the periodic political election, in which the people elect their representatives supposedly to represent them in government but in actual practice to govern them. The dual consequence of representation/govern provides the discursive space for those elected to equivocate about the ‘meaning’ of their election and the meaning of ‘government’. The liberal-minded argue that their ‘rightful’ role is to represent the interest of those who have elected them, while conservatives argue that, having been given the trust by and of the electorate, their role is to govern in the best interest of the entire society. On the part of the masses as electorate, in spite of commonly held scepticism towards the entire ‘business’ of politics as something less than the honesty and integrity that politicians claim and promise, elections hold out hopes for changes and reforms and ultimately, a better future. Elections holds out the promise ‘to the socially disadvantaged above all, of the enactment, in brief, decision historical moments, of laws enforceable on every relevant site of struggle within the state’s geographical stretch’ (Andersen 1996: 13); in this sense, election is an institutionalized part of the constant struggle of the masses to transform their daily life. During the designated election campaigning period, contesting parties and individual candidates would be engaged in different activities: knocking on doors to meet individual electorate, television appearances, shaking hands at shopping malls and speaking at organized mass rallies, hoping to convince members of the electorate to vote for them. Obviously, behind each contesting candidate are teams of ‘professionals’ who raise campaign funds, write speeches, take polls, do research on opponents and craft media advertisements. Mounting a successful campaign has become a ‘science’ in itself

6 Introduction and there is no shortage of professional insider’s accounts of how and when an election was won (Bailey et al. 2000; Thurber 2000) and ‘textbooks’ on to run a successful campaign (Powell and Cowart 2003). In spite of the ‘professionalization’ of campaigns, elections remain the primary channels of popular participation in politics. The character and intensity of popular participation obviously depend on the social and political culture of the country in question. For example, it has been observed that developing countries have a greater tendency to introduce compulsory voting to get their citizens to the polls because very significant number of the electorate would ignore the elections if there were no penalties (Powell 1980: 24). On the other hand, states with compulsory voting, such as Australia and Singapore, would argue that voting is every citizen’s duty if democracy as government by the people is to have any real substance. Even in instances where there are no real contests, popular participation in election can take different forms. In Indonesia during the authoritarian rule of President Suharto, when the periodic general elections were a meaningless exercise in terms of the final selection of parliamentarians to a totally compliant assembly, people were still mobilized during the election campaigning period to participate in the ‘pesta democrasi’, the ‘festival of democracy’ (Little 1996). Drawing on his analysis of Malaysia in this volume, Loh suggests, it is plausible that because the culture of democracy is so underdeveloped, elections may become ‘too emphasized’. These instances do not negate the fact that general elections remain the institutionalized means of mass political participation. Even in instances where the masses are generally sceptical about the likelihood of any changes in the political structure and leadership, political participation in the occasional elections are possible because, despite the healthy cynicism of experience, there is the optimism of hope that ‘this’ time it will make a difference; illustrative of this is the generally very high voting rates in Malaysia, where the outcome has always been a foregone conclusion, with the incumbent coalition government winning yet again, since 1970. One is reminded that ‘ordinary people are not cultural dopes’, people as electorate participate in elections with full awareness of irony, cynicism and even sense of impotence and, of course, hope. For interested individuals, participation in an election is not restricted to the casting of votes on polling day. Indeed, in instances when the winning candidate is a foregone conclusion, it is difficult to drum up enthusiasm about the election in that particular constituency and the candidate might even be left uncontested because he or she had been a successful and therefore, a popular incumbent in the office that is to be contested. In contrast, where there are genuine contests, active participation in the constellation of activities that constitute ‘the campaign’ is of far greater significance than the casting of the vote. Furthermore, during the campaigning period, not all individuals mobilized are engaged in generating support for specific political parties and candidates. Others use the period of relative freedom from normal legal constraints on free speech to mount protests against the

Introduction

7

existing political system, call for reform and generally promote counterestablishment ideologies. These activities disrupt the daily routine of the active participants – minimally as an ‘interested’ individual taking time to attend political rallies of different political parties and candidates to maximum engagement in taking financially costly leave from regular employment to participate fully in campaigning activities. As Ko observes in her study of the 2004 Taiwan presidential election in Chapter 1 in this volume, ‘The fuel for the [election] machine is not the lives of the citizens but the time culled from the people.’ Individuals accept such personal costs and disruptions to their daily life as a means by which to expand one’s effects on the outcome of the election beyond the one vote to which one is entitled, ‘by influencing the votes of others, the selection of candidates and /or the formation of campaign issues’ (Verba and Nie 1972: 46).

Institutionalized contest Materiality of popular support Electioneering as occasioned disruptions of the unremarkable flow of everyday life has certain features and structures. First, each contesting political party must try to impress on the electorate that its platform and candidates are ‘popular’, that it has mass support. This popular support is made manifest through the political party’s and/or its individual candidate’s ability to generate large number of people to attend the public events, such as mass rallies and street-campaigning, that they organized. These events must be able to produce a ‘crowd’ – a concept to which we will return later in the chapter. A large crowd creates a material ‘presence’ as the physicality of bodies as a crowd makes visible the invisibility of a diffused ‘popular support’, thus simultaneously lending credence and displacing scepticism in the party’s and candidate’s claim of ‘popularity’.4 Conversely, absence of attendees immediately falsifies any exaggerated claims of popular support. The risk of failure to a crowd-pulling event is therefore very high. Crowd-pulling events become vehicles for ‘displaying’ the relative strengths of the contesting parties and candidates. During the campaign period, every contesting political party and individual candidate organizes crowd-generating public events. Together, these events create an aggregated impression that the entire social body is mobilized, involved and focused on the election. Together, they create an illusion of participation by the whole people, befitting the claims and desires of a ‘democracy’. A final event would be held on election night, prepared with uncertainty of outcome of the result, it can turn out to be a rancorous victory celebration or a dejected gathering of the defeated. Either way, this final gathering is needed to mark the close of an ‘occasion’ and to ‘decompress’ from the heightened political awareness, excitement and activities. Thus,

8 Introduction from the point of view of popular participation, for individuals who voluntarily are involved in the campaign, the result at the end of the voting day may be said to be anti-climatic. Pervasive visibility A successful physical demonstration of popular support, measured in the sheer size of the crowd, creates a spectacle that is ‘newsworthy’. Indeed, ‘creating’ news is part of the reason for such crowd-pulling events. Their visual impact is very much a calculated activity: political parties issue uniforms, placards of campaign slogans, photographs of the party leaders and candidates and caricature effigies of the opponents to supporters, who parade these items prominently before the cameras of the mass media. The photographic images of the colourful and boisterous crowd enable the event to be detached from the constraints of physical space and time and be translocalized, as they are repetitively broadcast and circulated through the mass media, amplifying the symbolic significance and effects of the event. The broadcast images, voices and sounds become the only substitute for being at the events for those who were absent. Obviously, the effect of television is far more significant than the newspaper particularly where overwhelming proportion of the electorate is illiterate, which applies to vast number of people in developing countries. Mass media space is thus a resource that all contesting participants in electioneering must compete to occupy by intentionally generating ‘mediasignificant’ events as ‘news’, getting free and expanding publicity and attention of the electorate. For the campaign professionals, such media attention and amplification of the organized events are measures of their professional success; the coverage thus generated are called ‘earned media’ (Canon 2001: 224), in contrast to media spaces and spots that the campaigners have to pay for as advertisements for their candidates. And, free publicity gains credibility as ‘campaign effectiveness’ over paid publicity. With precisely the same desire for free publicity, others can use the occasion, hijacking the hard work of the event organizers, to parade their own messages. The circulation and recirculation of the images of crowds in mass media create a much more pervasive sense of the significance of the event throughout the social body. Interpellating the audiences of these images into the media-mediated events, they generate a sense that the ‘entire’ society is involved in the electioneering process, again reaffirming the myth of modern democracies.

The crowd at mass events As mentioned earlier, events organized by the contesting political parties and candidates attempt to generate a crowd. The specificity of the concept of a ‘crowd’ is brilliantly portrayed by Walter Benjamin:

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A street, a conflagration, or a traffic accident assemble people who are not defined along class lines. They present themselves as concrete gatherings, but socially they remain abstract – namely, in their isolated private interests. Their models are the customers who, each in his private interest, gather at the market around their ‘common cause’. In many cases, such gatherings have only a statistical existence. This existence conceals the really monstrous thing about them: the concentration of private persons as such by the accident of their private interests. (quoted in Slater 1993: 190) Slater provides further conceptually significant commentary: This image of the crowd contains two dialectically related (hence irreducible) terms: on the one hand, autonomous activity – people moving about according to their own self-determined logic. The crowd is not called into being as a whole, but because a number of individuals coincide – accidentally in a causal sense – in turning their gaze towards a particular focus. Even their interest in the same object is not identical. Hence the independent second term: a focus – a spectacle, an event, an object of interest of desire . . . However, given the dialectical logic by which the [above] two terms connected, crowds ‘happened’ – they cannot be coerced into existence. However rationalized, indeed successful marketing may be, what it attracts is still a crowd: a contingent, unstable and emergent entity, one of whose terms is always agency, however compromised that agency may be. (ibid.:190, original emphasis) The focus of the crowd may be unplanned, such as a traffic accident, or a ‘common cause’, such as an election, to ‘market’ the contesting political parties, candidates and their platforms. The emphasis on individualized agency of all who constitute the ‘crowd’, each with his/her own reason and desire is conceptually very important as it immediately foregrounds the multiplicity of purposes of the individuals. A non-exhaustive, readily imaginable listing of individual reasons for attending an electioneering event will include: those who are there to show support for their preferred party and candidate; detractors who are there to cast aspersions on the same candidate; uncommitted individuals who are looking to be convinced and consequently cast their votes accordingly on polling day; those who are there to listen to their grievances articulated by the orators featured in the events, in language far more effective than their own and, sceptics there who hopes to be convinced of something, some reason to get involve with the entire process of elections and, those who are there to ‘hijack’ the event and use the occasion to promote their own issues and interests, saving themselves the work and expense of organizing it.

10 Introduction In the same crowd would, therefore, be different signs and symbols displayed – placards of support, of parody, of caricature, of insults. There will be different activities, reflecting the different logics and reasons of those who are there – applauding the speeches and speakers, alternatively booing the same, creating minor disturbances to get attention for the alternative causes and issues, clowning around for its own sake with a ready-made audience. Prevalent among those who exploit the event are, of course, nongovernment organizations and organized interest groups. This is especially so when the political sphere is narrowly defined and the mass media are state-controlled, as in the case of Malaysia, where as Loh suggests, the short campaign period ‘nonetheless . . . remains an opportunity for the Opposition, NGOs and other critics to engage and egg on a participatory politics’.5 The concept of the ‘crowd’ analytically compels us to disaggregate the presumed ‘unity’ of the gathering into its constitutive components and fragments. It enables us to go beyond a campaign-event organizer’s attempt at creating and claiming unified mass support of all those present at the event. In tearing away the veiled illusion of unity of mass popular support at the event, it focuses our analytic attention on the complexities and instabilities of political support. Parenthetically, it should be noted that surveys and polls have become increasingly a part of electioneering to generate aggregated information about the attitudes of the electorate in order to arrive at some predictive indication of the possible election outcome. In this sense, survey and polling results can stand as proxy for the materiality of the ‘crowd’, making ‘visible’ the ‘invisible’ popular sentiments. However, polls remain poor substitutes for generating ‘visibility’ of popular support because individual members of the electorates remain abstract and invisible as ‘respondents’ to the polls. Furthermore, the poll results can never be sufficiently disaggregated to get at the agency of the individual voter. For these and other reasons, crowdgenerating activities continue to be fundamental to the election process. Of greater consequence is the arrival of new communication technologies as new tools for election campaigning. Among these are internet and its multiple communication modes and mobile phone messages. In these instances, generation of popular support or criticism of a particular political party and/or candidate takes on a ‘personal’ appeal, as campaigners use the new communication medium to narrow-cast their messages. Individuals are targeted through seemingly personalized messages as email or short messages (SMS) by ‘individual party supporters’ to all of their contacts in extensive mailing lists. As the process is repeated, the ‘personalized’ messages multiply cumulatively to produce a mass effect. The election of President Noh of Korea in 2003 has been attributed to this invisible process. So too was the massive public protest against the attempted coup by General Suchinda in 1992, which brought back the election process to Thailand, which also accounts for the continuing use of the internet as a channel for political commentaries by the urban middle class Thais in the 2005 General

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Election. The easy access of the internet has seriously transformed personal political participation beyond attending political rallies and casting a vote. It has enabled individuals to post and propagate their commentaries and opinions, ironically as satires or comics or seriously as debating points, on a multitude of websites. In these instances, although the effects and influences desired by the active participants remain the aggregate outcome of the election, the physicality of the crowd is completely dissipated and virtualized without a trace. Even if it is unlikely to completely displace crowd-generating events during electioneering, it will undoubtedly be a permanent part of the electioneering process from now on.

Order and transgression Political election as an institutionalized form of contest means that the contest is regulated and conducted within the bounds of social peace. Activities, behaviours and speeches made during the contest are to be subject to conventionally defined ‘good’ manners and tastes and, above all, within the law; although during the campaigning period, relatively speaking, maximum freedom is permitted for both contesting candidates and their supporters in the political arena. In general, rules for maintenance of social order apply: a time and place to be specified, often a licence from policing and other relevant authorities must be sought, the line-up of speakers is known ahead of time, partly as an advertisement for the event, and most importantly, peaceful physical behaviour regardless of the heat of rhetoric. This is a condition that obtains where the ‘culture’ of democracy is well entrenched, where the election process is open and fair and the outcome of the election is accepted by all. The conditions for relatively trouble-free elections have yet to be established in ‘new’ and ‘quasi’ democracies, such as those in contemporary Asia. In these instances even behaviours in parliament are often unsavoury; excesses in speeches and demeanour are never far away. One can, therefore, hardly expect electioneering activities to be polite and rational affairs. The rules of election are, of course, often violated by the contestants and their supporters, regardless how beautifully crafted are the laws. Additionally, in some of these new democracies, the legitimacy of the incumbent governments is often dubious in the eyes of the electorate and political power is maintained by other means, including the use of force or anti-democratic legislations. These conditions engender a sense of alienation and scepticism among the citizens not only towards the governments but towards the entire election process itself. Under such conditions, elections and campaigns take on very different meanings, eliciting very different modes of participation and behaviour. In societies where the practices of elections are modified to the benefits of incumbent political leaders, i.e. where there is no level playing field, the relative freedom of the election campaign period is often used by dissenting individuals and groups to express dissatisfaction with the system. The

12 Introduction transgressive activities of the sceptical, dissatisfied and dissident take centre stage in such circumstances. Demonstrations against the regime, caricatures of its political leaders, parodies of its oppression and ineptitude transform the election into public entertainment. These activities often make news and are amplified through circulation and recirculation in the increasingly globalized mass media, adding an international dimension to local elections. Generally, within these transgressive activities, the symbols of social order are inverted as ‘critique’ of the existing conditions. In so doing, the election campaign is turned into something resembling a ‘carnival’ – ideally ‘free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything’ (Bakhtin, quoted in Humphrey 2001: 31). Like the carnival, there are two possible trajectories for the transgressive activities. First, under the contemporary global hegemony of ‘democracy’ as the only morally defensible political system, the election is a necessity for any regime’s claim to legitimacy, regardless of how it is conducted. The transgressive activities of the marginalized and dissident are tolerated by anti-democratic regimes as a necessary evil, cynically under the cloak of ‘free’ elections. The transgressive activities are therefore ‘authorized transgressions’, a contradiction in terms (Eco 1984), ‘reserved for certain places, certain streets, or framed by the television screen’ (Eco, quoted in Humphrey 2001: 33). Permitted, if not authorized, during the campaign period, transgressions are acts of ‘blowing off steam’ for the sceptical, dissatisfied and dissident. Instead of challenging the regime, such acts in the end provide, ironically, the symbolic resources to ‘demonstrate’ the democratic claims of the repressive regime. Transgressions leave the extant social order intact, once the campaign period is over. However, such transgressive activities do in effect stretch the boundaries of social order and conventional good behaviour. They test the tolerance of incumbent anti-democratic governments that have a tenuous hold on the social order and, consequently, are not adverse to the use of force. Thus, it takes very little for transgressions at election rallies to become ‘too’ offensive to the regime, provoking it to use force to suppress the activities, pushing the situation into violence, riots and general social disorder, with uncertain outcomes, including the replacement of the incumbent regime by one more inclined towards greater democratization.6 An illustrative example is the development of so-called ‘People Power’ in the Philippines, first, to dislodge the late President Marcos in 1986 and then again in 2001 to remove the duly elected President Estrada. Nevertheless, the risk of such spontaneous uprising becoming entrenched and replacing orderly elections as a mechanism to change government is a prospect that even ex-President Cora Aquino counselled against. In the long run, the new and quasi-democracies examined here would still desire an orderly election process to be in place, a domestication of the unwieldy electioneering activities and political participation as a sign of political maturity and political modernity.

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Elections as popular culture practices in Asia In 2004, many countries in Asia had elections at different levels of government. It provided an unprecedented opportunity not only to research popular local cultural practices during electioneering but also to bring these researches into comparative perspective. For reasons of geography, national cultural boundaries and linguistic divisions, it is well nigh impossible for a researcher to do the comparative study single-handedly. However, comparative perspectives, both conceptual and substantive, can be achieved by bringing together within one volume the research results undertaken by an individual researcher in his or her home country. Comparative knowledge can thus be derived from reading all the country studies as a whole. The chapters in this volume are the result of the collaborative work from the following countries: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India and Japan, all of which held elections in 2004; Thailand held a general election in February 2005 and Korea held a presidential election in 2002. Obviously, the point is not to survey all the countries in Asia, which is well nigh impossible, even if there were no constraint of space. Rather, it is to demonstrate the utility of conceptualization of ‘elections as popular culture’ with the elections as illustrations. To the extent that elections are periodic events, in each location the cultural practices in electioneering would, of course, repeat many features of what is the local convention. The 2004 election was in this sense no exception and its analysis should reveal these conventional features. However, as contesting parties in each election try to make their respective platforms relevant by commenting on issues of the time and attracting new supporters, contextual elements specific to the year 2004 would also feature as ‘particularities’ that rework the conventional framework. An illustrative example from this volume is the Taiwan election. Conventionally, a final mass rally is organized by every contesting party to both demonstrate the strength of the popular support and release the emotions that have been accumulating during the campaign period. However, in the 2004 Presidential Election, the attempted assassination of the incumbent President and Vice-President, who were also candidates for the ruling party, on the eve of the election caused the final rallies of all the political parties to be cancelled. The result was, as Ko argued, the pent-up energies of the opposition parties were released into street protests when the election was won by a hair’s breadth by the incumbents.7 The same repetition of conventional practices with the particularities of the 2004 elections is found in all the cases studies. Both the local conventional practices and specific particularities of the 2004 elections are of course equally worthy of analytic attention. To get at local colour, while a general conceptual framework for treating political election as popular culture has been attempted in this introductory chapter, it will be inappropriate to methodologically insist on a common approach or on a set of common themes for all the instances examined. As

14 Introduction the empirical material to be analysed in each location is determined by local culture and thus different from the other locations, each researcher has to choose and focus on significant themes and practices in local elections and examine these choices with contextually appropriate methodological approaches. This methodological freedom has enriched the comparative substantive knowledge of popular culture in Asia, without jeopardizing the possibility of comparative insights. Each chapter is an illustration and substantiation of the fruitfulness of examining ‘political elections as popular culture’, and together they provide comparative insights into the different electioneering popular cultures in Asia. As suggested in the conceptual framework, crowds were ubiquitous in all the elections observed, engaging in different activities in different locations, determined by the local political conditions. The biggest crowds were seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indonesia. Since 1997, Hong Kong has been a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Being denied a fully elected local government by the PRC, two massive demonstrations to demand full suffrage were organized prior to the 2004 election of a limited mandate. In part to facilitate counting by the official eye, spectacular visibility of the size of the crowd was enhanced by requesting all the demonstrators to wear black in the first and white in the second demonstration; while black symbolically coded the ‘death’ of democracy, it was unsuitable in the summer sun. Prominent in the crowd were ‘rhymes’ and ‘idioms’ written in Chinese ink – a common evocation of the literate in Chinese communities – either mounted on hardboards or hung loosely from umbrellas and/or simply written on the clothes of the demonstrators, giving new visibility to the idea of ‘the personal is political’. In Taiwan, there were no major issues of disagreement between the two contesting national parties. However, both felt the need to express resistance to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political intention to reclaim Taiwan as a ‘province’ through what was called ‘I love Taiwan’ mass rallies. The ‘masses’ were visually enhanced by colour coding the respective party supporters, pan-Blue for the Kuomintang (KMT) and pan-Green for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Correspondingly, the behaviours of the political party leaders became competing gestures of the expression of their ‘love’ for Taiwan. Perhaps the most memorable image of this demonstration of ‘love’ was when the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of KMT knelt on the ground, simultaneously but in different cities, kissed the ground and swore ‘to love Taiwan and protect Taiwan with their blood’. Images of the rallies and this specific event were, of course, televised and repeatedly broadcast. A variation of the ‘I love Taiwan’ campaign was enacted in India in 2004. The then ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the incumbent advantage of having its hands on public funds, mounted an advertisement blitz on the theme of ‘India Shining’. The sleek, well-designed, colourful hoardings, print ads and television commercials with happy faces and personalized

Introduction

15

slogans – ‘I Make My India Shine’ – veiled an electioneering campaign behind the celebration of national achievements. According to Prasad, this was not unprecedented. The assassinated President Rajiv Gandhi had mounted similar campaign in which celebrities from the fields of sports, cinema and music spouted the slogan, ‘Mera bharat mahan’ (My India is Great’)! In Indonesia, the 2004 presidential elections were the second free election after almost four decades of the military-authoritarian regime of Suharto. The crowd came in the form of what Lindsay calls ‘fully motorized affairs’. Motorcycle squads of all-male riders, dressed in the bright single-colour jackets of the respective political parties, with party flags flying, roamed the streets, followed by buses, trucks and cars, crammed full of bodies. Mobilized to show force, such motorized parades called ‘pawai’ drew cultural resonance from other forms of parades, like the parade of floats during religious festivals. Almost all-male crowds were also created by engaging professional female popular music singers to perform on stage, sharing the stage were party candidates and stalwarts. Campaign speeches, if any, were kept to the minimum. In this election, singing seemed to be a necessary qualification for candidacy. All the candidates sang on stage during the campaign period, with the possible exception of the then incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri,8 culminating in a televised event in which they sang in unison a common folk song, as if to show that there was no animosity among the contestants but they were instead, together, the very manifestation of the founding motto of the nation, ‘unity in diversity’. The ubiquity of crowds during elections is such that it borders on the unremarkable until its absence is noted. Japan has the most ‘quiet’ or, in Tsurumoto’s words, ‘boring’ municipal elections.9 In the interest of maintaining ‘equality’ of conditions and avoidance of corruption, legislations specify down to the last detail the instruments and activities that may be employed by the contesting candidates. For example, publicly installed white boards, drawn with equal size squares, are installed on fences of public buildings. Each candidate is entitled to one poster on each board, with only the candidate’s front-facial photograph, his or her name and the name of the political party to which he or she belongs. Furthermore, each candidate is entitled to a single minivan as the campaign vehicle to ferry the candidate and a small number of campaign workers. The van is fitted with loudspeakers to broadcast the candidate and the party’s platform. The Japanese case stands at one extreme of the continuum of rousing electioneering campaigns as the highly rationalized, end-result driven election process. It may also signify an extreme instance of the ‘universality’ of election process, where the legal codes have successfully domesticated popular cultural electioneering practices. This is something that the Thai polity has been trying to achieve in the name of ‘cleaning up’ what have been very financially corrupt affairs and has made any festive’ campaign activities ‘illegal’. Away from the actual physical bodies of the crowd are the media images of campaigning activities. The images are of course not restricted to those

16 Introduction generated by the crowd but include professionally crafted images and messages put out by the political parties and their candidates. In addition to the above-mentioned Indian instance, where advertisements produced by the incumbent government with public funds supposedly in ‘celebration’ of the nation in effect provide advertisements for the incumbent ruling party. Finally, there are images and messages generated by the media industry itself as products which are meant to inform the electorates. The claim ‘to inform’ has to be heavily discounted when the media are controlled by the ruling coalition as in Malaysia, or Thailand where the government directly owned four of the six television channels, and, of the remaining two, one is owned by the family of the Prime Minister and the other owned by members of the cabinet. Since its formation in 1963, Malaysia has been governed by a ruling coalition led by the United Malay National Organization.10 Consequently, until now, the final outcome of a general election has always been a foregone conclusion. Under such certainty, the ‘intensity’ and ‘heat’ of an election have to be and are very significantly generated by the pro-government media. For example, on polling day, newspapers provide tables for people to keep scores on each constituency and to tally up the winners and losers, as if in a sports meeting or at the race-course. However, Loh observes, as the media are government-controlled or owned by the political parties in the ruling coalition, generating the ‘hype’ for general elections has a limit: the media still ‘must excite the voters to believe that they make a difference and should come to vote while ensuring that the Barisan National [the ruling coalition] is returned to power’. The ‘media’ is constituted by different mediums, each with is own segment of consumer population, it therefore has a different influence and impact on the electorate as a whole. Furthermore, in the contemporary world, the media is no longer limited to commercial broadcast channels but includes all the new computer-mediated information and communication technologies, such as the internet and the ubiquitous mobile phone, with its own communication facilities, such as short messaging. In Thailand, Pongsawat observes that mass media is more important to the urban middleclass electorate, who consume electioneering messages in the same way as they consume television dramas: ‘enjoying a feeling in a movement between involvement and distance, acceptance and protest’. Furthermore, they derived the greatest pleasures by posting and joining in the posting of ironic and sceptical commentaries on the multitude of internet websites. Similarly, the Hong Kong electorate used the internet extensively as a political space to parody politicians; often a politician’s website would be the target of attack with insulting parodies from internet users. The new communication media demonstrated its political power most dramatically in the 2002 Korean presidential election, which is the reason for its inclusion in this volume. The internet and the mobile phone have been credited as ‘the main factors which enabled Noh, political underdog,

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to turn the tide and eventually win the election’. Noh’s supporters ‘posted and exchanged updated news on the election in real time, analysis of public opinions, and impassioned messages to vote online’; they ‘made phone calls, and sent SMS ceaselessly to inform and galvanize voters who were considered Noh’s supporters’. Through the loosely structured networks of the internet and mobile phones, but conducted with very high degree of coordination and voluntary actions, Noh’s supporters were able to snatch victory on the very eve of the election. The internet and other information communication technologies have obviously joined the other media as a site for political participation by the masses. As suggested above, newspapers in Malaysia provide printed tables for their readers to keep scores on polling day. As the result in each constituency is an uncertain outcome, every election provides an array of opportunities to place a bet, to gamble. Bets can be placed on the outcome of every constituency, on particular contestants, on the number of seats won by different contesting political parties and, finally, on the final aggregate outcome which announces the winning party and thus the subsequent government. To the best of our knowledge, there are no legal gambling outlets for betting on elections in Asia. That only means that betting on elections simply goes underground. As Aguilar suggests, ‘The ritual structure or elections is akin to that of a game of chance’; the chance or gambling element is perhaps particularly emphasized in the Philippines because of years of political instability since the dismantling of martial law under the late authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. In Chapter 4, Aguilar follows up this suggestion with the most elegant use of an entire set of argot for cock-fights – a pervasive and legal Filipino entertainment – to match the attitudes and metaphors used by the poor, who participated in a national survey, conducted by the Institute of Philippine Culture in Manila. The analogy is too colourful to defy summary. While methodologically the analogy does not in itself ‘explain’ the behaviour during elections, it nevertheless points strongly to the link between cock-fights and elections in the popular imagination. This reaffirms the conviction of this collaborative project that political election is inextricably intertwined with fragments of the local popular culture in which it takes place. The above observations drawn from the case studies in this volume illustrate the general and comparable features of electioneering. However, as suggested earlier, each election also has its own particular features that respond to the immediate context in which it is held. Two illustrative examples can be provided: one whimsical, the other serious. In both the Taiwan and Hong Kong crowds, reflecting both traditional and contemporary popular cultures shared by their ethnic Chinese populations, demonstrators appeared in the costumes of Chinese opera and television icons. These costumed appearances were reminiscent of a currently popular activity among the youth in East Asia known as ‘Cosplay’ – ‘costume play’. Started in Japan, Cosplay parties are organized events in which young people dressed up as

18 Introduction their favourite manga, anime, movie or any popular iconic characters and parade in front of each other for no other reasons than dressing up and spectacle. Given this link to Cosplay, the meaning of ‘political’ participation of those so costumed was marked with uncertainty; they could very well be making a mockery of the entire political process, of the election and the demonstrations as farce. In Taiwan, it is conventional practice for the political parties to organize a final mass rally on the eve of polling day to release the intense emotions that have built up during the campaign period. During the 2004 presidential election, the assassination attempt on the DPP presidential and vicepresidential candidates on the eve of polling day resulted in the cancellation of all final mass rallies. Ko argues in Chapter 1 that one of the consequences was that the repressed emotions of KMT supporters were transferred to prolonged mass demonstrations throughout the country, in protest against the election result, in which the DPP won by a very narrow margin, although pre-election surveys and public sentiments had predicted the KMT to win. One year after the election, small demonstrations still continue. Arguably, the continuing instability of the present DPP government, under Chen Sui Pian, is a consequence of the lingering resentment of its ‘dubious’ election victory.

Conclusion According to Prasad, when he was first invited to participate in this collaborative project, as an Indian scholar who works on Indian cinemas and has observed the rise and fall of movie stars in politics of southern India, his immediate response was ‘Political election as popular culture, what else could it be?’ Indeed, it seems so obvious that there is no study of Indian politics as popular culture. Until the idea of the project was mooted, Ko had felt worn down by the worn-out politics of Taiwan, which perpetually circulate around the division between local Taiwanese, ‘Min-nan’ speakers and Mandarinspeaking ‘mainlanders-in-Taiwan’. The idea of examining the ‘tiresome’ elections as popular culture breathed new life and rejuvenated her interest in the 2004 Taiwan presidential election. Tsurumoto confessed to paying very little attention to municipal electioneering activities in Japan, although she had dutifully voted in them. Her disinterest, reflected in the sluggishness with which she dragged herself into fieldwork one Sunday morning, was confirmed by the findings of ‘more small vans with loudspeakers, more people wearing uni-coloured t-shirts, more fragments of trite phrases spoken over the microphone, more white gloves [worn by contesting candidates and also by taxi-drivers], more posters of similar formats, on and on and on’. These personal comments not only reflect the local conditions of electioneering but more importantly, constitute a range of responses to those very conditions. In the Indian case, where movie stars regularly morph into politicians, and where the ‘melodramatic’ character of elections resonates with popular Hindi movies, politics as popular culture is taken-for-granted

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as a matter of fact, if not matter of course. In Taiwan, the apparently insolvable issue of Taiwan’s political independence from the PRC has not only caused such deep divisions within the Taiwanese people but has settled itself into an oppressive presence which eclipses all other social, cultural and political issues. Yet how this oppressive presence is repetitively re-enacted during each presidential election, in and through electioneering practices, remains unexamined. These practices are uncritically dispensed with as irrationalities which are embarrassing as they signify a lack of political development, maturity and modernity. The intellectual desire is for ‘civilized’ behaviour, ‘reasoned’ discussions and ‘rational’ decisions during elections. In the proverb, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, Japan appears to have rid elections of embarrassing irrationalities, which results in a disinterested rather than an informed and rational electorate. By closely examining the popular cultural practices through which electioneering is conducted, we are not concerned with exposing the exotic features of these cultural practices. Nevertheless, the contributors to this volume certainly found pleasure in the apparent foibles of the politicians who dressed themselves up as popular cultural icons on their way to file for candidacy on nomination day and other entertaining visual images of some participants in the demonstrations. More significantly, these practices are ‘pleasurable’ and meaningful for the participants. These are the ways they participate in their ‘democracies’. These are the ways they express their faith in their systems, beyond the usual scepticism about particular politicians and the ‘system’ in general. These are the ways they participate in ‘the opportunity to remove from office the politicians in whom they have lost confidence, and to put into office those whom they prefer to be leaders’, and they are ‘acutely aware of systematic electoral fraud’.11 These popular cultural electioneering activities as modes of political participation will go some way towards answering the puzzle of why election turnouts remain high in Asian countries relative to developed countries.

Notes 1 For a political science view of the election process which sees many ‘irrationalities’ in many of the countries examined in this volume, see the essays on Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia in the volume edited by Taylor (1996). 2 This dominant/subordinate dichotomy marks the legacy of the neo-Marxist orientation of the influential intellectual path-breakers in British Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thomson. 3 Peter Burke claims that the study of popular culture Europe was premised on the discovery of the idea of the ‘people’: ‘It was in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when traditional popular culture was just beginning to disappear, that the “people” or the “folk” became a subject of interest to European intellectuals ([1974] 1994: 3). 4 For ‘physicality’ as a visual force, see Fisk’s (1989: 84) discussion of Barthes’ analysis of wrestling as a spectacular sport. 5 Loh, Chapter 6, in this volume.

20 Introduction 6 The two possible outcomes of ‘blowing off steam’ and ‘revolution’ are common tropes in the discussion of popular festivals (Humphrey 2001). 7 All illustrative examples in this section are drawn from the respective case studies in this volume, unless stated otherwise. Thus no specific references will be given. 8 Some candidates even released their own commercially marketed CDs, singing about their love for their nation. 9 During the central government election in 2005, whenever the popular incumbent Prime Minister Koizumi, went, he drew crowds. 10 UMNO was also the leader in the ruling coalition that governed Malaya after independence in 1957. 11 Aguilar, Chapter 4, this volume.

References Andersen, Benedict R. (1996) ‘Elections and participation in three Southeast Asian countries’, in Robert H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Election in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12–33. Bailey, Michael A., Faucheux, Ronald A., Herrnson, Paul S. and Wilcox, Clyde (eds) (2000) Campaigns and Elections: Contemporary Case Studies. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press. Burke, Peter ([1974] 1994) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Scholar Press. Canon, David (2001) ‘Wisconsin’s Second District: History in the Making’, in James Thurber (ed.) The Battle for Congress. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, pp. 199–228. Dahrendorf, Ralf (2005) ‘A Legal Election Does Not Always Bring Legitimacy’, The Straits Times (Singapore), 24 January, p. 17. Eco, Umberto (1984) ‘The Frame of Comic “Freedom” ’, in Thomas Sebeok (ed.) Carnival! Approaches to Semiotics, 64. Fisk, John (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin and Hyman. Gardiner, Michael E. (2000) Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Gunster, Shane (2004) Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hall, Stuart (1994) ‘Notes on Deconstructing “The Popular” ’, in John Storey (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 455– 466. Humphrey, Chris (2001) The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Little, William (1996) ‘A Useful Fiction: Democratic Legitimation in New Order Indonesia’, in Robert H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 34–60. Powell, G. Bingham, Jr. (1980) ‘Voting Turnout in Thirty Democracies: Partisan, Legal and Socio-economic Influences’, in R. Rose (ed.) Electoral Participation: A Comparative Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 5–34. Powell, Larry and Cowart, Joseph (2003) Political Campaign Communication: Inside and Out. Boston and New York: Pearson Education Inc. Rose, Richard (1980) Electoral Participation: A Comparative Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Slater, Don (1993) ‘Going shopping: markets, crowds and consumption’, in Chris Jenks (ed.) Cultural Reproduction. London: Routledge, pp. 188–209.

Introduction

21

Storey, John (1997) Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Taylor Robert H. (ed.) (2006) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thurber, James A. (2000) The Battles for Congress: Consultants, Candidates and Voters. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Verba, Sydney and Nie, Norman H. (1972) Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality. New York: Harper and Row.

22 Ko Yufen

1

The festive machine Taiwan’s 2004 elections as popular culture Yu-fen Ko

Political democratization in Taiwan was underway by the mid-1990s, when non-Kuomintang (KMT) political leaders began to coordinate their electioneering activities in local elections under the loose coalition of the Tangwai Campaign Corporation. After the lifting of the 40-year Martial Law in 1987, both popular political participation and the speed of democratization picked up dramatically. Since then, island-wide elections have been held virtually once a year or more frequently. Political science scholars have found postMartial Law Taiwan an ideal lab to investigate voting behaviors, public opinion surveys, and campaign strategies. Most critical discourses on Taiwanese elections have highlighted two issues: ethnic identities and nationalism. Ethnic politics is not defined by skin color or race because all the groups involved are Han-Chinese; the non-Chinese aboriginals are so marginalized in this society that they are not heard in the ethnic confrontations. ‘Ethnicity’ is roughly defined by language: the largest group, the Min-nan speakers vs. the second largest group, the Mandarin speakers.1 The third ethnic/language group, Hakka, has strategically negotiated and cooperated with the larger two, so as to gain more resources and maintain political purchase. Nationalism in Taiwan is a process of struggle for independence to claim that Taiwan is itself a nation with its own language and ethnicity against the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim on Taiwan as a province. This has led some Min-nan speakers to claim that they are ‘genetically’ different from the Han Chinese and to the categorization of the Min-nan group as ‘local/Taiwanese’ and Mandarin group as ‘outsider/Mainland’ group. Therefore, ‘ethnic’ divisions and independence have been two crucial causes of friction in every election, for political parties as well as for the society. Every year, the island’s population has to live through passionate confrontations between the opposing Min-nan speakers and Mandarin speakers. In this chapter I am not concerned with the by-now hackneyed topics associated with ‘ethnic politics’ but will try to interpret Taiwan’s elections as a form of popular culture. This shift of attention will hopefully throw new light on the meanings of these elections. This shift is also refreshing for me on a personal level. With this new conceptual lens, I no longer feel the omnipresent political campaigns tiresome, giving rise to anxiety and

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 23 discomfort. I have come to see them more as noisy festivals: the parasite-like banners all over the streets, the teams of motorcycles with flags invading the alleys, the parades of the trucks with the conventional musical instruments (usually meant for traditional weddings and festivals), the firecrackers being lit along the streets, the partisan evening mass gatherings which resemble pop music concerts, and, last but not least, the nonstop coverage of the elections in the media. In researching for this chapter, I had hoped that Cultural Studies scholars in Taiwan would have already written as much as the behavioral science scholars on the elections; however, to my surprise, I found that there has been very little attention paid to the phenomenon. Most articles in a critical vein are quite abstract in theoretical arguments and historical elaborations. This is to a certain extent reflective of the fact that elections in Taiwan seem to be, at the first sight, a war of ideologies, be it national, ethnic, or cultural. More attentive to ideological operations, critical theorists tend to take on the super-structural level as the battlefield, to call for peace and rational social dialogues among ethnic groups, and to advocate the making of an ideal public sphere, of course, with Habermas most prominently on their minds. They have completely ignored the operational analysis of political parties, which the Taiwan media call the ‘war machines for the election (
 !)’. I would like to suggest that any association of the ‘machine’ with connotations of a systematic and orderly operation of a well-structured organization should be avoided, because the election process is more akin to a provisional, contingent, and flexible guerrilla war. Like an all-out war, every election consists of maneuvers and guerrilla tactics meticulously designed by the cadre of each party. Like a state-wide war, each election mobilizes the entire citizenry. The fuel for the machine is not the lives of the citizens, but the time culled from the people. As numerous researchers point out, campaign rhetoric and media coverage are craftily calculated and arranged to trigger tensions and confrontations among contending groups (Fu 2004; Lu 2004; Chien 2004). Many worry that such drastically oppositional situations will bring more fractures, increase hatred among people, and, eventually, tear society apart (You 2004). As the academics are preoccupied with their yearning for rationality, what does not fall neatly into ‘rationality’ is ignored. However, elections are behaviorally euphoric in a festive fashion and the Taiwan election war/festive machines at times arouse emotions so poignant as to make people cry. As emotional manipulation in elections has been deeply imbedded in Taiwan for almost two decades, many analysts tend to dismiss emotions easily, treating the management, or mismanagement, of emotions as a ‘trick’ inherited from the protests and the street movements of the Martial Law period. Consequently, the question of how emotions are mobilized during and for the sake of elections remains unanalyzed. ‘Public’ is a popularized term in the rhetoric of Taiwan elections with local inflections. The idea ‘an election is a public affair’ often means

24 Ko Yufen ‘popular participation (
 !"#)= as a way to speak out and(
)’. The emotional investments in ‘public affairs’ in Taiwan exceed the conventional West-derived conceptualization of ‘public’, such as Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere as a space for idealized communication. With democratization as the political goal for the past 20 years, Taiwan people have grown familiar with the democratic rhetoric, yet the theoretical implications of ‘public’ – democracy, civility, orderly representative institution, and ‘modernity’ – are hard to find during Taiwan elections. I would argue that the elections in Taiwan are closer to Chatterjee’s definition of the ‘political’ (2000) which refers not to autonomy, rationality and liberty but to confrontations, negotiations, and calculations of power relations. Elections depend on the traditional or regional networks such as fraternities, the committees governing the temples, the system of domicile (
 !), family clans (
 ), village councils (
 !"), military housing compounds (
), and other community alliances. These establishments are not the widely celebrated modern civil organizations but represent more traditional, deep-rooted connections, or guanxi (
), interpersonal relations based on kinship, neighborhood, and acquaintance. They consist of interest exchange, power networking, and face, or mianzi (
). The modernizing goal of democracy is practiced through these alliances in a festive manner that combines traditional forces with commercial formats. For example, in many towns, candidates prefer to hold their ‘public’ speech in front of the Mazu Temple (
 ),2 to flaunt their alleged morality that even the Goddess approves of. Candidates’ fraternity associations and temple connections organize ‘vote-begging’ parades (
 !), bangng drums on the campaign trucks and lighting fire crackers to pave the way for candidates and their aides. Candidates swear their honesty and true serving spirit upon the Goddess. Some even kneel down and weep to gain voters’ sympathy; in practice, ethnic Chinese do not kneel down in front of people other than their own parents or ancestors. When the candidates kneel down in front of the common people, the latter are interpellated into a parental role in relation to the candidates (
 !"). Candidates also choose to speak at night markets, rather than in the supposedly more civilized town halls or civil squares; hired showgirls, or go-go girls, dance half-naked in order to attract the attention of night market goers. Such activities and formats disappoint and are targets of criticism from scholars across the entire political spectrum, conservatives, liberals and radicals alike. Their criticisms are stunningly similar. That is, elections should be rational and peaceful, period. However, the idea of how elections should be, and what they are and are not, has itself become a cultural question. Obviously, the imagined modern world with a ‘proper’ public, exchanging rational dialogues, making up their free minds, and calmly proceeding to a peaceful vote is not the democracy adopted in Taiwan, at least not at this moment. And this Westernized ideal of a civil society and a rational public does not help much in understanding the emotional involvement of the people.

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 25 A close analysis of how political campaigns are run may show physical manifestations of people’s emotional investments. At times, political mass gatherings look like pop music concerts with all the appropriate lighting and special effects, producing passionate and pleasurable affect for individual participants. However, as part of the entire election process, they also emphasize and constitute the idea of a collectivity, i.e. socially structured fear, formulated hostility, historical trauma, panic of losing, ethnic identity and group belonging, all of which are displayed in public with sound and fury. The entire election process can thus be conceptualized as how all the material and cultural practices together constitute a structured space for the affective investment of the Taiwan population during election time. The problematization of emotion in Taiwan politics has been suggested by Chen Kuan-hsing’s notion of ‘emotional structures of feeling’ (2001: 43). He argues that, in Asia, this formation of emotional structures is historically shaped by both the Cold War and colonialism, both of which also overdetermined the violent modernities of Asia. Only by confronting the emotional structures of feeling, can new possibilities be opened towards peace within the nation and towards the regional security. I agree with Chen that moments of tension and excitement on the level of sentiments should be regarded as substantial manifestations of conflict between the individual and the social structure, as part and parcel of the individual’s experience ‘in exteriority’ in the world. In this chapter, I will concentrate on analyzing how the sentiments of the electorate are invested in the festive operations of political election. In contrast to the tendency to analyze sentiments (
) under an ideology of ‘interiority’, as subjective irrationalities, thereby underestimating the manipulation of the sentiments in public, I want to examine how sentiments are handled publicly, in their exteriority. By analyzing emotions, I want to suggest that they play a significant role in the structures and operations of the elections in Taiwan. This helps us understand the other constitutive elements around which elections are organized: bodily performances. Emotions are displayed in all possible communication spaces; they get especially intense in public and are often expressed in bodily performances through gestures. Emotion diminishes the distance and posture between people; people bond with one another and trust is built with emotional displays as corporealized in bodily performances, not with mindful dialogues characterized by Habermasian rationality.

The 2004 elections In 2004, there were two island-wide elections in Taiwan: the Presidential Election on March 20th and the Parliament Election on December 12th. Like every past election, these were loaded with festivity and emotions. Vivacious festivity and tear-jerking emotions could be found in the largescale orchestrated mass gatherings before and after the elections, and the dramatized campaign strategies on and off the media. For the presidential

26 Ko Yufen election campaign, the two contending parties, the Pan-green3 camp of the Democratic Progress Party (DPP) and the Pan-blue4 camp of Kuomintang (KMT), each claimed to have mobilized one million people for their parties’ respective festive rallies, as well as vote-attracting activities that made media headlines for months. The Taiwanese saying, ‘an election is a show’, is both metaphorical and literal. The presidential election in March ended with the victory of Chen Shuibian, the incumbent DPP president, by a slight margin (approximately 26,000 votes). Chen’s re-election was controversial because the president was injured in an attempted assassination on the eve of the voting day. News about this incident shocked the island and abroad. News media hyped up and produced live news coverage for the rest of the day, but no one was able to determine the veracity of the assassination in a short period of time, and the assassin, if any, has still been unidentified. Rumors spread. Owing to the disturbing doubts, all campaigns, such as mass gatherings of final rallies before the voting day, the so-called ‘Empowerment Conventions (
 !) were cancelled after the assassination attempt. The cancellation of such gatherings was unprecedented in post-Martial Law Taiwan. Without the planned Empowerment Conventions as outlets for emotions, the eve of the 2004 presidential election was spent in uncertainty and frustration for both parties and their supporters. The suppressed anger and energy were appropriated by expressions of different modes of protests, at different locations, and they lasted for months after the presidential campaign. During the campaign period, pre-election surveys predicted that Lien Chan of the Pan-blue KMT would be able to defeat Chen comfortably. Consequently, many believed that this assassination attempt, now known as the 319 Gunshot Incident, was a conspiracy orchestrated by the Pan-green DPP or its supporters to garner more votes for the allegedly victimized Chen. The result of the election spawned a series of large-scale demonstrations protesting against Chen in front of the Presidential Office and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Square. Lien also accused Chen of staging the hoax ‘assassination’ to manipulate the voters’ emotions in his favor and challenged the result in court. In October, seven months later, the Supreme Court rejected Lien’s lawsuit, but the protests continued. One year after the election, some supporters of the Pan-blue camp continued to wave the national flags in front of the Presidential Office, rain or shine. The national flag is significant because Chen is thought to be an unfaithful representative of the national flag. Furthermore, the Pan-blue camp was also afraid that Chen would go on to ‘steal the nation’ by unilaterally claiming Taiwan’s independence, which was the last thing they wanted to see. Ironically, it can be imagined that if Chen had not won the election, his supporters would most likely have done exactly the same towards the elected candidate, Lien, although with flags of another color. In December 2004, nine months after the controversy over the legitimacy of Chen’s presidency, the campaigns for the Parliament Election inherited

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 27 the ‘energy of the masses’ (
 !) from the Presidential Election. The campaign operations were more festive than ever. All candidates performed gimmicks as early as on nomination day in order to attract the already cheapened spotlights of the media. Two significant tricks widely appropriated by candidates were the ‘costume play’, or ‘cosplay’, and ‘rescue action’ (
 !). ‘Cosplay’ is a Japanese term for dressing like a cartoon or anime figure. Many candidates adopted cosplay as their first impression maker: one candidate dressed like the Hollywood film character ‘The Terminator’; another impersonated Hong Kong comic movie star Steven Chow in the film God of Gamblers. Several female candidates dressed like the most popular female figure of the year, a woman therapist of the traditional medicine Dae Jang Gum (
 ) who featured in a Korean epic drama. A final example, the ex-president and leader of the Taiwan Solidarity Union, Lee Teng-hui, considered the representative figure of the old generation who grew up in the Japanese Occupation period (1895–1945), with nostalgia for Japanese culture, cosplayed as a Japanese Samurai in order to attract media attention for his candidates. His photographs were seized upon and ridiculed by media. ‘Rescue action’, on the other hand, is a strategy used by those candidates whose survey results are on the edge of either losing or winning the election. Usually these candidates change their flags into black-and-white ‘Rescue Me’, ‘SOS’, or ‘Don’t Let Me Fall’ banners in the later period of their campaigns, pleading for voters’ sympathy and attention. Taipei City is usually full of white banners of emergent rescue calls the week before voting day. The result of the Parliament Election turned out to be in line with the expectations of the Taiwan people. The President, Chen Shui-bian’s Pangreen camp remained a minority in the Parliament, and the Pan-blue camp won the majority seats. For outside observers, such a result appeared inconsistent with the soaring Taiwanese nationalism that was observed.5 However, for the people of Taiwan, the result is completely understandable in the wake of the Pan-green camp’s slogans of ‘righting Taiwan’s wronged name’ (
 !"#). Most were angered and frightened by the Pan-green camp’s concocted ‘righting Taiwan’s wronged name’ crusade, which means to rid Taiwan of the association of Chineseness – an act considered so headstrong and blunt that it would jeopardize the security of Taiwan. Such is the dilemma of nationalism in Taiwan; passions and excitement could easily lead to fear and panic, especially when the threatening other, the PRC, remains more than an imaginary enemy.

Emotions: the logic of love and the politics of ressentiment The passion/fear dilemma comes from the within/outside identity politics. Although soaring nationalism has proved a double-edged sword in Taiwan, the Pan-green camp kept taking advantage of the identity politics, with the belief that their extremely partisan strategy would lead them to electoral triumph. The aim was not to create the enemy from outside, namely, the PRC,

28 Ko Yufen but to pick out the enemy from within: those who love or are closely related to the PRC in Taiwan. For instance, since the presidential campaign, ‘I love Taiwan’ (
 ), implying that I love no state other than Taiwan, has become a mantra so taken for granted that virtually all citizens are under ideological inspection, formally or informally, on whether or not they endorse the slogan. Such blatant manipulation of a patriotic ideology is a process of disowning and excluding fellow citizens who do not show sufficient loyalty in officially sanctioned ways. In reaction, Chu Tian-xin, one of the most acclaimed but controversial writers in Taiwan wrote an article boldly entitled, ‘I Don’t Love Taiwan’ (2004) to openly challenge and criticize the obsession. The article was soon both widely circulated and applauded for her audacity and conversely cited as evidence of her ‘China complex’. In the overwhelming logic of ‘love’, one not only serves the nation, but one’s sentiments are also required for devotion. However, for the Mandarin speakers whose parents or grandparents came to Taiwan in the 1949 Retreat, or for those businessmen who invest in the PRC, it is not easy to disown Chineseness or to cut off their relations with the PRC proper (
 !"#$). Even if these Mandarin speakers do cut off their Chinese connections and proclaim their ‘real’ love for Taiwan from the bottom of their hearts, their ‘love’ is always doubted, because ‘they only speak the enemy’s language’ (
 !"#), which brutally means: only Min-nan and Hakka are the legitimate ‘Taiwan-loving’ languages. Mandarin speakers are categorized as the enemy from within. In this logic, one can never prove one’s love when the outcome is already defined by one’s ‘ethnicity/language’. Furthermore, in this ‘I love Taiwan’ slogan, the sentiments of the citizens are appropriated and exploited according to what Chao has categorized as Taiwan’s identity politics since the 1990s: the politics of ressentiment (
). Following Nietzsche, Chao defines this revenge as to attribute one’s own pain onto a hostile external world, and to see oneself as the good one facing the evil enemy. Through this process one compensates himself with an imaginary revenge, but has lost the ability to face the reality. (1998: 98) To overcome such politics, Chao suggests that we dismantle the modern rational cognition that posits rationality as the center of social actions, and adopt a project of ‘aesthetically mediated self-education’ that sets free the body, action, desire, and emotions to establish a politics of empowerment (ibid.: 244). Even though Chao’s expectation of the ‘concept of body, desire, and emotions’ is much too romanticized, his presumption is unmistakably that body, desire, and emotions are significant loci when redressing democracy. I want to stress here that ‘body, desire, and emotions’, as commonly known in Taiwan as in Foucault’s theories, are more unruly than docile, and they more often tend to disturb us rather than to pacify us.

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 29 Let me return to the historical structure of the politics of ressentiment in order to illuminate the discussions on emotions that follow. The previously mentioned Chen’s conceptualization of emotional structures of feeling and Chao’s critique of the politics of ressentiment both deal with a historical past when Mandarin speakers were the dominant group under the KMT regime. The hatred among ethnic/language groups is based on the question of KMT’s discriminative ‘Mandarin language prescription’ and its consequences. It was a systematic discrimination and erasure of any languages other than Mandarin, and it is perhaps still the most shared cultural discrimination experience of non-Mandarin speakers, a historical fact not taken into account in Chen’s and Chao’s discussions. For Chen, it is the Cold War and colonialism that alienate the ethnic/language groups; for Chao, it is the nationalistic populism and ressentiment of the low that generates hatred. Their arguments are helpful but inadequate. In order to understand the Min-nan speakers’ vengeful triumphalism (
 !"), one must take into account the discriminating Mandarin language policy, which was strictly enforced around 1974 by the KMT regime, until it was lifted in 1993 after several years of protests. This Mandarin policy was immediate, personal and deeply felt in Taiwan’s everyday life for more than 20 years. It was a more effective and penetrating cultural mechanism than the grand network of Cold War or colonialism. To rephrase the Foucauldian concept of power in Taiwan’s context, the mechanism of language operates on everyone who cannot speak Mandarin well; it categorizes people; it rewards those who obey and mimic; it punishes and belittles others with an impure accent. It regulates, induces, and produces subjects of language. The Mandarin language policy, I would argue, must be taken as another important historical force that overdetermines the ethnic/language/ regional fractions in Taiwan, and its effect is still in operation. As Chen points out, many people in Taiwan are still under the Cold War structure of feeling, and there has been no ‘de-Cold War’ debate that has brought people to understand each other. To that I would add that the ressentiment of Min-nan speakers prevents communication from happening. Chao identifies the ressentiment coming from nationalistic populism, as if populist hatred was not created from any historical basis. I suggest that the hatred comes from quotidian experiences that accumulate in personal histories and structure most people’s subjective formations. The Mandarin language policy has laid the ground of hatred for the long term. Until the historical account of this language policy is given greater attention, the ressentiment question: ‘Why is there this much hatred toward all Mandarin speakers?’ will remain unanswered. Until now, although the Min-nan-speaking DPP has won the control of state apparatus and claimed triumph for all Min-nan speakers, culturally, Mandarin is still considered the superior language, and the other languages are inferior. The manifestation of a culturally inferior mindset parallels with the Martial Law/Cold War structure and colonialism. From this inferiority comes the politics of ressentiment.

30 Ko Yufen Language plays a crucial role in election campaigns, for it possesses the power to reinvoke the inferior memories and to mobilize the crowd’s emotions. The content of a speech does not matter. As long as the candidate speaks fluent Min-nan or Hakka, he or she immediately passes the ‘I love Taiwan’ test. Due to the Mandarin language policy in the past, most Mandarin speakers had never bothered to learn another language other than Mandarin. After the political climate changed, when Mandarin speakers were no longer guaranteed political privileges, many Mandarin-speaking candidates showed efforts to learn Min-nan, Hakka, and aboriginal languages, to display their ‘love for Taiwan’. However, a paradoxical logic is at work: being able to speak the language does not change one’s background, but only confirms the articulation of ‘I love Taiwan’ with Min-nan triumphalism, which, in turn denies any connection of Mandarin with ‘I love Taiwan’. Mandarin language has thus been turned into the key factor that associates Mandarin speakers with the PRC; Mandarin speakers exist as ‘the evil ones’, as the KMT supporters who once oppressed Taiwan, and those who are labeled as ‘China’s followers’ remain threatening to Taiwan. In this transfiguration of their cultural image, Mandarin speakers are considered ‘not to love Taiwan’. ‘Taiwan’ remains the trophy of the Min-nan speakers (and perhaps Hakka, but never the aboriginals).

The mobilization of emotions (


!)

The carnival-like rallies during elections in Taiwan have their origins in the more violent and intense protests, demonstrations, and other antigovernment street movements of the 1980s. These street movements and conflicts in public had been the essential methods of the DPP during its formative years and those of other organized counter-hegemony activisms against the hegemonic KMT government in the 1980s. In the past decade, elections have become regularized, both the DPP and the KMT regimes have since adopted the street movement as a legitimate method of demonstration and emotional outlet. The tacticians who manage the mass mobilizations have developed a set of knowledges: how to gather and organize the crowd, how to orchestrate the spectacle-like parades, how to occupy the public spaces, how to spread blackmail and deceptive rumors that turn the tables on the opponent, how to create conflicts to confuse and disturb the opponents, how to provoke the crowd’s emotions, how to create audiovisual effects, and most of all, how to attract media attention. The street demonstrations are combined with media wars, public relation strategies, and guerilla-like campaigns such as dividing hundreds of motorcycles into small groups, each equipped with flags, that can move more freely through the narrow allies to mobilize voters. All personal connections, traditional or postmodern, and all possible forms of communication are simultaneously employed. Through these mechanisms, popular emotions are transformed into ‘popular energy’, which further materializes as ‘people’s

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 31 votes’. The emotional signifier shifts from ethnic identity to partisan positions. Democracy in action is thereby reduced to the voter’s behavior, which reminds us of the assembly line in a factory – a purely mechanical process. The election campaign operation includes two parts: first, the mediamediated operation, such as television news, newspapers, the internet, immediate messages delivered to cellular phones, and flyers that appear in every family’s mailbox; and, second, the spatial operation, which includes vote-begging parades day and night, banner-mapping, and evening final rallies on the eve of polling day. These final rallies should be more precisely translated as the ‘Empowerment Conventions’ (
 !); the conventions are more akin to Taiwan TV variety shows with celebrities on the stage and the crowds in front of the stage. Both operations are organized according to the emotional principle: emotions should be displayed and showed off in public. The competition among candidates and political parties and their supporters is thus also a competition of emotional display. As these spatial operations are made to attract media attention, emotional activities manifested in bodily performances are designed to surprise and/or to manufacture spectacles, in the hope that they will be broadcast to a wider audience through the media. This emotional display in space and the representation in media is a self-perpetuating movement that produces passionate affect for individual participants and the audience as well. It also enhances, emphasizes and constitutes the imagined collectivity of all supporters through the immediate coverage. The media-mediated operation: show your love The media-mediated operation mixes festive comedy performances with strategic pep talks (
), not only to raise morale (
) but also to interpellate the traumatized historical subjects; the pep talks often emphasize through threat that they, both the candidates and their supporters, are on the verge of losing the election, if they don’t vote. The earlier mentioned cosplay, on the other hand, is a comic and festive performance that has only appeared in recent years. The first record of cosplay in an election can be dated to the 1996 presidential election, when the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the DPP held a masquerade party, dressed as a fairy-tale prince and a pirate, respectively. The candidates felt ‘like clowns’ (
 ), dressed as strangers rather than themselves. They refused to dance at the masquerade party. They later toured the entire island on a truck converted into a shiplike float, christened the ‘First Sail for Democracy’ (
 !). The public relations manager of the DPP designed the activities as a means to rid the DPP of its historic sadness, which the DPP had relied on heavily. However, at the time, the DPP could not give up its politics of sorrow (
 !) and the image of the repressed. The humorous activities were strongly criticized by most people as well as the DPP members, and the DPP president candidate, Peng Ming-min, even said that democracy was a

32 Ko Yufen holy cause for which they would die and therefore should not be turned into a monkey business. The PR manager apologized and cancelled all the other monkey-business-like festive plans. The DPP lost that election to Lee Tenghui, the leader of the KMT at the time. But monkey business gradually changed into real business. As local governments of counties and smaller cities have to take part in the ‘Cultural Establishments Plan’, and are later encouraged to promote the ‘Cultural Creative Industry’ (
 !"#), politicians are required by the media to speak, with creativity, at an increasing number of official festival occasions, such as local products promotion parties, mid-Autumn festivals, Christmas parties, and New Year’s Eve parties (
 !). They have to deliver joyful messages to the media and to attract tourists. As a result, the media and the audience have grown used to politicians dressed in costumes of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Reindeer, the Rabbit in the Moon for the Moon Festival, Superman, Spiderman, or Elvis Presley for any occasion. During the periods of election campaigning, most candidates are more than willing to do cosplay if media spotlights are guaranteed. In the 2004 Parliament election period, one county incumbent candidate dressed up as a swan, which in Chinese is close to geese, and performed Swan Lake, to promote the local products of goose and cater to the interests of the local voters. He hit the headline on every television news channel that evening, and he grabbed the opportunity to show that he was so full of guts and would do anything for the people. Needless to say, he was re-elected. In addition to festive cosplay, press conferences are the most common activities designed to display emotions and to increase media exposure. The frequent press conferences as part of the election campaigns are part of the strategic operations deployed to increase media exposure and to create an agenda of the candidate’s own interest. Press conferences also manufacture temporary ‘public’ spaces for candidates to display ‘gut feelings’ and to perform for the media. The press conference has become a mediated form of emotional performance; it is also an important channel through which emotional messages can be delivered. Usually press conferences of elections are full of angry announcements accusing opponents of bribery or embezzlement, revealing the evidence in hand that could prove criminal activities, or claiming one’s innocence and accusing the opponents of libel, of verbal bullying (
). These types of smear press conferences and the lawsuits that followed were especially significant in the 2004 presidential campaign, when the two contesting candidates accused each other of embezzlement and illegal procurement of donations. In January 2004, a weekly magazine published a series of personal letters allegedly written by the Pan-blue candidate Lien Chan’s daughter, revealing Lien as a violent father. Lien’s daughter countered that with her own press conference and accused the weekly magazine of forgery. She was later accused in another press conference held by several business organizations of embezzlement of more than 6,000,000 USD.

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 33 In early March, the Pan-blue camp accused the Pan-green’s First Lady of taking illegal money from an exiled businessman. The First Lady denied this in a press conference and insisted on filing a lawsuit. The businessman held another international satellite-visual press conference to prove that the accusation was true. The First Lady made her denial again the following day. Then a Pan-green parliament member held another press conference and proved that the businessman was telling the truth. As this parliament member and the First Lady belonged to the same camp, the First Lady refused to give any further comment. This Pan-green parliament member was praised by the Pan-blue camp as ‘the last conscience of the Pan-green’; however, he lost in the December parliament election, because the Pan-green supporters saw him as a renegade who had betrayed his own camp. In the 2004 presidential campaign, press conferences were full of the atmosphere of ‘love’. After the February 28th Pan-green’s island-wide million people ‘Hand-in-Hand, Protect Taiwan’ (228
 !) parade, the ‘I Love Taiwan’ slogan spread. A rumor was spread through underground radio and hardcore Pan-green talk shows: ‘If the Pan-blue wins, they will trade in Taiwan to China.’ Such rumors were not new, because the Pan-blue’s vice-president candidate, James Soong, has been called a possible ‘traitor’ for years. The rumors brought uncertainty and doubts. It became even more necessary for the Pan-blue to prove that they too ‘love’ Taiwan. In the March 13th Pan-blue’s million people ‘Speak Out and Loud’ (
 !"#$%) parade, the Pan-blue’s presidential candidate Lien knelt down in Taipei while the vice-presidential candidate Soong knelt down in Taichung, simultaneously, in front of live coverage TV news and hundreds of cameras. They kissed the ground, with tears, and swore to ‘love Taiwan and protect Taiwan with their blood’. Television news channels replayed the shot over and over again the entire weekend. Some channels mixed this land-kissing shot with the bird’s view of Pan-green’s Hand-in-Hand parade (millions of people holding hands, surrounding the island), added moving symphony music as the soundtrack – a sensational ‘We Love Taiwan’ short film was done and played repeatedly, to show the news channel’s love for Taiwan. By mid-March, before the 319 Gunshot Incident, the presidential campaign was driven by the emotional demonstration and competition to display ‘who loves Taiwan better’. The act of kneeling is something unique in Taiwan’s election history. It is a ‘political’ gesture. Candidates kneel for various reasons: to show their true spirit, to prove their honesty, to swear for having or having not done something, to apologize for something, to show their despair in losing the election, to pose low for sympathy, to call for rescue votes, and so forth. Kneeling is the ultimate expression of the Taiwanese bond, to ‘expose gut feelings’ (
 ). Kneeling is always the climax of any campaign, and the media is always there to capture the moment. It is a common belief that if any candidate can kneel in front of the people, he will win the election. The Pan-greens were nervous after the 313 Pan-blue’s kneeling/land-kissing, and

34 Ko Yufen tried to turn the action into a negative one. The Pan-blue’s vice president candidate Soong was known for having ‘soft knees’, which was meant to imply that he knelt amazingly often. The Pan-greens had to remind the voters that Soong knelt too often, therefore his knees were not trustworthy. The First Lady of Pan-green criticized the Pan-blues for not coming up with any new tricks and thus being forced to go back to the traditional game. They strongly called on the voters not to be moved by such theatrical acts and fake tears. The emotionality necessary to expose one’s gut feelings has to be expressed through various exaggerated bodily performances. However, kneeling in front of the camera has become one such bodily performance that is constantly called into question regarding its authenticity. In other words, media attention has caused a sense of sarcasm – ‘election is a show’ – kneeling, like other performances, is seen as nothing more than a gesture with insincere calculations. In addition to press conferences of announcements, accusations, and pleas of innocence, in the 2004 parliament election there were also new types of press conferences: crying for ‘rescue action’. In the last week of the campaign, some candidates held press conferences to announce that their public surveys were so disappointing that they had no hope of winning and that their political parties were not helping them. They cried for the voters’ sympathy to help the neglected orphans of election, namely the losing candidates themselves. Some of them even announced with tears that they were considering backing out from the election. By making news with their fake withdrawals, they were invited onto news programs, live political talk shows, and call-in shows. As a result, their publicity went up and voters sympathized with their situations. Some of them (not all) were elected. All these activities may be called the mobilization of emotions: a political operation of body and rhetoric that mobilizes people’s emotions through massive people movements, exaggerating actions, and media spectacles, along with sensationalistic discourses. Through the mobilization of emotions, subjects experience belonging, empowerment, and passion for a dedicated person, a constructed object or concept. Similarly, the subjects are also appropriated by historical trauma and memory to generate fear, uncertainty, and hatred. The forms of political election in Taiwan do not proceed in a rational style; the campaigns do not call for rational choices; voters have to be emotionally mobilized to trust someone and vote for him/her, with gut feelings. The spatial operation: show your presence The aim of a spatial operation is to create a visually monolithic yet aweinspiring spectacle through spatial arrangements. Examples of this mode of operation include the banners (with the names and portraits of the candidates) that cover the streets and bridges, the teams of vehicles that flaunt the banners and circle the streets and allies, the vote-begging parades with drums and

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 35 firecrackers, the hand-shaking activities, the spectacular million-people parades across the island and the most emotional and passionate ‘Empowerment Conventions’ (
 !). After Chen Shui-bian released his ‘A-Bian doll’ along with other related commodities in the Taipei Mayor election of 1998, candidate-related commodities have become part of the election campaigns: the side-line commodities of stuffed dolls, hats, pins, T-shirts, bumperstickers, motorcycle flags, little desk display flags, vests, pencils, notepads, free downloads, and so on. These commodities are designed and marketed to transform the candidates into household celebrities; supporters display their affection for the candidates through the very act of consumption. Some commodities even become collectors items for the limited quantity produced and ‘historical meanings’ they hold. The most important activity in a candidate’s daily routine is to go on the ‘vote-begging’ and hand-shaking parade. The must-be-visited places include temples, traditional markets, night markets, housing compounds, village centers and as many weddings and funerals as possible. In these visits, they have to illustrate, ‘sincerely’ of course, their closeness to the people with the act of blanket-style greetings by shaking hands with everyone in the crowd. Hand-shaking is considered to be the most direct contact with the crowd that can show the candidate’s sincerity, according to the conventional bonding rule of ‘exposing the gut feelings’ (
 ); as long as the candidate shows up and shake hands with everyone, he or she will create a good selfimage. In these activities, a community leader or an elder and respected person leads the candidate and the campaign squad here and there to shake hands. This leading person should know where to go and who to avoid so there are no embarrassing confrontations. During the hand-shaking activities, fans gather and express their affections, usually true supporters express their support, and those who belong to the opposite camp sometimes impolitely refuse to take the opponent’s hand. It is a belief that by shaking people’s hands one knows how much support one has. Hand-shaking is a slow bodily maneuver through space; the candidates have to literally touch and smile at every person. Presidential candidates usually tour the island within three months as proof of their claim that they love Taiwan so much that they have been to every corner in Taiwan (
 !"#$%&'). In other words, they must be present to everyone and everywhere. Presence is the only way to ‘expose the gut feelings’. The Empowerment Conventions are held in outdoor public arenas, usually a football or baseball stadium, sometimes in squares or closed streets, with television live coverage, on the eve of voting day. As the music rises, the fireworks blossoms in the night sky, firecrackers are lit and glittering colored bands and paper pieces fall from the top of the brightly lit stage where the candidates’ family and friends gather to lead everyone in singing their campaign theme song; the crowd is provoked and inflamed. By attending these activities, the voters can show and be proud of their presence. With the media spotlight on them, they are visible subjects. By hailing

36 Ko Yufen together, the voters become one. The flag-waving hails in the empowerment parties, ‘dong xuan’ (a Min-nan word for ‘elected’), by tens of thousands of people with tears and smiles on their faces, are perhaps the most significant and thrilling spectacles of Taiwan’s elections. The hail was once very idealistic like: ‘Long Live Democracy in Taiwan’ (
 !"#) in the 1980s street movements; comparatively, the popular hail now, ‘dong xuan’ ‘Be Elected’, seems straightforward, goal-oriented, but ideology-loaded as usual. The changed hail can be interpreted to mean that a single candidate’s success can mean as much as the supporters’ symbolic revenge. At the Empowerment Conventions, the supporters show up to make their presence felt on live news coverage; they hail the candidates as well as the imagined audience behind the camera, in front of their televisions. This competition of emotional display is organized to emphasize collectivity, through a set of material practices and mechanisms that are designed to release or enhance supporter’s feelings; these practices also open up and structure the voters’ fears, as well as the possibility of empowerment. The crowd is well trained through previous experiences: the candidate talks sensationally to the crowd with organ music in the background. When the stage lights go brighter, the organ chord goes higher and louder, the candidate asks the crowd a question, and the crowd waves their flags and hails the candidate. All the participants in such a gathering know the stage light is for the live TV cameras to take better ‘shots of people’s shouts’ (
 !), so they shout back to any question with positive answers: ‘Yes’, or ‘Right’, or ‘Great’. Such an empowerment gathering is a bona fide demonstration, which consists of the tears and flesh of the crowd on display. Ironically, such a demonstration is not against anything. Rather, the crowd demonstrates to make their presence felt, to make sure that they exist and are presented. By way of conclusion, witnessing Taiwan’s spectacular mass gatherings of all kinds, one might wonder how the street movements and grass-root rallies of the 1980s have been transformed into the carnival-like, pop concert-like, Baptist sermon-style of the Empowerment Convention. In less than ten years, elections have espoused an image-making industry, how to ‘make’ a candidate is as carefully planned as any pop star’s new record promotion. Traditional ways of connection and performance, combined with newly developed methods of festive mobilization, have formed Taiwan’s politics of emotions. People’s anxiety over how to affirm their existence in a society torn by ethnic politics is appropriated in the process of mobilization of emotions, so as to let out love, hate, ressentiment, anger, fear, and, perhaps, true gut feelings. It is impossible to predict how future transformations may turn out. It will be productive, however, to begin a new understanding of the popular and the political in their various, ever-changing patterns of specularization and embodiment. And, that is precisely the main goal of this chapter. Rather than conclude, that is, this chapter begs continuing observation and, perhaps, different forms of participation.

The festive machine in Taiwanese elections 37

Notes 1 I use ‘language’ to designate what is commonly categorized as ‘dialects’. The categorical concept between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ is insufficient to show the tension – linguistically, historically, politically – that characterizes Taiwan’s identity politics of nationalism. Ironically, the non-Chinese aboriginals are so marginalized in this society that their voice is not heard in the ethnic confrontations. 2 Mazu is one of the most popular deities in Taiwan, her temples are found in almost every major town and city. Mazu is a goddess who comes from the Min-nan area (South of Fu-Jian Province of China). 3 Pan-green is composed of two parties, the major one is the Democratic Progress Party whose flag is green, the other the Taiwan Solidarity Union, brown flag, small but influential, led by ex-president Lee Deng-hui. Basically the Pan-greens are pro-independence, and most of its members are Min-nan speakers. 4 Pan-blue is led by KMT whose flag is deep blue, the other party is the People First Party (PFP), represented by an orange flag; PFP is a party consisting mostly of ex-KMT members, thus called the Pan-blue. The Pan-blues are not necessarily anti-independence, although some members might still consider Taiwan as part of the territory of China. Pan-blue consists of various ethnicities, its core members are Mandarin speakers. 5 Perry Anderson’s (2004) election analysis ‘Stand-Off in Taiwan’ is sharp and straight to the point. Written in June 2004, this article also predicted that the Taiwanese nationalism, after Chen’s victory, would create a bandwagon logic and the Pangreens would win an outright majority in the legislature. See Anderson (2004).

References Anderson, P. (2004) ‘Stand-off in Taiwan’, London Review of Books, June. Available at: www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/ande01_html Chao, Gang
 (1998) ‘Farewell to Ressentiment: Exploring the Crisis of Democracy in Taiwan’, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies Research Series 06. Chatterjee, Partha (2000) Locating Political Society: Modernity, State Violence and Post-colonial Democracies. Taipei: Chuliu. Chen, Kuan-hsing
 (1996) ‘Decolonization and Cultural Studies’, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 21: 73–139. Chen, Kuan-hsing (2001) ‘Why Is “Great Reconciliation” Im/possible? De-Cold War/ Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears’, Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 43: 41–110. Chien, Yung-Hsiang

(2004) ‘Face the Plebiscite’s Value and Choice with Honesty’, New Journalism 889. Chu, Tian-xin (2004) ‘I Don’t Love Taiwan’, Chinatimes 22 April. Fu, Ta-wei
 (2004) ‘Split Electoral Game vs. Deepened Cultural Base’, ConTemporary 201: 68–72. Lu, Shi-Hsiang

(2004) ‘Election News and Media Chaos’, Con-Temporary 201: 73–77. You, Ching-hsin
 (2004) ‘The 2004 Taiwan’s Presidential Election: the Lack of Political Trust and Unconsolidated Democracy’, Taiwan Foundation for Democracy 1(2): 193–199.

38 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong

2

Popular protest and electioneering in a partial democracy The case of Hong Kong Wan-chaw Shae and Pik-wan Wong

Introduction Academic research on popular culture in Hong Kong over the past three decades has focused mostly on the analysis of media culture and cultural identities of Hong Kong people rather than the cultural aspects of election and popular protest (Ng and Cheung 2001). Similarly, with only a few exceptions that aim at exploring the interplay between culture and politics (Ku 1999; Wong 2000a; Lam W. 2004), the conventional political science approach to Hong Kong politics has tended to focus on a few concerns, e.g., analysis of Hong Kong people’s political orientations, political institutions, election processes and outcome, evolution of electoral rule, roles of political parties and other interest/pressure groups. (e.g., McMillen and DeGolyer 1993; Choy et al. 1995; Cheng 1999; Kuan et al. 1999; Kuan et al. 2002; Lau 2002; Ma and Choy 2003; Sing 2003; Sing 2004). While these are no doubt important issues, there is as yet insufficient attention given to the various forms of political participation as expressed in mass rallies, the internet, and other newly emerged popular cultural practices in Hong Kong. This chapter attempts to address this lacuna by examining in some detail both the form and contents of these emergent political-cultural practices and performances that have been observed in the 2003 and 2004, 1st July prodemocracy mass rallies and the electioneering of the Legislative Council (LegCo) election in 2004. This chapter will be divided into three main parts. The first section is a discussion of the general political climate since the 1997 handover. It serves as background for analyzing the popular protest of the pro-democracy mass rallies that occurred in the hot summers of 2003 and 2004. The popular protest shaped the electioneering in September 2004, and perhaps subsequently resulted in the resignation of the first Chief Executive, Mr Tung Chee-hwa, in March 2005. Following this is a discussion on some of the specific dimensions of Hong Kong’s emerging political culture. The third section focuses on the popular resistance, the modes of electioneering, and the emergency of cyber-politics. We will focus in particular on the creative modes of popular

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39

resistances, as well as the genesis of cyberpolitics in Hong Kong’s 2004 LegCo election, as a new platform for the candidates and internet users to protest against domination, to air their grievances, and to exhibit their counter-discourse to the dominant ideology, all of which are part and parcel of the electioneering process,

Politics in partially democratic Hong Kong: background to the two 1st July mass rallies After the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the British government of Hong Kong began to launch a tortuous democratization process as a part of the British plan for decolonizing Hong Kong (Sing 2004). This British-led democratization process was punctuated by a series of warnings issued by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) authorities, which insisted that any political reform undertaken prior to the 1997 ‘handover’ must closely follow the political framework stipulated in the Basic Law. In response, the British colonial government stepped back from some of its more ‘radical’ political reform proposals, but also introduced a series of reforms that resulted in the protection of the civic and political rights of the people of Hong Kong. The result is a political system that can best be called a ‘partial democracy’. According to the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, promulgated in 1990 by the National People’s Congress (NPC) of the PRC, became effective immediately after the handover on 1st July 1997. Under the Basic Law, Hong Kong would, for at least 50 years, enjoy a ‘high degree of autonomy’ (Ghai 1997). The Central People’s Government (CPG ) will be responsible only for ‘defence’ and ‘foreign affairs’, leaving a full range of internal social and economic affairs to the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). It also set the pace of Hong Kong’s democratization for at least 10 years after the handover (1997 to 2007). Although the Basic Law specifies that ultimately the Chief Executive of the HKSAR will be selected by universal suffrage (article 45), it does not say ‘when’ this will be actualized. For eight years after the handover, Hong Kong could enjoy only partial democracy, with only 800 people participating in the selection of the Chief Executive of the HKSAR. In the 2004 LegCo election, only 30 of the 60 LegCo seats were directly elected by the voters in geographical districts, the other half of the seats were chosen by fewer than 200,000 members of ‘functional constituencies’, mostly ‘pro-establishment/pro-Beijing’ candidates from various business and professional groups like banking, finance, accounting, and tourism.1 Two annexes of the Basic Law stringently limit the likelihood of reform. Throughout the transitional period to the handover, Hong Kong society was increasingly politicized. On one hand, the introduction of representational government, however limited and partial, changed the rules of the

40 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong game, rendering the strategy of ‘administrative absorption of politics’ (King 1975) which had characterized much of the colonial period increasingly obsolete and inadequate. It simultaneously raised the demands and expectations of the people and increased the worries of the business sector and other vested interests. Meanwhile, realizing that PRC would be the future master of Hong Kong, many local elites, professional associations, business corporations and other organizations shifted their sense of loyalty to the Central People’s Government (CPG hereafter); while many pro-democracy organizations and politicians suddenly found themselves befriended by the British Hong Kong government. Hong Kong society was thus very politicized even before the handover in 1997, with the major social schism being the ‘pro-democracy’ camp on one side and the ‘pro-Beijing’ camp on the other. The ‘one country, two systems’ formula was devised by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to solve the ‘Hong Kong issue’. Deng’s primary intention was to preserve the economic vitality of Hong Kong through separating its capitalist economic system from the socialist system on the mainland (Holliday et al. 2004). For the first few years after the handover, Beijing exercised self-restraint and refrained from intervening in local administration (Hsiung 2000). But this formula, however ingenious, is clearly unable to cope with the fast-changing political climate of the HKSAR. To make matters worse, Hong Kong has had its fair share of misfortune in the region ever since 1997, from the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98, the avian flu fiasco in 1998, to the SARS epidemic in 2003. With the less than satisfactory responses of the HKSAR government, these apparently non-political issues quickly acquired a ‘political’ favour. Either the personal capabilities of the Chief Executive and his associates, or the ‘undemocratic structure’ of the HKSAR government, were to blame for the mismanagement of the problems, with the two being two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, to the extent that the existing partially elected legislature has been fully endorsed by the CPG, and that full democracy in Hong Kong would not be possible without the blessing of Beijing, the CPG itself has also been subjected to increasing mockery and criticism, if not outright denunciation, by many of the local media, academics and politicians. 1st July 1997 was the day on which the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned back to China. Since then, it has been made into a public holiday and for many people, it is also a day of celebration. But six years after the return of Hong Kong to China, on 1st July 2003 and again one year later in 2004, many people took to the streets to demonstrate against the HKSAR government. The immediate reason for the 2003 rally was the proposal to pass the National Security (Legislative Provisions) Bill as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law: The HKSAR shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the CPG, or theft of state secrets,

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to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies. (Article 23, Basic Law) Indeed, in 2002, soon after the Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa finished his first term, he was under pressure to pass this law. Without sufficient and thorough consultation, and in complete disregard of public opinion, the HKSAR government launched a Bill to be passed by July 2003. The proposed Bill, however, was considered by many as too wide and too loose, with major offences vaguely defined, resulting in strengthening official powers to curb peaceful dissidence through heavy sentences, and seriously endangering the civil rights and freedom of the press and expression guaranteed by the Basic Law (Holliday et al. 2004: 263–265). The issue became the ‘talk of the town’ for several months in both the print and electronic media. Adding fuel to the fire, public statements made by some government officials in response to queries and challenges were often more provocative than otherwise. As a result of the HKSAR government’s reluctance to amend and postpone the deadline for passing the Bill, a mass rally was called by those who were dissatisfied with the Bill, on the day that commemorates the establishment of the HKSAR. The executive-led government was dismissive and continued to press ahead, as the legislature did not have sufficient power to exercise an effective ‘check-and-balance’ on the government. More importantly, it is not too difficult for the government to secure enough pro-government votes from the ‘royalists’ in the LegCo.2 However, things did not turn out the way the government expected. After the leader of the pro-business Liberal Party, James Tien, declared that he would withdraw his support for the passing of the Bill, the government retracted and postponed the Bill for an indefinite period of time. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that it was the people’s power as manifested in the 1st July 2003 rally that eventually stopped the legislation process. Things did not stop there. With the forthcoming LegCo election in September 2004, the issue of establishing universal suffrage in 2007 for the election of the Chief Executive and 2008 for the election of all LegCo members was again brought to the centre of public concern. In an attempt to cool down this desire for universal suffrage, Beijing began a two-pronged attack on the pro-democracy movement. In February 2004, Beijing officials began to launch an ideological campaign by quoting the former CCP leader Deng Xiaoping’s remark on patriotism, arguing that the people ruling Hong Kong and those wanting to join the government must meet the ‘patriotic’ criteria. According to Deng, ‘patriotism’ include: respecting the Chinese nation, supporting the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and not impairing the city’s prosperity and stability (Cheung and Cheung 2004). If these were loosely defined, most Hong Kong people could meet the requirements.

42 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong However, in reality, Deng’s version has always been interpreted and extrapolated by ‘leftist’ Beijing officials as requiring Hong Kong people to maintain political loyalty to the CPG and support for Beijing’s ruling decisions and policies, and by extension, to refuse any proposal to extend the election system towards more democracy. Unsurprisingly, pro-democracy leaders and organizations have always been labelled as being ‘unpatriotic’ and thus politically excluded and marginalized.3 Several months before the 2004 election, Chinese officials publicly ‘admonished’ Hong Kong people with the assertion that Hong Kong should be governed mainly by ‘patriots’; implying that Hong Kong people should cast their votes to the pro-Beijing candidates, such as those from the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB). Second, several Chinese officials also declared in April 2004 that, based on their interpretation of the Basic Law, it would not be possible for Hong Kong to democratically elect its next chief executive in 2007 or implement full democracy in the legislature in 2008.4 Qiao Xiaoyang, Deputy Secretary General of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament, stated that Hong Kong had to develop democracy on a step-bystep basis and under China’s ‘supervision’. He claimed the NPC Standing Committee has the final say on whether there is a need for change and on whether such change is acceptable (South China Morning Post, 7 April 2004; Ming Pao, 10 April 2004; Washington Post, 27 April 2004). This move was criticized by pro-democracy activists and politicians, as well as US and British diplomats as an ‘erosion’ of the formula of ‘one country, two systems’ that is supposed to underpin Hong Kong’s special status of autonomy. Third, popular and pro-democracy radio talk-show hosts critical of the CCP also suffered from mysterious attacks by vandals; one of them received a threatening late-night phone call from a retired Chinese official and three of the most popular quit their jobs all within a short period prior to the election. Although it was impossible to prove that these were covertly orchestrated by the CPG, many people believed that the resignations were due to the pressure from China or pro-Beijing forces.5 These events formed the background of the 2004 mass rally. Ultimately, in spite of the mass participation in the second mass rally, the 2004 election results proved disappointing for the pro-democrats. The complicated political system and election method that the HKSAR government had adopted since the handover do not favour pro-democracy forces. First, half of the 60 seats were elected by functional constituencies which were largely dominated by supporters of the status quo and the pro-democracy camp could win only a small amount of the seats through this channel. As for the direct election, the proportional representation system prevented the multi-party pro-democracy camp from taking all of the remaining 30 seats, although they won 62 per cent of the 1.79 million votes cast in the five geographical constituencies. The pro-China DAB successfully obtained 12 seats and become the majority political party in the LeCo.6

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Emergent political practices and the two mass rallies The administrative incompetence of the HKSAR government became increasingly apparent as it increasingly turned to the CPG for help and assistance, leading to criticism concerning the continue viability of the ‘one country, two systems’ framework. The overt and covert forms of intervention by the CPG have made Hong Kong’s democratization process a sluggish one and the local political climate rather suffocating. Paradoxically, it is this suffocating political atmosphere that has fostered the development of a thriving civil society and, for Hong Kong, a new form of politics, the symbolic power of which manifested in the two 1st July mass rallies. Hong Kong politics is increasingly characterized by scepticism towards party politics, the displacement of class politics by single-issue movements and identity politics, the rise of ‘post-materialist’ values, an overall distrust of power and authority in general and an emphasis on playful and ironic style of expression. This does not mean that party politics, class politics and various movements driven by ‘materialistic’ values are absent or insignificant. However, without doubt, most local analysis and political commentaries have tended to identify the issue of day as that of democracy, and regard the pro-democracy/anti-democracy division as the major, if not the only, social cleavage. Furthermore, it is often assumed that the Anglo-American model is the standard which local development should be aiming for and against which the present situation is measured. This results not only in an undertheorization of the notion of democracy, but also in the false homogenization of the two opposing camps, pro- and anti-democracy. To be sure, there are many issues that are associated with the ‘anti- and pro-democracy divide’, but nevertheless also cut across it. One outstanding example is the issue of ‘patriotism’. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with being patriotic. However, in the Hong Kong context, the dominating discourse on ‘patriotism’ has always been monopolized and shaped by the CPG and the HKSAR government, which have been trying to cultivate the national sentiments of Hong Kong people since 1997. Pitting ‘patriotism’ against democracy has been a constant strategy used by both to obtain popular support. For example, as discussed earlier, in the beginning of 2004, to prevent the pro-democracy camp from winning more than 30 seats in the September LegCo election, China launched a ‘patriots ruling Hong Kong’ discourse to draw a sharp line between those who were and those who were not ‘patriotic’, to denigrate and stigmatize the pro-democracy candidates as unpatriotic and traitors as well as intimidate their sympathizers. A week before the election, it was arranged that PRC Olympic gold medallists and sport stars should visit Hong Kong, to deliver an implicit message to the public that being Chinese is something to be proud of (Ming Pao, 8 September 2004). Beijing also announced new trade deals with Hong Kong, new air routes to the mainland, and a desire to recruit Hong Kong talent to run the 2008 Olympics.7 All these actions would have a certain impact on ‘neutralizing’

44 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong the fear of the Hong Kong people towards the Communist regime and thereby restore voters’ confidence and support for the pro-Beijing candidates. While some democrats may be less ‘patriotic’ than the CPG would like them to be, it is simply not true that the pro-democracy camp as a whole are unpatriotic, for many of them have a long history of engagement in patriotic activities such as being involved in the pro-Chinese democracy movement, sometimes even to the embarrassment of the CPG (Wong 2000b). For many democrats, democracy and patriotism are not mutually exclusive, nor do they equate the latter with blind submission to the current regime. Another example is the use of economic development as a strategy to harness social support and legitimacy. The first Chief Executive, C.H. Tung, had on several occasions made it clear that he preferred doing solid work for the betterment of Hong Kong as opposed to participating in political shows. As the Hong Kong economy had been severely hit by the 1998 Asian financial crisis, the government under Tung had tried to cope by forging a stronger link with China. The Chinese government, on the other hand, is also keen to further develop its economic relationship with Hong Kong, partly because this is a mutually beneficial endeavour, and partly because it would soften its ‘hard line’ of uncompromising political position with a ‘soft line’ of economically supportive measures. After the first mass rally in 2003 and the economic crisis caused by SARS, China has actively responded by drawing a ‘new deal’ with the HKSAR government to help restore and revive Hong Kong’s economy.8 One of these supporting actions was the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). Given the fact that the basic orientation of Hong Kong people has long been characterized as ‘utilitarian’ (Lau 1982) and ‘materialistic’ (Ho and Leung 1995, 1997), one would expect most Hong Kong people to have endorsed such a strategy. However, many people also realized that there is a hidden price to be paid, for the increasing trend of economic dependence on China would in the longer run create space for the politically powerful CPG to impose its influence and domination on the local dependent polity, thereby consequently weakening the bargaining power of the HKSAR and damaging its prospects for autonomy (Holliday et al. 2004). In the 2004 rally, we saw many protesters, mostly young people, holding banners with statements making claims to the effect that ‘democracy cannot be bought off by economic means’. Many participants were quite clear that democracy and economic prosperity were not substitutes and should not be treated as such. This is clearly at odds with both the government’s and the CPG’s attempt to win popular support by economic means and the popular but often simplistic characterization of Hong Kong people as being basically ‘utilitarian’ and ‘materialistic’. Perhaps the most significant emergent element of the two 1st July rallies was to be found in the organization of the events. Unlike Taiwan, where mass rallies have also been frequently organized in recent years, these rallies were not mainly mobilized by organized political parties. While the pro-democracy political parties, such as the Democratic Party, the Frontier,

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and the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood were part of the loosely organized Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF) which organized these rallies, their mobilization strength had been rather limited. The establishment of the CHRF in September 2002 itself testifies to the growing dissatisfaction, among the grass-root supporters and non-government organizations (NGOs), with the leadership of these pro-democracy political parties, especially with their ‘vertical, centralized, top-down’ line of communication and style of collective action, which tends to discourage free expression and participation that are not in accordance with the party line. The CHRF is a multi-vocal, ‘rainbow coalition’ of more than 40 loosely organized NGOs sympathetic to the causes of democracy and human rights. In contrast to the political parties, the CHRF adopted an ‘open, horizontal, decentralized, and free structure’. The description ‘horizontal’ refers less to a fixed group and more to a loose network of rather heterogeneous groups9 – the participants of the mass rally included peoples from all walks of life, and with different social/ political/religious/class/gender/age/sexual orientations/racial identities. All of them were able to make use of the carnival-like rallies to voice their common goal as well as their specific concerns in the open space. With hindsight, one can say that it is probably this heterogeneous nature of the CHRF, against the background of growing disappointment in the HKSAR’s governance, the pressing concern over the National Security Bill and, the CPG’s blunt refusal to implement ‘full democracy’, as in direct and popular election of the Chief Executive and all Legislative councillors in 2007/08, that explained the massive rates of participation in the two 1st July rallies, comparable to the mass demonstrations of the pro-Chinese democracy movement that took place in Hong Kong in 1989 (Wong 2000b). Neither the organizers nor the participants of these two rallies knew that they were making history. Indeed, it would be too simple to say that the participants had been ‘mobilized’ by the organizers to the streets, as some pro-establishment commentators suggested; for such a simplistic interpretation ignores the fact that participation in the mass rally is a meaningful activity in its own right, so much so that even the organizers do not have a monopoly in the interpretation of the event, as Hall (1994: 460) and many others have reiterated many times, ‘ordinary people are not cultural dopes’. Indeed, one could even say that if the participants had been so effectively mobilized by anybody, it is by none other than the HKSAR government itself.

Popular resistances, electioneering, and cyber-politics in Hong Kong In the face of the CPG’s strong opposition to opening up the political channels further and the HKSAR government’s inadequacies, what choices did Hong Kong people have? According to Hirschman (1970), those in subordination could have three options: exit, voice, and loyalty. When exit is unavailable or costly, dissatisfaction will likely take the form of voice,

46 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong which Scott argues (1990: 137), can takes different forms, depending on the ability of power holders to punish open resistance. In Hong Kong some chose to leave the territory, others remained loyal to the government, but many more have decided to voice their opinions and feelings and they did so with vivacity, creativity and ingenuity. Such resistance has not only made a political impact on the legislation and election processes, but has also led to the resignation of the three senior government officials and subsequently, the Chief Executive. Popular resistance which emerged in the form of political satire flourished under Tung’s administration. Political comics, cartoons, songs, books, plays, and talk-shows satirized the Chief Executive and senior government officials. Tung’s refusal to take repressive measures against political opposition and critiques enabled these colourful popular cultural practices, which captured popular attention and were simultaneously profitable businesses (Lam 2004).10 We will examine in this section some of the public forms of popular protest by looking at how people demonstrated and made their voices ‘heard’ and their messages ‘seen’. In the hot summers of 2003 and 2004, Hong Kong people took to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction of Tung’s administration, against the legislation of the National Security Bill (2003) and to protest against the NPC’s interpretation of the Basic Law that put a halt to democracy (2004). While the exact number of participants in these two carnival-like rallies has been the subject of some debate,11 there is no question that they once again demythologized the conventional understanding that Hong Kong people are apolitical and only care about money-making or their personal/family interests (the most ‘classic’ statement of which is Lau, 1982). The popular cultural expressions of people’s views in these two pro-democracy rallies demonstrated a creative use of various modes of cultural practices and performances; a co-existence and mixture of what we would like to call ‘mainstream’ (or ‘conventional’) and ‘emergent’ modes of visual culture and cyber-culture were observed. James C. Scott has distinguished two types of resistance: public-declared resistance such as demonstrations and disguised resistance or ‘infra-politics’ (low-profile forms of resistance). In our view, a sharp line between the two modes is overdrawn, as mass demonstrations in modern societies are often carnival-like. Indeed, the mass rally is a powerful instrument of struggle and effective tool of people’s resistance, which combines the power of spectacular carnival-like visual images – full of lively sounds, music, dance, colours and activities of all kinds – that impress its targeted audience while simultaneously protects the participants by the ‘anonymity’ of the crowd. Parenthetically, recent developments in information technology have also allowed the proliferation of political expressions in the cyber-world that are both ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ simultaneously. Partly inspired by Scott’s theory, the following analysis will focus first on the public performances of resistance, followed by the hidden form of cyber-politics partially enabled by the information technology.

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According to Scott, who was himself inspired by Bakhtin, carnivals can be regarded ‘as an institutionalized form of political disguise’: [for they] are socially defined in some important ways as being out of the ordinary. Normal rules of social intercourse are not enforced, and either the wearing of actual guises or the anonymity conferred by being part of a large crowd amplifies a general air of license – licentiousness. . . . [C]arnival allows certain things to be said, certain forms of social power to be exercised that are muted or suppressed outside this ritual sphere . . . Among other things, carnival is ‘the people’s informal courtroom’ in which biting songs and scolding verse can be sung directly to the disrespected and malefactors . . . Disapproval that would be dangerous or socially costly to vent at other times is sanctioned during carnival. It is the time and place to settle, verbally at least, personal and social scores. (Scott 1990: 172–173) This description of the carnival seemed almost tailor-made to the two 1st July rallies. In these ‘people’s informal courtrooms’ were satire and parody. Tung, with his poor political leadership and judgement, became the most obvious target and many participants publicly shouted for this resignation. Other pro-government politicians including Tsang Hin-chi and Wu Waiyung, both Hong Kong deputies to the National People’s Congress; Ma Lik, the Party Chairman of the DAB; and Leung Chun-ying, Executive Councillor and member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference were all targets of satire and parody; the public accused them of ‘hurting’ both the mother country and Hong Kong’s autonomy, and working for their own business/political interests rather than Hong Kong’s public interest. The domination of the CPG and the monopoly of power of the CCP were also attacked by some participants. Anti-Tung balloons, cartoons, posters, banners, etc. could be seen everywhere on the streets from Causeway Bay to Central. The styles of performance that street protesters displayed took various forms; chanting slogans, showing petition-poems and rhymes, holding colourful banners, posters and placards, displaying buttons and stickers and distributing handbills to the direct use of one’s body and costume for displays. Washable tattoos were printed or painted on protesters’ faces and arms. Hats, T-shirts, shoes, and umbrellas, and even wreaths and paper coffins, symbolizing the death of democracy, were also used as a medium for showing one’s voice. A thorough analysis of the visual images of the mass rallies shows the ‘satirical’ elements of the rallies. The organizer of the rallies, CHRF, with slogans like: ‘Dress in Black, Against 23’, urged participants to wear black clothes for the 2003 rally, symbolically expressing the people’s anger and protesting against the legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law, as well as mourning for the ‘death’ of

48 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong liberty and democracy. Realizing that black clothes, even T-shirts, could be too hot for the summer, CHRF asked participants to wear white for the 2004 rally to show people’s quest for democracy and freedom; again, ‘mourning’ was the theme, as white is the colour of traditional Chinese mourning clothes.12 However, everybody could decide his/her own script and perform it in the public space, resulting in a culturally rich demonstration. A couple even attended the rally on their wedding day wearing traditional Chinese wedding costume, thus effectively bringing private and the public concerns into one. Apart from protest, the mass rally of 2004 had served another political objective, i.e., to mobilize participants to actively take part in the election by registering as voters and to remind them to vote and to ‘sweep away’ the ‘royalists’ (pro-establishment politicians) in the LegCo. Hence, we can consider the mass rally that occurred prior to the election as a prelude to the electioneering process of the pro-democracy camp. In Hong Kong, election television advertisements are non-existent. The Election Law requires the mass media to grant equal time to all candidates, hence, the governmentowned Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and Cable Television only organized a series of televised election forums for all candidates to attend and to meet the public via TV channels. Under such conditions, the media broadcast and circulation of the spectacular images of the rallies acted as an ‘advertisement’ for the forthcoming election in 2004, in favour of the pro-democracy parties, in contravention of the law. In recent years, digital media strategies have also emerged as a new component of recent political campaign in Hong Kong. Many candidates have developed their own websites to publicize their political positions and to lobby for support. To enhance direct and instant communication with young voters, ICQ and internet forums have been widely used by candidates during the 2004 electioneering process. Several internet-radio channels have also been launched by pro-democracy groups, political parties, and individuals.13 These have been used as a means to counter the monopoly of formal radio channels by business companies and the government. But electioneering is not the exclusive prerogative of political parties. Indeed, in tandem with the increasing popularization of information technology, electioneering has also become part of ordinary people’s activities and ‘parodying of politics’ became increasingly part of Hong Kong popular culture. The availability of information technology made cyber-politics and popular resistances not only possible but also much easier. Many digital visual images and songs shown in the mass rallies and electioneering process are borrowed from popular songs, movie scripts, are words or themes from the government’s campaign or governing elites, and official political propaganda. For example, in June 2003, the HKSAR government launched a ‘Hello from Hong Kong’ campaign by designing various postcards and inviting Hong Kong people to send those cards to friends and families outside of Hong Kong. The purpose was to tell potential tourists

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that Hong Kong has conquered SARS and that travel to Hong Kong was safe. Such postcards and its campaign slogan ‘the greetings of Hong Kong people are spreading across ten thousand miles’ have been parodied by internet users and turned into a series of e-cards to mobilize others for the pro-democracy rally in 2004. The original slogan was turned into ‘the grievances of Hong Kong people are spreading across ten thousand miles.’ People’s grievances and disappointments as expressed in these parodied e-cards included the poor performance of government officials in dealing with the crisis of SARS, the police force having too much power and using unnecessary force to ban peaceful demonstrations, the CPG’s decision to ban full democracy in 2007–2008, the sudden resignation of three popular radio talk show hosts, a few months prior to the September 2004 LegCo election and, the perceived threat that these resignations posed to the freedom of speech. Another target for parody was the DAB, the pro-Beijing political party. The pro-Beijing DAB chose ‘Stability for Democracy, Harmony for a Better Tomorrow’ as their major theme on campaign posters. They positioned themselves as a force of stability for society and mainland–Hong Kong relations, while condemning the Democrats for seeking to confront Beijing and create chaos in society.14 It launched a city-wide advertisement on 52 buses in town to attack the democrats; campaign advertisements on public transport vehicles, including on Mass Transit Railways cars, are conventional practices in Hong Kong. The DAB advertisement stressed that if the democrats become the majority in the LegCo, they would paralyse the government, in contrast the DAB would ‘do everything for the sake of Hong Kong’ (Sing To Daily, 18 August 2004). On the internet, these campaign advertising materials were modified by internet protestors; the slogan was changed to ‘DAB does everything for the sake of the CCP.’ Another DAB political advertisement, ‘Let’s go Hong Kong’, was posted at many MTR stations. It was originally targeted against its opponent, the Democratic Party. The advertisement reminded voters that it was easy to ‘destroy’ and very difficult to ‘rebuild’ Hong Kong, implying that voters should treasure stability and prosperity and avoid voting for the democrats. However, in the cyber-world, this advertisement was changed into ‘Let’s go Dictator’, to accuse the DAB of destroying democracy, and of treating obedience to Beijing as building Hong Kong. Finally, even the very name of DAB, Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, was also subjected to parody, as ‘Democracy According to Beijing’. All these cyber-culture practices, where internet users, especially youngsters, freely discuss politics, express their feelings, and create images or music videos, of course, benefited from the anonymity that information technology affords to its users, when they exercised their cultural resistance. The 2004 election brought forth a new phenomenon. With Photoshop, a large number of young voters re-created some leftist pro-Beijing candidates’ photos and circulated funny-looking images on the internet, to satirize proBeijing politicians and the DAB (Lee 2004). The DAB candidate for the

50 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong New Territories East Tso Wang-wai became a target of the youth. Tso has a doctoral degree in science and was a former professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was often invited as a guest speaker by local media as an expert on ‘scientific’ matters. In the course of his campaigning, he always emphasized his expertise in scientific knowledge and judgement, but his performance on a TV election forum was considered by many to be below their expectations and not on a par with his academic and selfimposed high profile. Indeed, many considered his performance to be unintentionally ‘funny’ and, consequently, he became an object of satire and parody by internet users. More than a hundred cartoons were created to make fun of Tso. Internet users also entered Tso’s forum and asked numerous silly questions and kept Tso too busy to respond to all. Some political commentators have suggested that this strategy combines the characteristics of the ‘hit-and-run’ strategy of the ‘Flash Mob’ phenomenon with the ‘anonymity’ provided by the internet where people do not have to participate physically but can surf quickly and anonymously in the cyber-world without leaving a trace (Lee 2004; Wong, S. 2004). Finally, songs for social movements and current political issues were created by pro-democracy young internet users and had been widely circulated in the internet for free download. In a ‘yumkung guan’ website (www.yumkung.com), dozens of songs parodying Hong Kong popular songs have become a new form of cultural resistance to the dominant discourses. To parody and satirize the ‘one country two systems’ formula and Beijing’s domination, a song carrying the theme ‘Without Two Systems in One country, there would not have been a New Hong Kong’ was created and posted on the internet (Lam 2004). This theme was definitely borrowed from the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda at the time when it was still struggling for power and legitimacy – ‘without the Communist Party, there would not have been a New China’.

Conclusion: popular cultural practices and electioneering in a new age? In this chapter we have examined the political context under which Hong Kong’s popular political culture has been flourishing. Under the current partial democratic political context, i.e., ‘one country, two systems’, political institutions and full democracy are awaiting development, political parties are still in their infancy, the performance of the government has been far from satisfactory, and the CPG has exerted constitutional and ideological domination over the HKSAR, there is a tendency for Hong Kong people to express their resistance to the top-down domination from the HKSAR government and from Beijing. These publicly declared resistances have taken different forms and were facilitated and multiplied by information technology. Popular resistance that emerged in the form of political satire was able to flourish owing to the unwillingness and/or inability of Tung’s administration

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to adopt stronger measures against these forms of political opposition which sprang from different sectors of the thriving civil society. It is, of course, difficult to establish with any degree of certainty to what extent the mass rallies and cyber-politics had an impact on the election result; many of the pro-democracy camp were quite disappointed with the 2004 LegCo election result. However, shortly after he had announced his resignation from the Chief Executive post, in late February 2005, Tung himself admitted that he first asked to resign from the Chief Executive’s job soon after the mass rally of 2004. Whether this statement was truthful or otherwise, the social and political significance of the two mass rallies can no longer be gainsaid. Furthermore, there is little doubt that these activities are likely to become a central part of the popular political culture of Hong Kong, as well as play an increasingly important role in future electioneering processes. Finally, having surveyed some of the cyber-politics in the 2004 LegCo Election, one is forced to conclude that a large part of the internet politics was devoted to scandal politics, smear campaigns and other sorts of negative campaigns – not even a distant approximation of a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’. This should not be too surprising; for in a society where the government suffers from a crisis of political legitimacy, where citizens are disaffected with both the central and local governments, and where the media is more interested in the image of the politicians than with their political platforms, one could hardly expect anything else. The symptoms of cyber-politics are in this regard the symptoms of the kind of politics that our society has. On the other hand, a more sympathetic reading also assures us that Hong Kong society is not as one-dimensional as some consider it to be, or at least not yet; and that such diverse and vivacious practices are themselves living proof of the existence of a vibrant civil society, if still only a partial democracy.

Acknowledgements This research was funded by a research grant from the General Education Centre of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (G-T826).

Notes 1 According to the Annex 1 of the Basic Law, if there is a need to amend the method of selecting the Chief Executives for the terms subsequent to the year 2007, such amendments must pass three hurdles: (1) the endorsement by a twothirds majority of all the members of the Legislative Council; (2) the consent of the Chief Executive; and (3) the approval of the Standing Committee of the NPC. Annex 2 stipulates that the introduction of greater democracy after 2007 requires the endorsement of a two-thirds majority of all Legislative Council members, the consent of the Chief Executive, and that they will be reported to the Standing Committee of the NPC for record. 2 The legislators of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) and the Liberal Party are widely considered to be ‘royalists’ in the LegCo.

52 Wan-Chaw Shae and Pik-Wan Wong

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13

14

The ‘royalists’ also include a few other independent legislators who tend to support the government’s positions. Although there are currently 25 pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong, none of them have been appointed into the Executive Council, the highest power structure of the HKSAR. The NPC’s decision include the following: (1) no universal suffrage for electing the Chief Executive in 2007; (2) no universal suffrage for Legislative Council elections in 2008; (3) the half-and-half ratio for members of Legco elected from functional constituencies and elected directly will remain unchanged in 2008; (4) the procedures for voting on bills and motions in Legco shall remain unchanged in 2008; and (5) specific methods for 2007 Chief Executive and 2008 Legco elections can be appropriately modified. See ‘China’s broken promise’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 Sept. 2004. See ‘Time to redress the democratic deficit’, A14, South China Morning Post, 23 Sept. 2004. See ‘Two systems tested in Hong Kong, on Sunday voters will have a limited chance to elect members to the city’s parliament’, Christian Science Monitor, 10 Sept. 2004. During Hong Kong’s difficult times, the Central Government responded positively to the many suggestions put forward by the Special Administrative Region Government. These included signing the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), allowing more mainlanders to visit Hong Kong under the Individual Visit Scheme, streamlining the procedures for mainland enterprises to set up business in Hong Kong, establishing a new co-operation mechanism under the Hong Kong–Guangdong Co-operation Joint Conference, giving approval for local banks to conduct personal Renminbi business, importing mainland talent and implementing 24-hour boundary crossing clearance (see the Chief Executive’s Policy Address 2005, http://www.info.gov.hk). For further analysis of the horizontal vs. the vertical structure, see Osterweil (2004). See also Yazhou Zhoukan, 20 March 2005. There was no official estimate of the number of participants in the rally of 2003. Even the organizer was surprised by the sheer number of participants, which simply defied count. The figure of 500,000 was simply a rough estimation made by the host on the spot. Many believed that the number well exceeded this estimate. For the rally in 2004, the Hong Kong police force estimated that there were only around 200,000. participants; however, the organizer CHRF maintained that the participants exceeded 500,000. As expected, the government estimation is always at odds with and far below the figure of the organizers’. See the handbill of the Civil Human Rights Front (June 2004). Newly emerged internet radio channels including for example: Radio45 (www.radio-45.com); Radio71 (www.radio71.hk); People’s Radio Hong Kong (www.prhk.org); Hi-Radio; HKiRadio; HK000.com; Hong Kong Catholic Church’s Internet Radio; and Chan Kam-lam’s Internet Radio. With only a few exceptions, most of the internet radio channels were launched by autonomous pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong. For easy connection to these internet radio channels, visit the website of e-politics21 (www.e-politics21.org). Ibid.

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The performance factor in Indonesian elections Jennifer Lindsay

Since Indonesia declared its independence in 1945, it has held nine national legislative elections at five-yearly intervals beginning in 1955 (1971, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2004) and one national direct presidential election (2004). Of these, only the first was held during the ‘Old Order’ of Soekarno (1945–66), six were held during the New Order of Soeharto (1966– 98) and two have been held since his removal from office. I was in Indonesia for seven of these (1971–99) legislative elections and the first round of the 2004 presidential election. This is actually more often than I have been present during or participated in elections in a country, Australia, where I myself can vote. Unlike the other writers in this volume, I am writing about the Indonesian elections as a non-voter, and my observations of the elections are comments of an outsider to the ballot box. I know that my voice (suara, in Indonesian the word for ‘voice’ is the same as for ‘vote’) is not counted. This chapter focuses primarily on Indonesia’s first-ever direct presidential election, the first round of which was held in July 2004 (the final run-off between the two finalists followed in September), but also refers both to the legislative election held three months earlier in April, and comparatively to earlier election practice.

Indonesian elections as ‘popular culture’ There are various ways one might approach elections in Indonesia as ‘popular culture’, depending on one’s approach to the term. In his Introduction to this volume, Chua provides a useful overview of approaches to ‘popular culture’ in Cultural Studies. He reviews the early approach to popular culture as ‘culture of the subordinated’ with its championing of the non-elite, and with culture seen in terms of a class dichotomy between the dominant and the subordinated. On the other hand, as he points out, more recent attention to the ‘mass’ has drawn popular culture studies to focus more exclusively on mass media and its practices of production and consumption. An inherent contradiction here is already obvious. The use of the same adjective ‘popular’ to apply to these two instances implies a similarity between them. Yet of course we can hardly consider mass media in itself as presenting

56 Jennifer Lindsay and championing the culture of the subordinated. For instance, as with the Indonesian elections discussed in this chapter, when we observe the entwined worlds of politics and performance, the mass media acts as an elite intrusion on popular live performance practice. The mass media – with its national reach beyond the live event, and its link to the commodified world of nationally recognized celebrities and politicians – is the culture of the elite. Approaching elections in Indonesia as popular culture, one might then interpret the ‘popular’ sphere neither in terms of a dichotomy between domin ant versus subordinate culture nor in terms of mass production and consumption, but rather in terms of the quotidian, mundane activities of ordinary people, as what Chua summarizes as ‘practices that one acquires as part of living the everyday life rather than through specialized and learned practices’. The advantage of this approach to the ‘popular’ is that it does not necessarily presuppose any elite/non-elite distinction, but rather looks for continuities in cultural practice between, say, the everyday and the celebratory. In considering possible continuities between wider cultural practice and that related to elections in Indonesia there are at least two possible approaches. One would be to look at the wider cultural practice of electing in general – that is, at wider practices of voting and electing beyond the national where the general election is situated. For instance, in Chapter 5 in this volume, Pitch Pongsawat notes that in Thailand familiarization with elections begins at kindergarten, when children learn to elect a school leader. In Indonesia, there is no such early familiarization process with choice related to leadership. There are, however, regular elections outside of the national framework, namely the election of village heads. Village-level elections for the lurah (hamlet-group head) have taken place continuously since the midnineteenth century in the Netherlands East Indies (Haris 2004: 18). During the New Order, this was the only position other than the provincial and national government representatives that remained an elected one. All other officials became government appointees.1 Changes implemented in mid-2005 have introduced direct elections for intermediate leadership positions of bupati, mayor and governor, and now the broader cultural map of voting practice in Indonesia is in a state of radical change, with national elections finding new significance in this broader map. The other approach to examining possible continuities between wider cultural practice and that related to elections in Indonesia is to look at ways that cultural practices other than voting – namely, practices that are not necessarily specific to elections – are enacted at election time, and to consider what this enactment implies about popular attitudes towards politics. This is the approach this chapter pursues, through examining the role performance plays in elections in Indonesia. An observation of elections reveals intense slippage between the world of performance and politics at election time. For instance, the presence of performers at election rallies is a longestablished practice. Post-Soeharto, election campaigning has moved into television, but there too performance remains foregrounded, even with

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 57 candidates making appearances as performers, as was a feature of the 2004 presidential elections. Celebrities have joined the stage, not merely as entertainers, but as candidate supporters, or as candidates themselves. Interaction between television and live performance is high, with the television campaigning of debates and talk-shows inspiring non-televised performance. And display and show, which was a feature of the election parades even in the Soeharto era, has become more marked of late, perhaps because of more assured media coverage. More recently, even voting day has become an opportunity for play, with costume and decoration at voting booths. What are we to make of this festive atmosphere, and the part that performance plays in making it? An initial response might be to assign it Bakhtinian carnivalesque significance, discovering in the festivity a site of reversal, transgression and resistance at the event of the election. The danger here is that this could perpetuate nostalgia for the early Cultural Studies desire to name and champion the subordinated. As we shall see, a closer inspection of the Indonesian case demands that we exercise caution in equating festivity with carnival. Humphrey has signaled such caution about ready application of a generic model of carnival to festivity, what he calls ‘analysis by analogy’, which denies the very specific conditions of the medieval carnival within much broader medieval festal culture (Humphrey 2000). And indeed, performance at election time in Indonesia stresses more continuities with everyday life than any carnivalesque reversal, or more precisely, any reversal as transgression. It stresses continuities with the fact that an element of resistance, as a sense of reflexivity and play, is part of performance itself. Then, rather than approaching the performance phenomenon with assumptions of ‘carnival’, we need to ask what the smooth traffic between performance and politics at election time suggests about attitudes in Indonesia towards elections. Here we need to pay heed to continuities of the presence of performance; both continuities between the presence of performance in the recent elections with those previously under very different political conditions; and also ways that the performances of election campaigns appear outside of elections, for instance what kind celebratory or ceremonial roles they play at other times. This chapter considers these questions, looking specifically at the 2004 legislative and presidential elections, but viewing them within the broader context of elections past.

A brief history of Indonesian national elections Indonesia declared independence in August 1945 following the Japanese surrender of World War II, which ended the Japanese Occupation. After four and a half years of fighting the Dutch who had returned to reclaim their former colony, the Republic of Indonesia became legally independent in December 1949. A turbulent period of parliamentary politics then followed, ending with President Soekarno’s overthrow of parliament and implementation of authoritarian ‘Guided Democracy’ in 1957. The Soekarno period – retrospectively

58 Jennifer Lindsay dubbed the ‘Old Order’ in contrast to the New Order that followed – continued until the coup of late 1965 when the confrontation between the military and the communists ended in the victory of the military and General Soeharto’s assumption of power, the bloodbath as the communists were hunted down, and finally the deposition of Soekarno as President in 1966. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, only one general election was held during the Soekarno period, Indonesia’s first-ever elections of 1955, which was contested by 28 parties. The first general elections of the New Order were held in 1971, contested by nine parties plus the new Government apparatus called ‘Functional Groups’, Golongan Karya or Golkar (which claimed not to be a party at all). In 1973, the nine political parties were forced to coalesce and reduce to two; namely the Development Unity Party, known as PPP, which was a federation of former Islamic parties, and the Indonesia Democracy Party or PDI which was a federation of former Nationalist and Christian Parties. All subsequent elections during the New Order, held at five-yearly intervals from 1977, were contested by only three parties: Golkar, PPP and PDI. Political parties defined by the government as parties (namely PPP and PDI) were forbidden from political activity at village level. This meant that their campaign activities such as rallies and parades which we will discuss later, were restricted to towns and cities. Since the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998, there have been major revisions to electoral rules. Restrictions on forming political parties were abolished. A total of 48 parties contested the 1999 general elections, and 24 parties contested in April 2004. The system for choosing the president was changed. Previously, the president and vice-president were chosen by the People’s Consultative Assembly every five years, but in 2004 they were directly elected by the people for the first time.2 In this system, while each presidential and vice-presidential candidate must each be endorsed by a party or coalition of parties to stand, the president/vice-president teams do not represent political parties. The presidential and vice-presidential candidates of any one team may thus come from different parties (as with the winning team, Yudhoyono from the new Democrat Party and Kalla from Golkar). In order to win, a team has to get 50 per cent of the votes. Thus it was that in 2004 there were two stages to this election; the first stage in July with five teams at which no team won 50 per cent of the vote, and the subsequent run-off in September between the two top teams, Megawati/ Hasyim against Yudhoyono/Kalla, won by latter. At the general elections in Indonesia, voters choose candidates for the People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat or DPR). Both the total number of seats and the composition of this Council have changed over time, and formerly not all the seats were directly elected. During the New Order around one-fifth of the 500 or so total seats were appointees, these predominantly military.3 In 1999, this number was reduced, and by the time of the 2004 elections, appointed members at DPR had been abolished, and voters were now choosing all DPR members.

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 59 All Indonesian citizens over the age of 17 can vote, so can those aged below 17 but who are currently or have been married. During the New Order, all government civil servants (who had to pledge loyalty to Golkar) had to vote at their workplace, which was a highly effective way of ensuring 100 per cent Golkar vote among civil servants. Now, people are free to vote where they wish, but many choose to return to the place where they are registered as dwelling. Parties are represented by symbols and colours, and voters make their choice by punching a hole in the ballot paper at their chosen symbol. Until 2004, voters elected purely by party, and the names of candidates were usually not known to them. The most important fact for parties to get across during the campaign period, then, was familiarization of voters with their colours and symbols. In 2004, although party symbols and colours were still paramount, now legislative candidates themselves were also revealed not only by name but often also by photograph, a change which we was to be of great significance when celebrities entered the race.

Performance in election campaigns National election campaigns in Indonesia are run over a period of four weeks, with a complete stop for the one week ‘quiet’ period immediately prior to voting day. During the campaign period, different parties are allotted different days for campaigning, to minimize actual physical confrontation between different party supporters. This practice of allotting different days to different parties started under the New Order, but has been continued (apparently with general agreement) for elections since 1998. Performance as a marked activity in the form of live entertainment is one of the main features of the campaigns, and has been, it seems, since 1955. Together with parades and rallies, slogans and costumes, and more recently TV talk shows, advertisements and televised live debates, it is an essential ingredient of the strictly delineated campaign period. Most performances take place at the public rallies or as sponsored events linked to them, but recently even the parades have become more overt performances in themselves.

Pawai: Motorized Parades The parades, called pawai, are a fully motorized affair. They consist of as many young men as possible on motorbikes with the mufflers removed so to make as much noise as they can revving the bikes to a rhythmic pattern; some women might be pillion passengers, but it is really a male domain. Along with the motorbikes are trucks and buses crammed with people, and some cars. Open transport is preferred, where the display of bodies is more evident. Supporters dress in the colour of their party, yell slogans, and decorate themselves and their motorbikes (trucks, buses, etc.) accordingly. Participants get free t-shirts, and often ‘petrol money’ from party organisers, and many of them participate in pawai of more than one party.

60 Jennifer Lindsay The pawai has been a feature of election campaigns at least since the late 1970s, and has now become virtually synonymous with elections, at least in this particular manifestation. But the pawai has other manifestations. As a parade of floats it used to be associated with community parades at Lebaran (the Idul Fitri festivities at the end of the Moslem fasting month) which was also the time of the night fair ( pasar malam). Or pawai connotes a parade of people marching (predominantly non-motorized) representing clearly defined community groups (schoolchildren and so forth) which is an enduring ritual of national independence-day. The election campaign has adopted this festive custom that has both a secular national and a religious association and made it into a particular display of physical mass support. The people on the street do not watch floats, but rather watch other people identified not as community groups, but as a crowd of generic party supporters. During the New Order, the pawai involved flags, costume and colour. Part of the effect was a moving sea of colour (Golkar’s yellow, PPP’s green, PDI’s red) on the streets, to stress the symbol and colour associated with the party, but particularly as a show of force. To this extent, the pawai was a show of how much of a crowd a party could muster, and the fact that many of the people wearing red today might be in green the next was not particularly important. More important was the impression of a crowd created at that moment, and the sense of potential danger that a crowd always inspires. Pemberton, writing on the 1982 elections, mentions the New Order rhetoric of ‘ekses’ (excess), and the balance maintained during the election campaign to keep ‘ekses’ at bay. Yet he also points out that the potential for ‘ekses’ – a pawai getting out of control for instance – was also essential to the elections as ritual during the New Order. Making the elections a success, which meant bringing about an appearance of order, involved including the potential for ‘ekses’ and demonstrating the ability to contain it. But Pemberton also rejects giving this phenomenon any carnivalesque interpretation. Rather, writing specifically about Java, he finds echoes with the practice called rebutan, which is an integral part of Javanese ritual life. Rebutan is a celebration of contestation which Pemberton describes as ‘struggles among rivals fighting over power-laden objects’ (1994: 18). Acts of rebutan, such as mass ripping apart of ritual food or offerings, used to be a common and integral part of the productive tension of Javanese rituals, from weddings through annual ceremonies honoring village guardian spirits, but were discouraged by the New Order. Since the fall of the New Order, the pawai has remained a feature of national election campaigns, but remains associated with political parties – with symbols and colours – rather than individuals, as in the presidential election. Now, however, the decoration has become more elaborate, with face paint and costumes, like football team supporters, but the pawai only ever has one side playing at a time. Even the motorbikes are dressed up. In 1999, the new National Mandate Party, or PAN, introduced a new element to the pawai – choreography. The pillion passengers sit or stand on the

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 61 motor bikes making choreographed movements in unison; it looks a little like flagged Morse code. And with this new choreography comes gender diversity – the PAN pawai now often also have women performing the passenger role. These days, the pawai of all parties get exposure on TV news, so the show extends beyond the live event, and this is certainly a factor in the increasingly elaborate and staged display. Out on the streets, though, the pawai continue. As before, there is the all-important sense of a crowd, and the danger of the mob. As before, there are often clashes and violence; fights break out between those in the pawai and spectators; motor accidents in the pawai also trigger violent reaction. Overall, though, the pawai have become more performative.

Staged live performance Unlike the pawai show that moves past people on the street, live performances of artists at rallies are usually the reasons for people to gather in one place, such as a stadium or large field. As such, they are often described as ‘crowd-pullers’ or ‘attractions’ for what one might expect to be the election campaign rally’s main act – that of convincing voters to vote for a candidate or party. In Indonesia, however, the attendees at rallies, who are almost exclusively young males, are usually either confirmed supporters of the party concerned, or are there precisely to watch the performances. And performances have been a constant feature of campaign rallies from the beginning of the national elections until the present. Writing of the 1955 election, Feith mentions ‘meetings where popular theatre was the attraction’ and the ‘ramai (bright, noisy) fair-like atmosphere of mass meetings’ (1957: 21–22). During the New Order, performer participation in election campaigns took two forms. First, there was the continued practice of the commissioning of ‘generic’ local popular performances at campaign time for crowd entertainment, like the unspecified and unnamed ‘popular theatre’ Feith mentioned and, second, the affiliation of ‘big name’ or ‘star’ performers with particular parties. This was particularly true of the all-powerful government non-party party, Golkar, which used performing artists to endorse its message of development. Politicization of artists began in the late 1950s and early 1960s during Soekarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’, when major political parties had affiliated cultural organizations and artists were pressured to join these organizations. In the highly-charged political climate of the time, artists were expected to espouse an ideology, and even non-party affiliation was a bold political statement. The most active cultural organization was the People’s Institute of Culture, or LEKRA, associated with the Communist Party. After the 1965 coup, the Communist Party was banned, and its members, both real and suspected, were murdered or imprisoned, including large numbers of performers. General Soeharto took over and the ‘New Order’ began, soon creating the new government apparatus, Golkar. Despite the new embargo

62 Jennifer Lindsay on any popular political activity, Golkar was quick to mobilize performers in the first New Order election campaign of 1971, ostensibly as entertainers to spread the development message. Golkar’s invention in 1971 was the ‘safari’, which was the name given to national tours by teams of popular singers and musicians, drawn almost entirely from Jakarta, sent to all the provinces (Ward 1974: 85–86). In the provinces they were supplemented by local artists, and their performances in huge stadiums were supplemented by election speeches. Golkar’s campaign organizers in 1971 recruited a total of 324 artists for the ‘Tim Kesenian Safari Golkar 1971’, comprising singers, comedians, dancers and bands. Fourteen planes were mobilized to transport this ‘Artis Safari’ around the country over the months of May and June (Tempo, 9 April 1977). The Golkar safari became a regular campaign event during the New Order, touring big-name Jakarta artists, predominantly singers, known through radio, TV and the recording industry. The other two political parties, with limited funds and completely blocked from the state-controlled media, could not compete. The only rival to Golkar’s claim to such ‘star’ performers came briefly from the PPP Party, which in the 1977 election managed to get dangdut star Rhoma Irama to head its election campaign. Dangdut, a form of popular music which mixes Indian, Middle Eastern, and Western musical elements, can be religious (in an Islamic frame), sentimental or raunchy, and rather like country music in the USA, though much funkier, is good to dance to, sing along with, and is also considered as belonging to the lower classes. As a result of Rhoma Irama’s endorsement of the Islamic coalition party PPP, he was blacklisted from appearing on state television TVRI, the only TV channel at the time when Golkar ruled the airwaves. In 1992, Rhoma Irama left PPP, joined the Golkar campaign and was immediately reinstated on TV. Throughout the New Order, the non-Golkar parties PPP and PDI, blocked from the media, found it particularly important to have lively, crowded live rally events – but at the same time, they were consistently out-manoeuvred in access to ‘stars’ at their rallies. With the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998, Golkar fell from favour and lost its control over the media. At the same time, private television, which had only begun in the early 1990s, boomed with no more overriding government control. Since 1998, performers have been free to choose their party affiliations, and parties are free to choose artists. During the New Order, all artists ‘invited’ to perform for Golkar – whether stars or not – were made to see this as a declaration of Golkar support, and their coercion was facilitated by provision of access to the media, government projects and statesponsored performances. It was not an invitation one could refuse. But in 1999 all this changed. Election campaigns in 1999 and 2004 included performers, as before, at rally events. But now performers could once again perform for various parties, without endorsing any one. This is the phenomenon that Indonesian filmmaker Garin Nugroho records in his short film of the April 2004 legislative elections. The Fear Factor: Star Galaxy followed a

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 63 group of dangdut singers in Yogyakarta as they perform for one political party rally after another. For them, the excitement is in the number of gigs the campaign generates. The more elections, they say, the better. If the pawai echoes celebrations of Lebaran and Independence Day, the campaign rally suggests the festive atmosphere of the pasar malam, the night fair held in towns for secular and religious celebratory events like Idul Fitri or independence day. The pasar malam is a crowded, noisy fair with booths, sideshows, shysters selling their wares and performances, established custom is that some of these performances will be ‘dirty dancing’, i.e. young women gyrating on narrow, raised makeshift stages to very loud music. The campaign rally, though held during the day, recalls this lively atmosphere of the fair, where performance, including gyrating girls if at all possible, is integral. As at a fair, those watching the dancers are men. Like a fair, too, the rally is not a place for voicing opposition. People who go to the campaign rallies are supporters, or they dress and act like them. They go for the show; to be part of the crowd, to be entertained, some to show real partisan support, but not to declare themselves as opponents. Heckling is not rally activity. However, lively, loud and often overtly sensual performance is not restricted to the festive atmosphere of the fair or the rally. It has just as much place within the most domestic and arguably the most formal of rituals in Indonesia, the wedding. In Central and East Java, for instance, the traditional performance called tayuban, where one or more female dancers dance seductively and teasingly with male partners in turn, is a common part of the wedding event, and in fact weddings is where tayuban is chiefly performed (Widodo 1995). Similar types of performance are found at weddings elsewhere in Java, and beyond. Even dangdut singer-dancers can appear as wedding entertainment, singing and gyrating as the wedding guests sit formally sipping their tea, the bride and groom sitting impassive on their bridal thrones. The formal, ritualistic and ceremonial structure of an event like the wedding can embrace the informal, the bawdy and the unpredictable. The same juxtaposition of formal and informal is found in many traditional performance forms in Indonesia, where the juxtaposition pokes fun at the constructedness of authority and formality. The clown figures and comic interludes that are so integral to traditional theatre forms, such as wayang kulit, wayang wong or srimulat, tease the figures of power and each other, but they never actually challenge the established hierarchy. They merely highlight that these are characters, like the bride and groom and the wedding guests, who are playing a part. Wedding performances resemble the rally in another way, too, as part of a system of patronage. Weddings are one of the main occasions for performance in Indonesia, where the patronage structure for performance is still strong. Just as anyone with a name to upkeep and the wealth to do it must provide entertainment for his guests at a wedding, so too should any political party demonstrate its generosity in providing a good show so that a large number of guests will attend and be satisfied.

64 Jennifer Lindsay The association of the elections with the wedding is often made explicit on the election day itself. This has become more evident of late, and was particularly so in 2004. Newspaper and TV coverage showed many voting booths decorated with palm fronds in the style of a house holding a wedding, and some supervising officials playfully acted out the part of wedding hosts.4 ‘Getting dressed up’ is increasingly a media-covered phenomenon of election day. The image presented is that of a party, a wedding party. The term pesta or ‘party’ was introduced by New Order in 1982 to describe the elections – pesta demokrasi, often translated into English as ‘festival of democracy’. This translation has led to the interpretation of ‘festival’ as carnival. However, the word in Indonesian has other associations, as Pemberton, again writing on the 1982 elections, points out: Strange as this translation [festival of democracy] might sound, ‘Pesta Demokrasi’ is in fact an even stranger image for democratic elections. Rather than refer to ‘festival’ (which carries its own highly celebratory, at times carnivalesque, semantic force), the Indonesian – especially Central Javanese Indonesian – term ‘pesta’ usually refers to formal receptions regularly tied to public ceremonies and domestic rituals. Thus, the ideal 1982 election scene envisioned by the New Order government was that of, say, a Javanese-Indonesian ceremonial wedding reception where guests are ushered to socially predesignated seats to act as entertained but quiet witnesses for an event executed with close to perfect predictability – as well as, perhaps, a hint of festivity. Nearly untranslatable, ‘Pesta Demokrasi’ sounds a little like a ‘Formal Democracy Reception’. (Pemberton 1986: 4) Perhaps a better translation of ‘festival demokrasi’ would be ‘democracy party’, with its connotations of both fun and ceremony, but the phrase is confusing because of those other political parties. In any case, the Indonesian word pesta – which continues to be used for elections even after the New Order’s demise – does convey a sense of an event that is both celebratory and regulated, where there are patrons who provide generously, where people come and participate and have a sense of being a participant, and where an integral part of that sense is the partaking of the entertainment provided for them. But if the pawai and performances of elections during the New Order were manifestations of the regulatory and ritual side of the pesta, or the formal and predictable side of things which included the possibility of ekses, now post New Order, the emphasis is on pesta as play, as performance.

2004 changes By 2004, the importance of the campaign rallies was beginning to decrease for two main reasons: (1) the freedom of the media; and (2) the participation of celebrities in elections. Political parties still competed to get big-name stars to perform at their major rally events, but the emphasis was more on the

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 65 media coverage of those events and star appearances. The performance factor shifted into the mass media, as the elections became more a media event. After the fall of the New Order in 1998, the new freedom of all media, including the loss of exclusive influence of the private TV channels owned by Soeharto’s children, allowed for the use of the media for campaigning by all political parties, and for general news coverage of all political parties. In the 1999 election campaign, at a time when this freedom was relatively new, the potential of TV was just beginning to be explored with highly creative voter education messages, party advertisements, and lively interactive talk shows on television (Lindsay 2002). Viewers enjoyed seeing candidates interrogated by studio audiences, but they also enjoyed seeing candidates and supporters from different parties together in one place. Because the rallies keep different party candidates and supporters apart, it is therefore mainly on TV that they actually meet each other, and that people see them meeting each other, and this meeting turns into real entertainment.5

Celebrities performing as politicians By 2004, the intrusion of television in elections had brought elections squarely into the world of celebrities, singers, sinetron or soap-opera artists, comedians and film stars, who are themselves created by television. This celebrity involvement took place in various ways, from behind the scenes campaign support running ‘success teams’, to open declaration of party endorsement, through to candidates actually standing as party candidates. This was partly a response to the new sense of freedom in finally being able to openly declare partisan support without fear of being socially or politically ostracized. The trend for celebrity involvement began in 1999, but exploded in 2004, particularly with the presidential elections when voters nationally were voting for people – personalities, celebrities – rather than parties. One consequence of celebrity involvement was that the performers without national star status – the dangdut singers of Garin’s film, for instance – now found themselves with no name to sell. Their new freedom to move between political parties was, as I mentioned earlier, in one sense liberation from the earlier clutches of the Golkar system. But it was also a freedom gained because they were no longer sought out as party endorsement. By 2004, their role was being usurped by the elite popular world of mass media celebrities, where the meeting between nationally known television personalities and political parties and presidential candidate teams was one of mutual interest, each side offering the other television airtime and public promotion. Celebrities wished to be sought by parties to show that they have a name worth selling, and political parties and candidates looked for celebrity names for single-product endorsement. This mutual endorsement extended to celebrities accepting nominations as legislative candidates, and the 2004 April legislative elections saw a sudden surge of celebrities and artists standing as candidates, with a proportionately high level of success (Lindsay 2005).

66 Jennifer Lindsay In the lead-up to the presidential election in July, media coverage moved towards portraying celebrities as political performers – as discussants, interviewees and debaters on the presidential candidates, openly declaring their presidential choice. Rather than being the ‘attraction’ at a rally (live or broadcast), they now performed their support on TV as politically committed individuals. Just like politicians. The channel SCTV, for instance, broadcast a debate among several artists held as a live public event in Jakarta, and a studio interview panel of artists arguing their support for presidential candidates. The format of the latter was the same as an earlier April SCTV programme when the artists were the legislative candidates.

People performing as celebrities as politicians The TV celebrity-supporter debate format was even replicated in live performance in brilliant parody. In the hamlet of Tanggulsari, on the outskirts of the city of Solo in central Java, an event was held at the badminton court on the night of 27 June (‘Debat’, Koran Tempo, 29 June 2004). A sign was posted: ‘The citizens of Tanggulsari seek a President. Auditions for presidential candidates’. The whole village turned out. The people of Tanggulsari staged a debate – all acted by people of the village – between the ‘Wiranto success team’, the ‘Yudhoyono success team’, and the ‘Amien Rais success team’. A sign saying that the ‘Megawati success team and the Hamzah Haz success teams would not appear’ was presumably a quip about the perceived relative aloofness of those candidates, who were the incumbent president and vice-president. Representatives of the ‘success teams’ stood on oil drums and were given ten minutes to speak. Following the speeches, the auditioners – a panel comprising a housewife, a factory worker and a civil servant – asked the candidates questions. The audience then was given the opportunity to ask questions directly. The debate lasted four hours, and ended with a vote. When the votes were counted, the winner was the Amien Rais team. The woman representing the Amien Rais team then was led to sit on a chair prepared for the winner – a broken chair. The parody here was both play and real. The villagers were excited about the debate, and as the newspaper coverage reported it, they participated enthusiastically in the question session, asking real and heated questions of the ‘candidates’ who likewise replied totally in character. The whole event can be seen as the villagers truly enacting a sense of political participation, but this is also how we might view the original event that inspired the parody, the celebrities on national TV.

Politicians performing as celebrities The crossing between performance, celebrities and politics in the presidential election was particularly striking when the candidates themselves took on the role of performers on media entertainment programmes. As mentioned

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 67 earlier, during this July campaign, teams of president-vice presidential hopefuls presented themselves directly to the people as people and personalities rather than as representatives of single parties. There were five mixed-party teams of personalities in the first round: Wiranto and Salahuddin Wahid; Megawati and Hasyim Muzadi; Amien Rais and Siswono Yudo Husodo; Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Jusuf Kalla; and Hamzah Haz and Agum Gumelar. The candidates vied for media coverage and popular support by performing as singers and poetry-readers. Ostensibly, this was to soften their image, to help them relate to the public at a human level, but their competition as performers became quite serious. To maintain the proper decorum of the competition between the candidates-as-performers, dangdut, the popular music of fairs and rallies and their now nameless artists, was not performed. The only fitting music for political candidates to perform on the national media was Indonesian pop. On 19 June 2004, the TV channel Indosiar broadcast the Grand Final of the popular television programme Akademi Fantasi Indonesia, a national talent-show where elimination decisions were made by a jury. Two special guests performed that night, politicians Wiranto and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. A jury of celebrity-performers (Trie Utami, Harry Roesli and Erwin Gutawa) commented on their performance, criticizing their pitch control, choice of material, and so forth. Wiranto and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s performance was treated in the same manner as the other participants. Neither of them got final placings. Ten days later, the ‘real’ televised presidential debate took place over two days, 30 June and 1 July. Although this debate was deadly serious, the national broadcast on Metro TV featured a panel of commentators, all of them artists. The commentators sat in another room, like sports commentators. One of these was Harry Roesli, the musician who had been on the AFI jury, the other two were Butet Kartredjasa (an actor) and Arswendo Atmowiloto (a writer). They jocularly commented to the viewers on the ‘performance’ of the presidential hopefuls, discussing their body language, believability, and (alluding to the earlier AFI jury comments) to their need for ‘pitch control’. The climax of the presentation of presidential candidates as performers was a TV broadcast shown on national TV on 4 July, less than 12 hours before the polls opened. Metro TV featured a programme Tribute to Indonesia, hosted by the well-known performer and celebrity, Butet Kartaredjasa, who was one of the commentators on the earlier presidential debate. All the presidential and vice-presidential candidates were invited to appear on this programme, where they were asked to sing, perform and tell stories about themselves. Remarkably, at the end of an exhausting campaign, six of them turned up: Amien Rais, Agum Gumelar, Wiranto, Jusuf Kalla, Salahuddin Wahid and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Hasyim Muzadi appeared via video link-up. Neither Megawati, the incumbent president, nor Hamzah Haz turned up, perhaps for fear of being upstaged; the Tanggulsari villagers were prescient! They all performed Indonesian pop songs accompanied by the

68 Jennifer Lindsay resident band (Sinten Remen, led by Djadug Ferrianto) except for Amien Rais who opted to read a poem. Their material was well prepared – they had their songs memorized and ready in advance. They performed as professionals – with only a brief run-through with the band before each take. At the end of this round of the campaign, the image this programme beamed out was one of harmony. And notably it was performance – namely song and poetry – that offered the most immediate, obvious and readymade format for showing that harmony. Even the song chosen for the final unison act was a message of ‘togetherness’. Standing together, side by side, the candidates sang the popular Indonesian song ‘Iwan Fals, Kemesraan ini, janganlah cepat berlalu’ (‘Don’t let this feeling of closeness fade’). The image of these contestants standing in a line and singing together in harmony was strongly resonant of the end to so many traditional theatre forms in Indonesia, when the characters are stiffly arrayed in a tableau of stillness and harmony, with all conflict resolved. And yet, at the same time, the viewers precisely know, as they knew while watching Tribute to Indonesia, that this is just a performance.

Conclusion Performance permeates election in Indonesia, particularly the presidential election. But as it also permeates everyday life, we need to ask how we might see this as political at election time. At the outset of this chapter, I cautioned against interpreting the festive element of Indonesian elections as carnivalesque. The Bakhtinian model of carnival is seductive because it discovers resistance in an event out of the everyday where acts of reversal are seen as transgression. Overtly political, carnival is thus an obvious model to apply to political events like elections and can indeed be useful and illuminating. But the festive and performative elements of the Indonesian elections demand that we think more deeply about the political meaning at that particular time of something that happens all the time. As we have seen, many of the features of Indonesian election campaigns – the staged performances, the live rallies, the parades, the costumes – have stayed while the political conditions of elections themselves in Indonesia have radically changed. During the New Order, the elements of performance emphasized the government’s management of elections as ritual. Now, the same parades, rallies and performances, coupled with the new media performances of campaigns such as debates and talk shows, are more performative than ritualistic. That is, they stress a sense of play and roleplaying by the participants (players and audience) for enjoyment rather than as an imposed formal duty. The question, then, is why this performative sense of play and role-playing is so evident at election time in Indonesia, precisely at a time when elections have become more democratic. Could we not interpret this play as trivialization of the election process, an expression of cynical resignation about the ineffectiveness of democracy?

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 69 The villagers at Tanggulsari offer a way of approaching this apparent paradox, which is to see the play as precisely a celebration of participation where political agency and empowerment are found in making fun. One of Indonesia’s foremost intellectuals, Goenawan Mohamad, observed this, seeing in this event exactly the emergence of true democracy. Writing on the Tanggulsari presidential auditions he said: the entire event was the idea of the people of Tanggulsari. Perhaps because democracy had indeed reached this far. But perhaps too because of the opposite: democracy in 2004 emerged precisely from villagers longing to be able to have a voice, to make decisions, to try things out, and to have fun. Another side to all this is that democracy itself is a paradox, as thinkers from Weber to Badiou have noted, and Goenawan Mohamad has frequently discussed when writing on politics in Indonesia.6 And elections are ironically precisely moments when that paradox of democracy is most evident. For democracy elevates the importance of individuals through acknowledging that all citizens are equal in having free choice and can exercise their vote and voice (suara) in electing their leaders. But on the other hand, it is precisely when individuals exercise that choice that they are nameless, reduced to strokes in a tally on election day. As Benedict Anderson notes, ‘[Normal voting] is thus almost the polar opposite of all other forms of personal political participation. Insofar as it has general meaning, it acquires this meaning only by mathematical aggregation’ (1996: 14). Democracy, though hard-won when societies fight for freedom from autocratic and totalitarian rule, works to turn government into what Badiou calls ‘routine politics’ (2001: 31). Democracy is then the process of regulating and domesticating political excitement, such as the excitement of revolution, and elections are a major way this is done. Taylor, in his volume on elections in Southeast Asia, puts this well: Elections are double-edged weapons in the rise of democracy and in the formation of a dominant, stable, and permanent political order. On the one hand, they are pacifying instruments. They are often means of depoliticizing populations, limiting the politically possible to formalized campaigns and episodic voting opportunities. (1996: 8) We can see the performance factor in Indonesia’s recent elections, then, as one way that people seek to uphold a sense of participation and political excitement, including, perhaps, some of the excitement of the regime change in 1998 and the hopes for change this ushered in. The performance-play of elections, rather than being just an expression of cynical resignation that these changes have all come to nothing, is a way that people resist the

70 Jennifer Lindsay encroaching routine and bureaucratization of democracy itself. This is not to suggest there is not also acute awareness of the failure of many of these hopes: after all, the presidential winner of the Tanggulsari performance was given a broken chair. And yet, despite the realities of rampant corruption, despite the ineffectual self-interested politicking of politicians in Jakarta, despite dashed hopes of effective leadership on all sides, Indonesian citizens still join in the election campaign and turn out in huge numbers to vote on election day. Performance – the reflexive awareness of acting that is both part of everyday life and is lifted to the stage – then provides Indonesians at election time, rich and familiar models for commenting on politics and participating in them.

Notes 1 Indonesian political life at the village level has been studied both with the wider social and political life of the village and in comparison with national elections at the local level, see Geertz (1965); Jay (1969); Antlöv (1994); Hüsken (1994); SchulteNordholt (1980). 2 The People’s Consultative Assembly consisted of the People’s Representative Council (DPR) plus 200 appointed members. 3 Actually, a total of 500 only from 1987. For exact figures and changes during the New Order see www.seasite.niu.edu/Indonesian/Indonesian_elections/Election_ text.html 4 Writing of village elections in the 1960s, Jay also notes that ‘Coconut fronts are curved over the entrance to the grounds, as at a family festivity’ (1969: 385). 5 Before the presidential election, candidates were invited to be present simultaneously at live events, following the televised models. For instance, the Jakarta Arts Council (Dewan Kesenian Jakarta) organized a meeting at Taman Ismail Marzuki where the candidates were asked to speak on their policies for the arts, the novelty being that they were asked to be there at the same time. 6 See, for instance, Goenawan Mohamad’s Catatan Pinggir columns (2001a, 2001b, 2004a, 2004b) in Tempo magazine.

References Anderson, Benedict R. (1996) ‘Elections and Participation in Three Southeast Asian Countries’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Antlöv, Hans (1994) ‘Village Leaders and the New Order’, in Hans Antlov and Sven Cederroth (eds) Leadership on Java: Gentle Hints, Authoritarian Rule. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Antlöv, Hans and Cederoth, Sven (eds) (2004) Elections in Indonesia: The New Order and Beyond. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward. London: Verso. ‘Debat ala Kampung Tanggulsari’, Koran Tempo, 29 June 2004 (byline Anas Syahirul). Feith, Herbert (1957) The Indonesian Elections of 1955. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Modern Indonesia Project. Geertz, Clifford (1965) The Social History of an Indonesian Town. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The performance factor in Indonesian elections 71 Haris, Syamsuddin (2004) ‘General Elections Under the New Order’, in Hans Antlöv and Sven Cederoth (eds) Elections in Indonesia: The New Order and Beyond. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 18–37. Humphrey, Chris (2000) ‘Bakhtin and the Study of Popular Culture: Re-thinking Carnival as a Historical and Analytical Concept’, in Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov (eds) Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory. New York: St Martin’s Press. Hüsken, Frans (1994) ‘Village Elections in Central Java, State Control or Local Democracy?’ in Hans Antlöv and Sven Cederroth (eds) Leadership on Java: Gentle Hints, Authoritarian Rule. Richnond, Surrey: Curzon Press, pp. 119–136. Jay, Robert R. (1969) Javanese Villagers: Social Relations in Rural Modjokuto. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lindsay, Jennifer (2002) ‘Television, Orality and Performance: Indonesia’s 1999 Elections’, Archipel 64: 323–336. Lindsay, Jennifer (2005) ‘Performing in the Indonesian Elections’, in Margaret Kartomi (ed.) The Year of Voting Frequently: Politics and Artists in Indonesia’s 2004 Elections. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, pp. 35–52. Mohamad, Goenawan (2001a) ‘Gus’, Catatan Pinggir column [henceforth CP] Tempo magazine 1 April 2001. (English translation by Jennifer Lindsay in English version of Tempo [henceforth TEE] 10 April 2001. Mohamad, Goenawan (2001b) ‘Eksit’, CP Tempo, 5 August 2001 (TEE, 13 August 2001). Mohamad, Goenawan (2004a) ‘Tanggulsari’, CP, Tempo, 11 July 2004 (TEE, 20 July 2004). Mohamad, Goenawan (2004b) ‘Kejadian’, CP, Tempo, 5 December 2004 (‘Event’ TEE, 13 December 2004). Pemberton, John (1986) ‘Notes on the 1982 General Election in Solo’, Indonesia 41, April: 1–22. Pemberton, John (1994) On the Subject of ‘Java’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schulte-Nordholt, N.G. (1980) ‘The Indonesian Elections: A National Ritual’, in R. Schefold, J.W. Schoorl, and J. Tennekes (eds) Man, Meaning, and History: Essays in Honour of H.G. Schulte Nordholt. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde, 89: 179–203. Taylor, R.H. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–11. Ward, Ken (1974) The 1971 Election in Indonesia: An East Java Case Study. Melbourne: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. Widodo, Amrih (1995) ‘The Stages of the State: Arts of the People and Rites of Hegemonization’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Special Issue, Performance, Dept. of Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Sydney, 29: 1–35.

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4

Betting on democracy Electoral ritual in the Philippine presidential campaign Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr

Elections, at their face value, are institutionalized contests for public positions that pit contending individuals and groups of (professional) politicians against each other. These contests are governed by formal legislation, and compliance with set procedures establishes the legitimacy of a victor’s claim to the post. However, elections are more than just exercises in filling up vacancies in the state apparatus that give winning individuals a right to rule. An internally valid election grants legitimacy not only to the winner but to the social structure as a whole. Moreover, elections can be seen as a ritualized social practice, with each election filled with ritual performances that may be engaging or off-putting depending on the sociopolitical context, the candidates running for office, the participating voters, and the audience at large. In the unfolding of this ritual may be found a basis for legitimacy and consent to hegemony, in addition to, or even rather than, formal rules and procedural equality per se. As Geertz (1983: 144–146) hinted, despite the deployment of a different set of idioms compared with ancient rulers and wielders of charisma, modern politics retains ritualism at its core, indicative of ‘the inherent sacredness of central authority’. Philippine experiences suggest an alternative this ‘sacred’ reading of elections. Elections can be seen as a time of tension between the sacred and the profane, the ideal and the expedient, of inversion but also of affirming social hierarchy, free but totally constrained, participatory from below yet engineered from the top and, meaningful yet meaningless at the same time. Amid this contradictory character, Philippine elections are hugely popular, taken seriously, and draw very high (80–85 percent) participation rates. This chapter offers an analysis of the ritual character of Philippine elections for national positions, mainly for the post of president, but also for that of vice-president and senators. The electoral field is one of an internal discourse, and requires one to enter this milieu to appreciate its cultural complexity. The messages during election campaigns are for everyone, including nonelectors, who undergo a general feeling of mass excitement not witnessed on a daily basis. The electoral texts and structures are understandable by the general public and constitute the popular, indeed folk, culture of elections. One way of interpreting this field, which is preferred here, is to see the

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electoral complex as structured like a ritual, specifically, a ritualized gamble or game of chance. This cultural figuration of elections is a product of Philippine history, an overview of which is presented in this chapter. The broad insights on Filipino political culture are buttressed by data collected by the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) of the Ateneo de Manila University from 16 focus group discussions (FGDs) held in late March and early April 2004, during the campaign period leading up to the polls on 10 May 2004. The IPC Ateneo research involved ten FGDs in urban communities and six in rural communities, in sites spread throughout the country (IPC 2005). Some of the findings of that study are presented here. The notion of elections as a ritual process prompts concluding reflections on the nonclosure of Philippine elections, particularly in relation to May 2004. The perspective discussed in this chapter can make the Philippines appear as the odd one among the countries discussed in this volume, but on reflection its broad ritual structure can be seen in many ways as, in fact, exemplary.

Ritualized electoral contests Viewed from the perspective of Philippine history, rituals have suffused elections starting in the late nineteenth century under Spanish colonial rule, when local notables gathered to ‘elect’ the local magistrate – although, strictly speaking, it was to nominate a short list from which the Spanish governorgeneral made his choice of town magistrate (May 1989). Under the aegis of American colonialism, the 1906 elections for the National Assembly inaugurated the Congressional system that has been followed since then. Direct elections for the presidency commenced in 1935 under American tutelage. It should be noted that specific aspects of the electoral system – such as the so-called Australian Ballot, with official ballots provided by the government rather than by political parties – were introduced in the United States and its Asian colony at about the same time; and that familiarity with fraudulent practices in the USA gave colonial authorities in the Philippines the kind of expertise to intervene in elections in a way that achieved American ends (Nakano 2004). Since independence in 1946 until Ferdinand Marcos won an unprecedented reelection in 1969 and declared martial law in 1972, elections were held in a way that allowed two dominant parties to alternate in controlling the presidency. Since the return of procedural democracy after Marcos’s downfall in 1986, a multiparty system has come into place. In this multiparty system the specific rituals of electoral contests have been in constant flux. Moreover, in the absence of genuine political parties, a different sort of coalition for national posts emerges in each election, such as the ‘K-4’ (following F4, the famous boy band from Taiwan) coalition of the incumbent administration in 2004. The official rules of the game are also constantly shifting, based on the interests of the dominant party. The different set of contenders in each election also influences how the electoral campaign unfolds.

74 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr 2004, however, marked an important change in electioneering (incidentally, a Philippine legal term referring to a violation of the law, which, in being widely flouted anyway, renders the boundaries between the legal and the illegal heavily blurred). Since 1986, political advertising during elections had been banned. It was lifted in the 2001 senatorial elections, in anticipation of the 2004 presidential elections. The so-called ‘Fair Elections Act’ now allows a ‘candidate or registered political party for a national elective office’ a maximum of 120 minutes of television advertisements. The supposed lobbying by TV stations resulted in a decision of the Commission on Election (Comelec) that the 120 minutes maximum was applicable to each television station (Hofileña 2004: 51). Favoring the establishment, the ruling inflated the available time for political ads on TV. It resulted in the obvious commodification of candidates for television viewers, TV rather than radio being the primary medium relied upon by most voters as studies reveal. The paradigm of corporate advertising was imported to politics. ‘Advertising handlers regarded candidates as no different from shampoo or soap: They had to be sold to the market through ads’ (ibid.: 66). Interestingly, the legalization of political advertising allowed financial transactions to surface as legitimate payments to TV corporations, replacing the illicit payments to individual media personalities of the past (ibid.: 52). The 2004 elections for the presidency – with its five candidates – was odd because, for the first time since 1986, the incumbent president was running for office, made possible by the ascension to the presidency of then VicePresident Arroyo after President Joseph Estrada was forced out of office in January 2001. The limit of a one six-year term for the president instituted since Marcos’s downfall was breached. Hence, Arroyo essentially started campaigning the day she assumed office extra-constitutionally. As the incumbent, Arroyo deployed all resources at her disposal to win at all costs. At the start of the campaign she was far from popular; it was rough-going until her savvy handlers, making the most of mass media techniques as well as patronage treats and tricks, succeeded in boosting her popularity. In this connection, political surveys as well as exit polls became a major factor in the 2004 election, particularly after the accuracy of poll predictions that Estrada would win in the 1998 elections. Surveys became a basis for soliciting campaign funds, and for losing potential donors for those who trailed behind in numbers. The mass media watched the survey trends closely, particularly when Arroyo began to overtake the widely popular film star candidate, Fernando Poe Jr., dubbed ‘Da King’ of Philippine movies. It was like a horse overtaking the frontrunner somewhere near mid-track, with all the excitement and disbelief such an event elicits. Not surprisingly, the press reported this and other aspects of the elections, as a respected media practitioner puts it, as a cock-fight, a horse-race and a boxing match (Coronel 2004). Concern for television ratings amid the election campaign, with all its financial and market implications, also embedded the race within the media itself.

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The miting de avance or final rally is an old ritual adapted to recent times. It is the meeting a party and its candidates hold just before election day, or on the evening of the last day of the official campaign period. The speeches are conventionalized, with the usual attacks on the opposing candidate, often delivered in a manner that elicits laughter from the mass of supporters. Political rallies, in this sense, constitute entertainment, but the crowd of supporters is also taken as an index of a candidate’s popularity and chances of electoral victory. But with the ‘objectification’ of the campaign strategy that pointed to regionalized trends based on sample surveys, Arroyo decided not to hold a miting de avance, resorting instead to a few publicized ‘town hall’ meetings as a substitute. Interestingly, the other major contender to the presidency, Poe, stuck to the old-style miting de avance, which was held in the heart of the country’s financial capital, Makati. While Arroyo’s non-rally was unusual, Poe’s rally was also unconventional, for such occasions are normally held at the Luneta, the great park devoted to national hero José Rizal. But, for Poe, Makati was a friendly political terrain. Two other presidential candidates, top-policeofficer-turned-senator Panfilo (Ping) Lacson and longtime senator Raul Roco (who was seriously taken ill during the campaign, an event of profound melodramatic quality), did not hold the big rally. Presidential candidate Eduardo (Eddie) Villanueva, however, stuck to the old formula by staging a huge miting at the Luneta; his old style was matched by the novelty of countless supporters making small donations to fund the campaign of this Christian preacher and TV evangelist.1 Despite the flux and the odd occurrences that 2004 witnessed, some elements of electoral rituals can be said to be unchanging. The filing of candidacy at the last minute at the Manila office of the Comelec is often staged with a little fanfare, with the candidate’s arrival often accompanied by a small crowd of supporters. More importantly, candidates for national positions are expected to move around the country during the campaign, visiting all the major regional capital cities, giving due importance to the local as indispensable to the national, and touching the masses and being seen and heard. These movements around the country are akin to the ‘progress’ of rulers of ancient realms, and are extensively featured in the mass media. These visitations are often referred to as ‘sorties’, but a military connotation is not implied. Rather, the physical movement around the country of, say, a presidential candidate is an indispensable vote-getting strategy; it also evinces a candidate’s presidential quality and signifies a form of reconnaissance of the territory one hopes to rule. During the electoral campaign period, the ubiquitous display of placards and streamers, the wall-papering of fences with a candidate’s posters, and the mass distribution of leaflets in every habitable place, indicates a period of filth that goes beyond the everyday dirt of the city and metropolis. In addition to the visual, the auditory senses are bombarded with campaign slogans, jingles, and political advertising. The campaign period – some four

76 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr months in 2004 – is intentionally one of excess. The chaos is tolerated and accepted, and transgressions become normative. Indeed, one can argue that without these excesses Filipinos would not recognize the period as pertaining properly to that of an election campaign.

Elections and the ritual structure of a gambling match Despite the instabilities of specific ritual acts, the 2004 national elections conformed to the general notion of an election as itself a protracted ritual process. Elections can be said to conform to the basic structure of a ritual famously discussed by Victor Turner (1967). This ritual structure, I believe, is capable of encapsulating ‘ancient’ sentiments despite the ‘modernity’ of elections. As soon as the campaign period begins, liminality sets in. The usual structural status of the contenders in an election is suspended; one does not know which of the candidates will win. In the meantime, they are neither ordinary citizens nor officeholders. Electoral candidates are betwixt and between, transitional beings in a state of ambiguity and occupying a structural position of paradox. Before the end is reached there are many sacrificial acts – or, at least, acts that test one’s physical, social, and emotional endurance and suitability for office – that candidates must undergo. But elections as ritual differ from the rituals analyzed by Turner. Participants in the electoral ritual do not all end with an elevated status at the ritual’s conclusion, for inevitably only the winning candidate assumes office. The ritual can be seen, therefore, as a contest of weeding out other liminal beings. The campaigning and sacrifices end just before election day, but the ritual is not over yet. The act of casting one’s vote is the ritual within the ritual, with the customary pose for the cameras before dropping one’s ballot in the box. The period of liminality ends only with the declaration of the winning candidate. The ritual structure of elections is akin to that of a game of chance. Elsewhere (Aguilar 1994, 1998), I have argued – and will rehearse some of it here – that the electoral contest is intimately related to the notion of gambling, both as a game and as a worldview, a cultural formation that emerged in response to the exigencies of colonial rule. In the wake of the Spanish conquest in the late sixteenth century, the natives felt trapped and compelled to navigate between two colliding spirit-worlds, the indigenous and the Hispanic which placed natives in the underdog position. Amid this power collision and cultural entrapment, natives cultivated a gambling worldview that sought to appease the demands of both worlds while hoping that, in doing so, one would not be caught by the other. It was a form of wagering upon the odds of power. If one was pinned down so that the equal appeasement of both realms was not possible, it became a case of sheer bad luck. Otherwise, the natives moved back and forth between the overlapping worlds of the indigenous and the colonial, submitting to and concomitantly subverting colonial domination. This strategy of simultaneous avoidance and acceptance was graphically encoded in the various forms of gambling that

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flourished under Spanish colonial rule, foremost of which was the cockfight – bulang, sabong, or juego de gallos – which the colonial state used deliberately to attract natives to the center. In the cockpit, the rule has been that only cocks of more-or-less equal prowess, with an even fighting chance, are matched in any fight, and that opposing bets are equalized before the fight can begin. This assumption of parity is reserved for the liminal period that starts from the matching of fowls and into the fight, when the idea of superiority/hierarchy is both affirmed and disbelieved, only to be confirmed after the fight. Despite their liminal status, one cock is invariably perceived as the superior one, while the other is seen as the underdog. In cockfighting, the native could be entertained by what was essentially a cosmic battle, for the cocks were seen as standing for an otherworldly realm. One of the birds would be identified with the colonizer, while the other with the native. Thus, as noted by many observers in the nineteenth century, the shouting in the cockpit would be ecstatic whenever the underdog won – and the same behavior holds true to the present, as if to say that the poor and subjugated also have a chance. The cockpit’s message is contradictory. On one hand, hierarchy and dominance are omnipresent as the outcome validated the native concept of power being the rule of the mighty, those who are spiritually favored. On the other hand, the cockfight allows for the inversion of hierarchy in society. It even allows the underdogs of society to bet on and champion the underdog. In the cockpit, history and social structure can be momentarily suspended and phenomenologically forgotten, even as ultimately history is made and the social structure reaffirmed. At the conclusion of a cockfight, the winner must be generous with the winnings by sharing balato, token portions of the bounty that are distributed to one’s circle of supporters and other proximate individuals. An integral aspect of winning in a cockfight or other games of chance, the balato is founded on the belief that one’s luck (swerte) brings victory, and to share this luck augments future chances of winning. In contrast, being stingy invites bad luck. Thus, the balato is not meant to be a leveling mechanism but a recirculation of luck and the reinscription of all within the world of gambling. With the historically formed mindset of gamblers, Filipinos have responded to political elections – particularly to the two-party system that prevailed for the most part of the twentieth century – as if it were a cockfight. Elections encapsulate and demonstrate the gambling worldview. It is evinced linguistically by the term used to refer to one’s preferred candidate as one’s manok or cock. Evidently, the elector does not possess the fighting cock but, like the spectator in a cockpit, can place a bet on a candidate and hope that the wager will be multiplied several times over with the cock’s victory in the form of generous balato. Not coincidentally, in distinctively Philippine English, candidates are called ‘bets’. Also indicative is the provision in the Election Code that, in case of a tie, the winning candidate is determined by the casting of lots.

78 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr In recent years, contenders for the presidency have become known as ‘presidentiables’, probably indicating the time when, just after the downfall of Marcos, it was not clear who could possibly be a replacement for such a strongman. Since no one seemed to match the talent, prowess, and everything else about Marcos, the search for who could possibly become president led to the invention of the word ‘presidentiable’. Thus elections have generated two uniquely Philippine English words. Presidentiables are bets on which one can place a wager.

People power and the multiparty system In the presidential elections in the postwar and prior to the Martial Law period, the binary opposition between two major candidates was strongly evocative of the cockfight: an equal match, a source of entertainment, a cosmic battle between mighty men. The playing field was level, the outcome sort of unpredictable, as suggested by the alternating cycle of winning and losing between the two major political parties. The pattern was upset in 1969 when Marcos became the first incumbent president to be reelected. Because political parties had no significant ideological differences, turncoatism was rampant. Elite political gamblers jockeyed for positions relative to the ‘bets’ and the promised balato in case of victory. People wagered their bets on the candidate who was expected to distribute the spoils. For the ordinary supporter or campaign volunteer, a valuable balato could come in the form of a job in the state bureaucracy. Vote buying was like an advanced balato, while contributing to the electoral campaign fund entitled a business entity to enormous post-election advantages. Like the cockfight, electoral politics was not meant or seen as transforming social hierarchies. Indeed, with an electorate that was largely rural, many were coerced or intimidated by patronage networks or by thugs to vote according to the demands of social hierarchy. For many, elections were a gamble that allowed a few people to end up in a different structural location from where even bigger gambles could be waged. By the cockpit’s rule of equal match, the elections held under the Marcos dictatorship were a sham precisely because Marcos had no credible opponent, a ‘hold-up fight’ in cockfighting argot. Nevertheless, Marcos himself was a genuine and shrewd gambler who tested his fate to the limit. He enjoyed a high margin of credibility – until the moment the ‘superior powers’ were seen to have irrevocably withdrawn their favor, until Marcos’s magic itself had vanished. Thus, Marcos could not forever be without a challenger who would seek to restore, especially for the old elite whom he deprived of the arena, their conditions of fair play vis-à-vis the state apparatus. Marcos’s biggest and most miscalculated gamble was the decision to hold the ‘snap’ election in 1986. It had no legal basis, but was intended to convince the United States that Marcos remained the legitimate ruler of the country.

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After many years, the country had its first credible match involving two worthy contenders. Marcos was the ‘red’ cock fighting against the ‘yellow’ hen that was Cory Aquino. Obviously, the latter was the favorite underdog, and many citizens made a concerted effort to prevent a fraudulent result. When it became apparent that the election had been stolen (in conjunction with a complex set of other factors, not least being the intervention of political entrepreneurs), the extreme frustration over an imminent underdog victory fuelled the popular sentiment that crystallized into People Power. The spectators in the cockpit, as it were, became so fed up that they left the bleachers and mobbed the arena, hence becoming primary participants in an unprecedented gamble. The Philippine Constitution, promulgated in 1987, was largely designed as a return to the electoral politics prior to the martial law period. But it had one important new feature: a multiparty system. Thus, when the presidential election of 1992 was held, the first under this system, there were eight presidential candidates. Voters found it extremely confusing. Financiers were forced to hedge their bets by giving financial support to more than one candidate. The election was akin to a carambola, a rare kind of fight with many cocks released into the pit at the same time, with the lone survivor winning; the victorious cock owner collects all bets and takes home all the dead roosters. But somehow the playing field was narrowed to two candidates – at least in the minds of many voters and in the discourse of newspaper columnists and radio commentators. The winner in 1992 was Fidel Ramos. Since then, two more presidential elections have been held, one in 1998, won by Joseph Estrada, and another in 2004, won by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. In all these contests the multiplicity of presidential aspirants attested to the political fragmentation of Philippine elites, who could not get their act together. It should be noted that elections under the multiparty system have been held in a context that diverged significantly from that of the pre-martial law years. As a rule, as already mentioned, the incumbent president is not entitled to run for reelection due to the constitutional limit of one six-year term. The election for national positions also occurs simultaneously with that for regional, district, and city/municipal positions, in a contest for over 17,000 seats, requiring a voter to fill a ballot with a long list of names. Simultaneous national and local elections overload the capacity of political machineries, and often result in local party bosses paying more attention to local than national candidates. Moreover, demographic change and urbanization have increased the ratio of urban to rural voters, with the proportions now roughly equal. The role of rural patronage systems has diminished as a result. Although techniques of intimidation in urban areas are being invented and reinvented, the fearsome days of rural elections are found only in some so-called ‘hot spots’. Since vigilance of the citizenry reaped its rewards in 1986, a heightened level of vigilance and active participation have become evident in the polls.

80 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr These contests have also become extremely expensive affairs, requiring enormous and mainly illicit financial contributions from corporate sponsors and other bettors, and the consequently huge payback required once winners are installed in office. In 1998, the campaign spending of each of the main presidential candidates was said to have ranged from P1.5 billion to P3 billion. In 2004, the estimates ranged from a low of P5 billion to a high of P10 billion, with about P750 million to as much as P1.25 billion being spent on political advertising in the mass media (Hofileña 2004: 6). In conjunction with the changing rules of the game, election spending of these proportions has heightened the character of elections as commodified spectacle and, in its captivating effect, ensures that this social ritual invades the consciousness of massive numbers. To what extent does the perspective described here match the ideas of ordinary people? Is there a way to probe people’s thoughts to understand their recognition, or perhaps misrecognition, of elections as a cultural phenomenon? What do people think about elections which may explain the very high participation rates? What to them spells legitimacy?

Metaphors of the poor The IPC Ateneo study conducted just before the 10 May 2004 national and local election provided empirical support to the view that electoral contests are regarded by people as analogous to a cockfight and, in general, to a gambling match. But the FGD data enriches this view by illuminating the ideational and pragmatic tensions inherent in elections. The sections that follow present selected data from that study of 16 focus group discussions involving ordinary Filipinos belonging to poor urban and rural communities. A time of extremes The FGD participants generally held idealistic notions of leadership, comparing elected leaders to righteous parents, for instance, but the topic of elections elicited overwhelmingly negative responses. The poor see elections as marking an unusual time in the life of the nation, a period of excess as indicated earlier. Beyond the physical dirt and the bombardment of the senses, ordinary Filipinos point to the undesirable character traits that become preponderant at this time. Elections for them signify a time of discord, pretense, mudslinging, gambling in the form of the illegal numbers game jueteng (to raise campaign funds), opportunism, elevated level of violence and armed conflict, election-related killings, and deployment of goons. It is a time of war and intimidation, according to some youth. The poor are aware of the tricks deployed during elections, and they see through the strategies of politicians. It is a time for choosing leaders, but it is also an ugly time. They recognize that it is a time when the poor benefit from the

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increased money and goods in circulation – the advanced balato, as it were. In their words, elections signify a time of: Panagpabanglo ken panangpadakes [Smelling good and mud-slinging] (urban female); Pera at bigas na binibigay ng mga kandidato [Cash and rice given away by candidates] (rural female); Masisira na naman ang relasyon ng mga tao. Halimbawa, magkakaaway ang magkapatid. [Social relations will be strained. For example, even siblings engage in a fight] (urban male); Maraming nabubuhay na patay [Many dead are brought back to life] – flying voters (urban male); Jueteng, ilegal na transaksyon [Jueteng, illegal transactions] (rural males); Nagpapabango; sinasamantala ang panahon, naglalabas ng mga pondo para sa mga projects [Candidates make themselves ‘smell good’; they take advantage of the occasion and release public funds to support projects] (youth); Dayaan na naman! [It’s cheating time again!] (youth); Magulo at maraming patayan [Chaotic and a time of many murders] (urban male); Kumukuha ng mga goons ang mga kandidato [Candidates hire goons] (urban male). Metaphors for elections The metaphors concerning elections indicate a certain worldview that colors participation in this political exercise. It is also a sensibility that enables the participants to survive the uncertainties and overcome the deceitfulness of this process. A recurrent theme refers to elections as a game of chance, a race, and, for those in rural areas, a cockfight. As in any other game with which people are familiar, cheating becomes almost inevitable. As the participants put it, elections are like: Parang laro na may nananalo at natatalo [A game with winners and losers] (rural female); Pareha ug sugal adunay makadaug, aduna usay mapilde [A gamble where some will win and others will lose] (urban male); Isang magulo at maruming laro [A chaotic and dirty game] (urban male); Katulad ng baraha, may patay at buhay [A card game, some alive, others dead] (urban male); Garo sarong bolang na nagpipili nin pupustahan [A cockfight, and one must choose (a cock) to place a bet] (rural male); Isang boxing na maraming nasusuntok na kandidato [A boxing match where many candidates receive blows] (youth); Isang chess game na malalaman lang kung sino ang panalo sa huling tira [A game of chess where the winner can be known only at the last move] (youth); Isang karera ng kabayo na may siguradong mananalo [A horse-race that will surely have a winner] (youth); Isang lotto na maaaring maging mayaman ang mananalo [A lotto where the winner can become very rich] (youth). The element of deception is captured in metaphors that allude to courtship, during which sweet words and grand promises abound:

82 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr Parang ligawan na may sinasagot at naba-basted [A courtship in which some suitors are rejected and one accepted (by the girl)] (rural female); Garo sa sarong pag-ilusyon na tuga sanag tuga [A courtship with endless promises] (rural male).Sarong bulaklak na namumukadkad, kadakol bubuyog na nag-aalimbubyong [A flower in full bloom that attracts many bees] (rural male); Murag dalaga nga diin magpiniliay [A woman who has to choose among many suitors] (rural male). The courtship metaphors are indicative of social inversion during the liminal period of the campaign. They suggest that, for once, the poor are being courted by the rich, who find themselves in the exceptional position of being on the asking, rather than receiving, end. But they are also fully cognizant that courtship is an idealized moment, when extravagant promises are made, only for these to be forgotten later. Closely allied to the courtship metaphor of elections is that of a fashion show or beauty contest, when people make a show of themselves that highlight the external façade but conceal the real character of people, particularly the candidates: Isang fashion show na ang mga pulitiko ay nagpapaganda ng anyo [A fashion show involving politicians who prettify themselves] (youth); Paguwapuhan, pasiklaban [A race for the most handsome, a time for showing off ] (youth); A beauty contest with candy showers (rural female). Other metaphors, although not frequently mentioned, refer to the festive atmosphere of elections, reminding us of the European analogue of elections as a carnival: A wedding with so much food and money (rural female); Pareha ug sinulog daghan kaayo ang mga tawo nga mudugok [Like the sinulog festival that draws so many people (spectators)] (urban male); Usa ka drama, nga daghan ug dramaturgo o artista [A drama that involves many performers and artists] (urban male). In sum, the metaphors the poor use for elections suggest the element of spectatorship. A possible exception is the courtship metaphor, in which the focus is on the electorate that is being wooed and must decide based on the unreliable and eventually empty words of suitor-candidates. In most cases, elections are viewed as a gamble, a game of chance, among politicians whom the poor watch and observe, and, on occasion, from whom they obtain some benefit. But the public’s role as spectators is far from being passive, for there is active engagement. Whether movie personalities are running for office or not, elections that simulate a cockpit, racetrack, or card game are inherently a form of entertainment. The entertainment is active and

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participatory and instead of leaving the cockpit, racetrack, or betting station, the people appear bent on staying on inside the ring. Participation in elections What is fascinating about the poor’s attitude toward elections is that, despite its flaws, the whole process is regarded as legitimate. Most of the FGD participants said they would vote on election day, 10 May 2004. They consider casting one’s ballot as an obligation, even if by law it is not mandatory. This sense of duty is pervasive, and is associated with a notion of citizenship in a ‘civilized’ human polity: May kasabihan na ang hindi bumoto, walang karapatang magreklamo [There is a saying that someone who does not vote has no right to complain] (urban male); Despite the negative image of elections, they are important because voting is an obligation of each person (urban female); Most will vote even if the people running for office do not merit their approval – saan nga kursunada (urban female); Tungod kay kung dili ta mobotar, dili kita tawo sa gobyerno, mura tag tagalasang [Because if we do not vote, we are not people of government. We are like men of the jungle] (rural female). The poor consider elections as the opportunity to remove from office the politicians in whom they have lost confidence, and to put into office those whom they prefer to be their leaders. No other mechanism can be imagined as providing this mechanism of change. Moreover, the change in officeholders is not merely for the moment, for many realize the broad and long-term implications of elections. They know that when they cast their ballots the future of the country is at stake: Without election, there would be anarchy (youth); The future of the nation rests with elections. Leaders can make or unmake a nation (youth); Dito nakasalalay ang kinabukasan ng mga mamamayan [On it depends the future of the people] (youth); Kinahanglan kay nag-agad sa atong boto ang kaugma-on sa atong nasud. [It is important because the future of the nation depends on us voters] (urban male); Para mapaunlad ang bayan [For the country to progress] (youth); Tsansa upang matanggal ang tiwaling lider [Opportunity to remove a crooked leader] (rural female); Para mailuklok ang mabuting kandidato [To place a good leader] (rural female). A number of rural women, however, candidly admit that they participate in elections for pragmatic considerations, such as to obtain cash, or simply because they would not want to waste the effort expended in the tedious voter registration process by not going to the polls:

84 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr Pinaghirapan ang pagrehistro [It was very difficult to register] (rural female); Para makakuha ng pera [To get money] (rural female); Para manalo ang kandidato ko, para kung sakaling naluklok siya at may problema ako, matutulungan niya ako [So my candidate will win, and if that happens and I have a problem someone will be able to help me] (rural female); Because a voter’s affidavit allows one to go abroad (rural female). The futility of elections was expressed by a handful of the participants. An urban youth notes the futility of the whole exercise, while an urban female participant laments that their candidate (possibly referring to Joseph Estarda) is maligned and unseated ‘even if he won fairly’. The urban female’s comment does not condemn elections per se, but is an expression of dismay that a legitimate electoral outcome for their candidate is overruled and disregarded. Her desire is for the rules of the game to be respected: There are two kinds of voters: ang uto-uto at ang nagpapauto [the gullible and those who allow themselves to be fooled] (youth); Some feel they are not going to vote. They are tired because people will try anyway to remove or paint a bad picture of the person you voted for, or will grab power away from him even if he won fairly (urban female). These negative views of elections, however, are not the dominant mode of thinking among the FGD participants. Most consider their participation in elections as meaningful, and as an opportunity to effect change. This idealism remains despite the recognition that the electoral process is extremely flawed. The reliability of election results In response to the question of whether or not the results of elections are reliable and trustworthy, a few of the FGD participants did not hesitate to express absolute faith in the process, most participants, however, qualify their comments. A common view is that the results of local elections are reliable (which may explain why their examples of good leaders are usually drawn from among local officials). The outcomes of national elections, however, are far from trustworthy. The poor recognize that national posts are highly contested, hence the recourse to massive cheating in national polls and they appear resigned to the reality of cheating as inevitable in elections, even endemic to Philippine life: Sa national marami ang kalokohan [Much foolishness occurs at the national level] (urban male); Switching of ballot boxes occurs especially at the national level (youth); National elections are subject to cheating, and therefore the results are flawed (rural female); Cheating is part of Philippine elections (youth); Cheating is part of the culture of

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Philippine elections and, therefore, a normal occurrence during elections (urban male). If the candidate one voted for loses In the case where one’s candidate loses in the election, the participants say they will feel sad, disappointed, and dismayed – matamlay, malungkot – but will eventually come to terms with the results. A few, however, say it will be very difficult for them to accept the loss of their candidate. Again, there is a feeling of resignation – wala ka nang magagawa – either because nothing can be done about the cheating or because the majority’s preference must be accepted: People tend to accept the results even if they have misgivings and air this out among themselves. They have no proof of fraud after all, so they keep quiet. (urban female); There is cheating. But I cannot do anything if he/she is the people’s choice. (youth); Sport lang [One must be a good loser] (youth). Some participants will adopt a wait-and-see attitude based on the performance of the candidate who wins the election, regardless of how elected. Perhaps, they say, they may still benefit from the person who wins: Accepting a candidate’s loss is dependent on the performance of the winner (youth); Ogma man giraray ta matabang man giraray sinda samo [We will still be happy because they will still help us] (rural male); Para mayong ribok, tapos halaton na lang ang saiyang nanginibohan sa torno niya [To avoid trouble, we will just wait for the winner’s accomplishments in office] (rural female). The element of chance pervades elections, from the campaign to the actual vote, and even to how the actual winner performs in office. However, resignation seems to ensue from a pragmatic attitude: ‘you win some, you lose some’. After all, for many of them, their life chances will not be substantially altered by elections.

The selection of candidates Influential factors in choice of candidate The participants in the study were asked about the factors they consider as affecting their choice of candidates. The most important sources of influence they themselves acknowledged are: Media, Pamilya (family), Simbahan (church), Partido pulitikal (political party), Sarili lang/walang nakakaimpluwensiya (self, no outside influence) and, surveys.

86 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr The media and sources of information To arrive at an informed choice, the participants recognize the mass media as playing a most crucial role. Urban participants, including the youth, rely on the mass media to provide trustworthy information and images about the candidates, including information such as the accomplishment of incumbents or what bills they have proposed in Congress and other information. In addition to the conventional media channels, campaign leaflets, advertisements, and streamers also provide information about candidates. Youth also rely on text messages and the Internet. Across all groups, however, tsismis (gossip) was mentioned as a source of information. Discussions (pakikisalamuha) with other person, kin or non-kin, are likewise, sources of information. To rural participants the family and the church are the more important influences, not the media. Although the media is ranked as the most influential factor in their choice of candidates, the information to which most have access is considered inadequate, particularly on candidates running for national positions. There is a desire to know candidates up-close, and listen to them talk: Daily news reports reveal only what candidates did on a particular day of the campaign and not what they want to do, what they have already done, what they have accomplished or want to accomplish (urban female); Although it is next to impossible, we prefer to personally interview the candidates (youth); TV ads are unreliable sources of information, there is no way to know their validity (youth); Kulang pa kasi dapat marinig magsalita, kahit nababasa ang mga plataporma [Even if we can read about their platform, it is still not enough because we need to hear them talk] (urban male). It is, therefore, interesting that the poor analyze the images projected by candidates, whether they are heard over the radio or seen on television, to gauge the character (ugali) of a person. For instance, rural women try to observe how a candidate speaks, noting especially if the candidate ‘speaks with respect’. In addition to manner of speaking, rural and urban males also observe how that individual stands up, walks, and deals with people and gaze at the candidate’s face for clues on character: Sa pananalita malalaman mo kung mabait o magaling [One can know if a person is kind or capable based on how they talk] (youth); Sa reaksyon niya sa mga tao habang nangangampanya [In a candidate’s reaction to people during the campaign] (youth); Physical appearance is a good source of determining behavior (urban male); If the candidate can look you straight in the eye. They say liars have unstable eye movements.(youth). Local candidates are scrutinized at closer range than candidates for national positions. Participants directly observe the behavior of local candidates during

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meetings, and even during seminars and graduation ceremonies when these individuals are invited to speak. Surveys As a source of influence on the choice of candidate, surveys are a primarily urban phenomenon. In a situation where several candidates are vying for the same office, voters choose not necessarily the best candidate in their opinion but the one that would prevent a detested candidate from emerging victorious. In arriving at these odds, surveys can serve as a useful guide, for some, on how to vote in relation to preventing another candidate from winning office. Both poor and middle-class voters resorted to this strategy in the bitterly contested 2004 presidential contest. Others look to surveys so they can vote as part of the biggest block of voters, and thereby feel good for being on the winning side: ‘Oo, sa mananalo ako, kasi gusto siya ng nakararami [Yes, I’ll vote for the winner because he/she is preferred by the majority] Majority wins’ (urban male). Surveys also provide information on the underdog, and allow one to vote for ‘someone who is behind (in the ranking) in order that that particular candidate can gain a lead’ (urban female). Nonetheless, for most of the participants and across all groups, the definitive answer is that surveys are irrelevant to their choice of candidate. This trend is shown in the rather low overall ranking of surveys as a source of influence on voting practice. There are, in general, two main reasons for the relative unimportance of surveys. The first is that surveys are distrusted: Maaari iyan ay paninira lamang [(A candidate’s poor showing in surveys) may be a demolition job only] (rural female); Surveys do not matter. Sometimes, surveys are used only to attack people (urban female); Surveys can be cheated. You cannot predict the winner through surveys alone (youth); Even in a cockfight, the winner is still undetermined. (rural male). The last statement is evocative of the liminality of the campaign – if even in a cockfight one will not really know the outcome until the very end, how could surveys ‘know’ the electoral outcome? The other reason pertains to the conviction that voters will choose candidates according to their own criteria, and not allow themselves to be swayed by statistics. Many value their individual vote, seeing it as making a difference in the overall chances at victory of their respective candidates. Participants, for example, insist that they will vote for candidates based on qualifications and track record, regardless of what the surveys say: Iboboto pa rin; sayang din ang boto kung ibibigay lang sa iba na hindi gusto [I will still vote (for someone not doing well in surveys); it will be a waste to give my vote to someone else I don’t like] (youth); Iboboto ang

88 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr karapatdapat para sa akin at di makikinig sa iba [I will vote for whom I think is the deserving candidate and I won’t listen to others] (youth). The relative unimportance of surveys among the poor raises the question: Are surveys significant primarily to the middle and upper classes? The answers will probably vary, depending on the exact configuration of each election. Still, in the game of life, one can say that perhaps the rich are used to winning, while the poor are accustomed to losing. It would be ironic if, ‘as losers’, the poor turn out to be the more principled voters when compared with the highly educated middle and upper classes. Confusing elections Many participants are of the view that the then forthcoming elections on 10 May 2004 are rather confusing, mainly because there are many candidates vying for the same position and multiple positions to fill. The confusion is also related to the lack of trustworthy information about the candidates. The spread of black propaganda leaves a voter with no basis for making a good decision: Maraming paninira ang lumalabas sa mga kandidato, hindi mo alam kung ano ang totoo [There’s too much mud-slinging going on, and one can’t know which one is true] (rural female); Maraming siraan. Hindi malaman kung ano sa mga paninira ang totoo [There’s too much wrecking of individual reputations. I can’t tell which of the allegations is truthful] (urban male); There are too many intrigues and scandals among candidates (youth). Another source of confusion pertains to the conduct of the elections itself, such as whether it will be computerized, and whether they have properly complied with the procedural requirements for registration and validation. Significantly, this apprehension expresses a keen desire to vote on electionday. Finally, vote-buying also caused confusion, as seen below. Vote-buying All the participants in the study agree that vote-buying is not right. There is a sense that the public ultimately loses from vote-buying. The money given out to buy votes, they say, will later on be recuperated by a winner from public funds, fuelling corruption of a magnitude exceeding the money used to buy votes: Hindi tama na mamigay, kasi kapag nanalo babawiin din ito, baka mas malaki pa [It’s not right to give money, because if they win they’ll take it back, involving even larger sums] (urban male); Dai, magkakaigwa nin

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korapto [No, it will lead to corruption] (rural male); Dai, mas ngana an babawion [No, they will take back much more in return] (rural female). A handful will absolutely not accept money. One urban male participant even equated vote-buying to the commodification of the voter’s personhood: ‘Mali, kasi parang binibili ang pagkatao mo [It’s wrong, because it’s like they’re buying your humanity]’ (urban male). However, most participants say they will accept the money and still vote according to their own preferences, it there were no mechanism for checking their actual vote, such as through a ‘carbon copy’ of the ballot. Otherwise, they will not accept money. Those who will accept a candidate’s money feel justified because the money is said to come from the people anyway: ‘Yung perang pinamumudmod nila ay galing din sa tao [The money they’re doling out to people comes from the people in the first place]’ (urban male). Apparently, years of advocacy by many church officials and leaders not to vote according to their conscience despite the acceptance of money have evidently borne fruit in this pervasive thinking among the participants. Apart from vote-buying, Metro Manila participants received threats of losing their jobs from some employers or managers if they do not vote for the candidate preferred by their superiors. Other employers adopt more subtle techniques, such as conducting a ‘survey’ of the workforce. In the latter case, workers tell management what the latter want to hear. Apart from such intimidation, violence and thuggery were not major issues for the FGD participants, a result that is perhaps a function of the relatively safe areas chosen for this study. Although so-called ‘hot spots’ are identified in every election, wholesale fraud has minimized the crudest forms of violence, since in elections for national positions fraud has become a complex and sophisticated game of manipulating results from behind the scenes through schemes such as dagdag-bawas (shaving off votes from one candidate to pad the votes of another). These are said to involve huge pay-offs for election officials at various levels.

What the IPC Ateneo data say To summarize, data from the IPC Ateneo study indicates that elections are widely viewed as a game of chance, a gamble, along with other element of spectatorship such as, heightened level of verbal and physical violence, of momentary and excess. Seeing it as a gamble has allowed voters to undergo the campaign period – a moment of liminality – with serious engagement as well as a healthy dose of fun and skepticism. It also helps them to come to terms with election outcomes without, in a sense, losing hope in the system. Any game of chance entails risks: win or lose. Voters would like to elect someone whom they know has the traits of a good leader, especially one with vision, intelligence, and a heart for the poor. But how are they to ‘know’ the candidates? Try them like shampoo or soap?

90 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr Every game of chance involves cheating. Ordinary voters are fully cognizant of the deception and trickery involved in electoral contests, particularly for national positions. The poor loathe empty promises and commonly see votebuying as wrong and improper. But, given their material needs, they will also take advantage of the money and goods that circulate widely at this time, if they can somehow escape the consequences. Despite all of its flaws, elections are regarded as the only means to change elected leaders and to seat new ones. Most of the poor regard their participation in elections as a duty, suggesting an appreciation of their role as citizens in a nation-state. People see the ballot as crucial to a political system that calls itself democratic. But they are also realistic enough to know that elections are not meant to change and overhaul the social structure. They cast their votes as a duty and as integral members of the body politic, but are also full participants in the process of gambling on candidates, hoping for change, and then moving on. Voters can be said, therefore, to approach elections with a profound feeling of ambivalence. To most of them, elections are the only legitimate means to effect change, and its outcome must be respected. In case the outcome is not to their liking, there is a feeling of resignation among poor voters who feel their room for efficacious action is severely limited. But there is also a pervasive sense that the outcome is the outcome, and it must come to pass. Everyone has played his or her role in the game and, unless there is a massive protest as in 1986, the people are prepared to abide by the results. That is how the game is played, and one must not be a sore loser. Thus, they recognize the imperfections of the electoral process, and still remain willing participants. The notion of a game of chance captures the feeling of belief in and ambivalence toward an accepted social practice that has an innate entertainment value, an inherent validity, and the unavoidable cheats, risks, and twists of fortune.

The 2004 elections: closure by death? In general, elections achieve proper closure when the losing candidate ritualistically concedes to the winning candidate and accepts the so-called people’s mandate based on simple arithmetic. In addition, normative statements are made that after all the acrimony of the campaign, people of opposing sides will have to live together, and must therefore bury their differences. In the Philippines, this ritual closure is hard to come by. Non-closure of the electoral ritual has become acute in the Philippine multiparty system, largely because whoever wins the presidential contest will not be the choice of a majority of the electorate. The multiplicity of candidates fragments the vote, and the winner has at best a (tenuous) plurality. Only in the case of Estrada’s victory in 1998 was the outcome not subject to a dispute. But the seeming closure did not last for long. As people say, ‘Look what they did to him.’ The winning margin of Ramos in 1992 was perilously small, although eventually

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he governed with legitimacy because he held a firm grip on power and was widely perceived to have performed well in office. In the 2004 election, Arroyo’s margin over Poe was rather slim – just over a million votes, with the official tally showing Arroyo received 12,905,808 votes against Poe’s 11,782,232. A case was filed in court to protest the results, attesting to the old adage that no one ever loses a Philippine election: the loser always cries, ‘I was cheated!’ The death of Poe on 14 December 2004 from natural causes put the case to rest. However, his innumerable loyal followers, including his actress-wife Susan Roces, refuse to accept the legitimacy of Arroyo as president. The widely circulated Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI 2005a) even named Poe as the Filipino of the Year for 2004. Consequently, a certain air of liminality lingers, with endless talk of disenchantment with Arroyo and of ousting her from power. The ritual is finished, but the ritual continues.

Postscript Having ended the chapter in February 2005 with a sense of persistent liminality, I had not imagined that about four months later the question of Arroyo’s victory in the 2004 presidential election would escalate into a sticky political checkmate. At the end of May 2005 the Philippine Senate opened hearings on allegations that Arroyo’s husband and other relatives took payoffs from jueteng gambling syndicates (subsequently, funds generated from jueteng would be linked to the rigging of the election). By early June the president’s office was trying to preempt an opposition plan to reveal wiretapped conversations between Arroyo and Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. The exposé was not thwarted and the so-called ‘Hello Garci’ tapes were publicly circulated, leading many to believe that the conversations were meant to fix the outcome of the May 2004 vote to ensure an Arroyo lead of over one million votes. On 27 June 2005, President Arroyo gave an unprecedented television address in which, amid gaping ambiguities, she declared ‘I am sorry’ for ‘a lapse in judgment’. On a day of many wagers, 8 July 2005 ten cabinet secretaries and advisers, including the president’s full economic team, resigned. They said the president’s ability to govern had been fatally wounded, and asked her to quit. On the same day, former President Aquino pleaded with Arroyo in a televised address to make ‘the supreme sacrifice’ of tendering her resignation for the good of the nation. A faction of the Liberal Party that included the head of the Senate called on the president to resign. The Makati Business Club also threw its hat into the ring. But the chips did not fall. The day ended with Former President Ramos lending support for Arroyo from within the Malacañang Palace and suggesting constitutional change as a solution. The Catholic Church hierarchy hesitated to join the call for Arroyo’s resignation, formalized in a statement issued on 10 July by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP). The military, ranking members of

92 Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr

Figure 4.1 Front page of 14 July 2005 issue of the Inquirer, politics as a cockfight

whom are implicated in the wiretapped conversation controversy, knew where their interests were best protected and hedged their bets in favor of the sitting president. The polarized situation was eloquently depicted on the front page of the 14 July 2005 issue of the Inquirer as a cockfight, with Aquino as the chief cock of the pro-resignation camp (‘Resign’) drawn in a match against Arroyo and her allies (‘Remain’). It dubbed the state of affairs as ‘National Grand Derby’ (see Figure 4.1). Instinctively, the gambling worldview was deployed to understand the political crisis. Indeed, it was one in which many had taken outrageous bets, and the cards and players were all jumbled up. The business elites, universities, and various sectors were deeply divided, and each side of the contest pulled together an odd mixture of gambler-political actors. Because in a cockfight we really do not know who the winner will be, we can only speculate as I end this postscript. We can take our cue from the Inquirer’s (PDI 2005b) headline on 31 July, ‘Odds favor GMA survival.’ The consummate gambler of all is poised to win this evidently protracted cockfight. But who will be the real losers? One guess would be the idealistic young. Meanwhile, jueteng continues and the thrills and booty of a state within the state go on everyday.

Note 1 Another novel element was the participation of overseas Filipinos, made possible by two interrelated laws passed in 2003, one extending dual citizenship to former Filipino citizens and another stipulating that overseas Filipinos can cast their ballot as absentee voters. This offered an interesting subplot to the election and electioneering narrative; it deserves a full story in itself, but is mentioned here only to indicate the many peculiarities of the 2004 elections.

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References Aguilar, Filomeno Jr (1994) ‘Of Cocks and Bets: Gambling, Class Structuring, and State Formation in the Philippines’, in James Eder and Robert Youngblood (eds) Patterns of Power and Politics in the Philippines. Temple, AZ: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University, pp. 147–196. Aguilar, Filomeno Jr (1998) Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Coronel, Sheila S. (2004) Cockfight, Horserace, Boxing match (Why Elections Are Covered as Sport): Lessons Learned from the 2004 Campaign Coverage. Quezon City: Center for Investigative Journalism. Geertz, Clifford (1983) ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power’, in C. Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Hofileña, Chay Florentino (2004) News for Sale: The Corruption and Commercialization of the Philippine Media. Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) (2005) The Vote of the Poor: The Ideals and Pragmatics of Elections. Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University. May, Glenn A. (1989) ‘Civic Ritual and Political Reality: Municipal Elections in the Late Nineteenth Century.’ in Ruby R. Paredes (ed.) Philippine Colonial Democracy. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, pp. 13–40. Nakano, Satoshi (2004) ‘Gabriel L. Kaplan and U.S. Involvement in Philippine Electoral Democracy: A Tale of Two Democracies’, Philippine Studies 52(2): 149–178. Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI ) (2005a) ‘Filipino of the Year 2004: Fernando Poe Jr.: Mourning an Unfulfilled Dream’, PDI, 23 January: A1, A18. Philippine Daily Inquirer (2005b) ‘Odds Favor GMA Survival: US Bank Says She’s Tougher Than Opposition Expected’, PDI, 31 July: A1, A6. Turner, Victor (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Middle-class ironic electoral cultural practices in Thailand Observing the 2005 National Assembly Election and its aftermath Pitch Pongsawat

Introduction This chapter is the result of my involvement in the 2005 National Assembly Election in Thailand; as a voter, a political commentator for different public media television, an organizer of a project sponsored by the Election Commission of Thailand for the new voters, and as an audience of politics. In other words, my multiple roles in this election event can be treated as consuming, producing, and reproducing such an election event in particular and the national political structure, in general. My weariest moment during the 2005 Election was when I was watching various election reports on the television and realized that the fastest and most comprehensive news report on the Election Day was the Independent Television (ITV), which is stationed in the same building as the Thai Rak Thai Party (the majority party), namely, the Shinawatra Building No. 3. This ‘Independent’ Television was a product of a search for independent media in the post-1992 May Massacre, during which the defeated military heavily censored news broadcasts. In 2001, the Shin(awatra) Corporation acquired the largest amount of ITV’s shares, a year prior to the first Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s administration.1 In terms of television media ownership in Thailand, four out of six major national television network channels are directly owned by the government (Channels 5, 7, 9, and 11). The other two public stations are directly owned by families of members of the cabinet (Channel 3 and ITV). The family of another cabinet member has the largest share in a cable news station (the Nation Channel). The Nation Channel had commissioned a vote-counting report that was used by all television stations on the election day. It was rumored that an unofficial but faster vote-counting report was being conducted with the technological support of the network of Advanced Info Service (AIS), the largest and most comprehensive network of the mobile telephone company of the Shin Corp.

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 95 The 2005 National Election on the 6th of February 2005 is the 21th National Election in Thailand. The Thai Rak Thai Party (the ruling party) won 377 seats, the Democrat Party won 96 seats, the Chart Thai Party won 25 seats, and the Mahachon Party won 2 seats. The overwhelming majority led by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra would allow him to continue his leadership without serious parliamentary opposition. This is due to the framework of the 1997 Constitution that requires up to 125 members of the parliament to initiate a vote of no confidence for the cabinet member, and 200 members to initiate a vote of no confidence for the prime minister. Compared with elections elsewhere presented in this volume, the 2005 Thailand election was not as festive and carnivalized as Thai elections used to be. This is because the Office of the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT), another product of the 1997 constitution to ‘clean up’ money politics and to ‘rationalize’ Thailand’s parliamentary system,2 did not allow any festive election campaigns to take place. The stringent regulation of the ECT was put in place at a time when various forms of vote-buying and other festive practices were well established as major elements of election campaign in the rural and urban areas.3 This attempt at cleaning up the election process has become one of political controversies as many candidates were disqualified during the election campaign or even after the election. For example, one of the colorful and popular candidates (Mrs Leena Jangjanya) for the 2004 Bangkok Governor Election was disqualified five days prior to the election. According to the ECT, Mrs Leena had violated the election law by employing dancers and singers in a parade to attract voters. Another controversy, raised by a focus group survey organized by the ‘campaign for the new voters’ committee, is that the voting right was imposed on Thai citizens at the age of 18, as part of the political reform to reach out to the youth in the belief that they are idealistic and thus, the new hope for nonselling of votes. Meanwhile, as a remnant of the ‘paternalistic’ military regime, individuals aged less than 20 are not allowed to go into a pub. To get myself out of my weariness and the feeling of powerless in the current Thaksin political and economic monopoly, and an ultra-rationalized election monitoring, I propose in this chapter a new way of looking and living with the 2005 election and Thai politics in a more radical manner. It is my belief that the conventional ways of studying elections in Thailand cannot provide a satisfactory and revolutionary explanation of the current trend in Thailand’s democratization. The mainstream approach merely examines vote casting behavior as aggregated political decision-making of individuals, while an economic-determinist analysis of historical, political and economic structures that influence voting behavior of certain groups or classes does not provide any explanation on how such structures have been reproduced and articulated. I hope that a new way of looking at election as popular cultural practice, focusing on the ways people ‘act and live’ in the election process and analyzing their voting practices, will place more agency with the people.

96 Pitch Pongsawat The chapter is divided into three main parts. The first section provides an introductory justification of the study of election as popular cultural practices. It includes a brief but critical survey of both mainstream and critical political economy studies of election in Thailand. The second section elaborates on Thailand’s electoral practices as popular cultural practices within various terrains of struggles. The final part reaffirms the significance of the study of election as popular cultural practices in radicalizing Thailand’s democracy in the midst of skepticism toward ‘electoral-mania democracy’; a skepticism that election plays an ideological role in reproducing and justifying the Thaksin regime which strongly believes in large party politics, strong and centralized leadership, and consensus politics towards the global capitalist development while giving less space for promoting and protecting people and community rights.4

Election in Thailand as popular culture: a first cut In a country where kindergarten school pupils participate in electing their school leader, election has become part of the lives of ordinary in Thailand in various formal and informal institutions. At the formal political level, however, voting is legally compulsory for Thai citizens who must participate in various elections at both national and local levels in every 4–6 years.5 Every citizen votes for the Members of Parliament and the Senate at the national level. In addition, citizens of Bangkok elect the District Councilors, the Bangkok Councilors and the Bangkok Governor at the local level. Residents of provincial town elect the Village Headman, the Sub-District Headman, the Sub-District Councilors, the Head of Sub-District council, the Provincial Councilors, and the Head of Provincial Council at the local level. Provincial non-town (rural) residents elect the Municipal Councilors, the Mayor, the Provincial Councilors, and the Head of Provincial Council at the local level. Nevertheless, a formal political election provides us only with a partial understanding of the amount of electoral activities people engage in routinely, and the activities surrounding ballot casting and the legality of election campaigns. To define election as popular cultural practices in people’s ordinary lives is to challenge mainstream electoral studies that provide a narrow view of defining election as only a form of voting behavior or, to be more specific, an aggregated form of vote casting. Such mainstream analyses aim to find out patterns of voting behavior or aggregated public decision of individual political actors and to identify various factors that influence such voting behavior. Furthermore, such analyses are interested in developing formal political institutions and legal frameworks to promote desirable political behavior – clean and ideological-based vote casting – so that civic political culture will be promoted in the long run, in line with political modernization and political development theory.6 Consequently, mainstream studies include various government-commissioned studies of deviant behavior in election

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 97 campaigns in order to make legal recommendations to tackle those ‘deviant’ political behaviors.7 Studying electoral practices as popular cultural practices also challenges the critical political economy approach that is skeptical toward the individualist and pluralist models of voting behavior. Such an approach argues that voting behavior has been structured by historical and politicaleconomic forces that produce uneven structural conditions; voters from different backgrounds bear these structures when they enter the political sphere, especially when they enter the ballot booth to vote. For example, Anderson (1996) argues that democratization through voting in contemporary Thailand took place after state-sponsored violence that eliminated the progressive movement from the formal political path during the late 1970s. Meanwhile, new forms of violence that involved direct conflict over economic and political interests took place at the local level, for which election became a legitimate form of securing economic and political power among local elites. In this sense, the articulation of capitalist and state formations in Thailand may be said to have been partly expressed in terms of the history of Thai democratization. Despite significant differences, both approaches give primacy to the voting behavior and the voting results as central to the understanding of elections. Furthermore, a strong sense of crude determination is central to their understanding of voting behavior: the determination of socio-economic structure in individual political behavior or in class struggle. In the mainstream approach, the western-democratic civic culture is deemed desirable to democratic voting behavior, while the deviant voting behavior in Thailand is seen as the result of the non-democratic political culture. Here, political culture is seen as the pattern of an individual’s orientation, role and attitudes toward the political system, which encompasses political ideals and the operating norms of a polity, i.e. political culture is the manifestation, in aggregate, of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics. In this vein, Thinaphan (1987) believed that individual political behavior in Thailand remained inherently traditional and those who proclaimed their support for democracy thus frequently contradicted themselves by what they really thought and did.8 In the critical political economy approach, electoral politics is crucial for the bourgeoisie to be in a dominant position in the polity, although electoral democracy holds out some genuine prospects in the longer run for meaningful legislation in the sphere of labor, and social welfare for irreversible social gain (Anderson 1996). The establishment of electoral politics at a certain historical moment is therefore a function of cultural practices that were determined externally by political and economic structural factors, and voting behavior and attitude in support of election in Thailand are related to class interests and class consciousness that were historically produced via the development of the political economy. Beyond the mainstream and the critical political-economy approaches, a Neo-Gramscian view offered by the works associated with the Birmingham

98 Pitch Pongsawat Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (1977) can help us transcend the crude western ethno-centric behavioralism and crude economic structural determination explanation. Analytic focus should be on the idea of ‘articulation’ (Barker 2000), i.e. a temporary unity between elements that do not have to go together. This will enable us to locate the ideological struggles behind such imaginary lived relation of electoral practices – represented, understood, and lived out in various ways – and a complex structure of dominance (Hall 1980). The study of articulation of election leads us to understand the concept of hegemony, which emphasizes the contingency of power relations and the struggle over consent rather than top-down domination (Gramsci 1971; Bocock 1986). Electoral hegemony thus needed to be won in the struggles in the concrete terrain of an articulated conjuncture of various forces. In this way, people are not political and/or cultural dupes, nor merely bearers of structural forces that structurally interpellate them. Elections thus become popular cultural practices that people act out and fight with various forces that try to fix certain meanings, worldviews, and power relation upon them, on the one hand, and somehow unintentionally and actively reproduce the whole complex structure of dominance, on the other. Thus conceived, the study of elections does not need to see voting behavior and the interpretation of its result as the only legitimate area of study. The production of the election campaign, the consumption of the election campaign that includes both news reports, and the consumption of political message can all be areas of study, among others, which do not necessary produce a teleological and linear interpretation of level of demo-cratization. In the next section I will identify two major popular cultural practices in electoral practices as alternative case studies vis-à-vis existing voting studies.

Election in Thailand as popular cultural practices: two practices Tautological moment of national election campaign by the Electoral Commission of Thailand (ECT) The establishment of the Electoral Commission of Thailand (ECT) as an independent state organization to promote elections and democracy and to monitor elections is a requirement of the 1997 Constitution. Historically, the functions of monitoring and engineering election had been in the hands of the Minister of Interior. Additionally, the Poll Watch Committee, a voluntary election watchdog, was established to monitor the post-May 1992 uprising election, but without any official authority to regulate election campaigns. Both the functions of Ministry of Interior and the Poll Watch Committee were transferred to the ECT in 1997.9 Significantly, the first term of the ECT (1997–2001) saw many members of the Poll Watch Committee in charge of executive positions; in 2000, the first ECT was praised by Asia Week as ‘the Best Government Reformer in Asia’. However, in the second term (2001–present), all the committee

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 99 members were replaced by ex-bureaucrats, either transferred or retired from the Ministry of Interior, National Police Office, and the Army, unlike the voluntary watchdogs who were basically progressive university lecturers and non-governmental organization personnel. Thus, the ideological repertoires of the ECT staffs were drawn from their past, communicated in a bureaucratic top-down mode to the people.10 The slogan to promote the 2001 election by the ECT was ‘Election is the duty. Choose the “Good” Person for the Parliament’. The slogan for the 2005 was ‘Election is the duty. Choose the “Good” Person to Rule the Country’. These slogans came from two major ideological sources. First, compulsory voting is stipulated by the 1997 Constitution. Second, the ‘good’ person refers to the Thai King’s speech which had been popularized through various media, especially in the national royal news broadcast program, during the Chartchai administration, the notorious period of money politics that led to the coup in 1991.11 The full version of His Majesty’s speech was actually presented at a right-wing paramilitary (the Village Scouts) training camp during the Communist insurgency period in the late 1960s.12 It is interesting that the ECT-led election-cum-democracy campaign to promote democratic election had, in essence, no democratic content at all. The Election Commission defines a ‘good’ election candidate simply as one who is not corrupt and not a vote buyer; the government’s anti-corruption campaign always presents the corrupt politicians as national traitors. Highranking bureaucratic and political officers who were charged with corruption would face both a legal trial as national traitors and a societal-moral trial for not keeping the royal oath. Thus, in fact, the ECT does not know how to provide coherent details on how democratic principles can and will fix the corruption issue, beyond the idea and desire that politicians should be a patriot and/or a royalist. The election-cum-democracy campaign was, therefore, a moment when authoritarianism and royal patriotism were presented in the name of democratic promotion.13 The logic here is both tautological and absurd. I am not saying that because the ECT is organizationally a remnant of an authoritarian-bureaucratic regime, they intentionally imposed such a royalist and patriotic slogan on the voter. The point is that when they unintentionally articulated their democratic election campaign, they ideologically set in motion certain meanings that made the new voters feel that voting was just another duty that the state was imposing upon them, among other duties. Compulsory voting stipulated in the 1997 Constitution thus was presented in a ‘duty’ mode, not in the mode of ‘citizen’s rights’. What actually took place in the 2005 election-cum-democracy campaign in Thailand was the ritual of imposing political order to perpetuate state power, rather than a state-led campaign to mobilize people to vote in the name of promoting people’s power to make public decisions and take control of the state. Thus, after the election, ECT asked all the four leaders of the political parties to publicly hold hands and sing the royal ‘Song of Unity’ (‘Samakkee Chomnoom’) as a symbol of the ECT’s campaign for ‘election for solidarity’.

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Consuming election as reproducing politics: an active audience model of election consumption in media General observations and comments regarding a large increase in marketing and the use of media-savvy consultants in election campaigns in Thailand have provoked the issue of media production and consumption in election and politics.14 I am interested in how the visual image and visual campaign strategies, among other kind of campaigns, produce their effect in/on an electoral audience who is not only the target of the media agencies and election candidates as a voter, but also a political consumer who actively produces meaning and reproduces the existing complex political structure. The question can be addressed by comparing the predominant modes of campaigning to reach the urban middle-class audiences via visual political images in the city in terms of signs, newspapers, television ads and news, and the presence of candidates on television programs, with community visits and speeches given by electoral candidates in the urban lower income communities and in rural areas. These two social classes have different expectations regarding election campaigns. The difference is not about political messages or ideologies as sets of belief and worldviews that can be analyzed from campaigns and vote casting, and from which we can find a larger explanation of the level of democratization. Nor is it about how economic interests directly determine middle-class political action to gain ideological and material interests. Rather, it is about the very moment when people participate in producing meanings, while consuming political messages; these processes reflect a complex relationship between the middle class and politics beyond their vote-casting action. Undoubtedly, the Thai middle class consumes political messages and relates these messages to their decision to vote or not to vote. However, equally importantly, they consume the entire process of electoral politics by producing various meaning beyond the issue of voting. Large numbers of the Thai middle class consume electoral politics by enjoying the feeling of being in a movement between involvement and distance, acceptance and protest, hating and loving politics, and the ironic consumption of politics, rather than just a direct connection between individual political beliefs and economic interests and voting behavior.15 Entertainment, emotion, enjoyment and pleasure are also the key links they have with politics, not just the connection between serious ideology and political rationale expressed in political attitude and behavior, on the one hand, and levels of democratization, on the other. Instead of participating in electoral politics and politics in general seriously because politics is a civilized activity aimed at human good in Aristotle’s sense,16 they actively act and participate in electoral politics by treating politics and politicians as ‘bad’ subjects. Ultimately, the middle class, in fact, enjoys this ironic relation with electoral politics and formal politics, no matter what their voting behavior might reveal. The places to find how much the middle class enjoy electoral politics and formal politics, in hating, irony, and loving ways, is not the poll. It is

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 101 to be found in the political internet message boards, ‘web-boards’ such as Pantip.com and other newspaper-based message boards ( Pitch 2002) and the recent popularity of news discussion programs ( Pitch 2005). Unlike polls that present only quantitative data on aggregated individualistic ‘decisions’, internet message boards and news discussion programs provide space for stories attached to each and every decision. In contrast to polls, message boards and discussion programs allow the personality of the individual electorate and the process of decision-making in casting one’s vote to be represented. However, the large number of participants in such democratic gazing and expression has never been treated by conventional academics as ‘participation’ in democratic politics because these activities do not fit into the simple decision-making model such as voting or roaming the street as a form of public protest. I would argue, however, that internet political message boards in Thailand are a striking example of an emerging field of ideological struggle where ironic political practices and ideological works take shape in the midst of the general praise for the promising emergence of a virtual democratic public sphere for net-citizens or ‘netizens’. I have demonstrated elsewhere ( Pitch 2002) that the use of the new internet message boards revealed that the middle-class-led public sphere is contentious, unsustainable, and unable to resolve fundamental political conflicts in Thailand, due to the lack of trust among the participants when practicing such free speech activities. Now, in retrospect, what strikes me more about the internet message board study is that, ironically, despite the general sentiment of viewing politics and politicians as bad subjects whose activities are based on greed and corruption, a large number of people participated in writing and reading, in political discussions.17 Locating people’s feelings about and distaste for politics in the message board is not a difficult task; one can readily discover such sentiments by examining each discussion topic, which invariably contains both agreement and disagreement on the proposed subject, mixed in with skepticism toward politics in general. The following examples show this clearly. Example 1 Manager.com Webboard [http://www2.manager.co.th/Mwebboard/listComment.aspx?QNumber= 135720&Mbrowse=9] Topic: Survey shows 18.3 million Thais don’t read book, a result of 19 million votes for Thai Rak Thai party in the last election. A survey shows that 18.3 million Thais do not read books, but love watching melodrama soap opera and listening to sexually related news.

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Pitch Pongsawat The result of the survey is expected to be the answer to the landslide victory of the Thai Rak Thai party that won 19 million votes in the last election. A reliable source reveals that the number of those who will not read books will double in the next 4 years which will lead to a larger victory of Thai Rak Thai for its 38 million votes. However, an expert is confident Thai Rak Thai will be in decline soon. Thank heaven. Author: Jatusung, posted: 24 August 2005/ 12:52 Opinion 1: The country is full with buffalos.18 Author: Kor Kor, posted: 24 August 2005/ 13:59 Opinion 2: Yes!! I just got it today. I have been wondering for so long about that 19 million votes. Author: Person number 20th million, posted: 24 August 2005/ 14:08 Opinion 3: I read books every day, and I still voted for Thai Rak Thai. Author: It was not weird to like Thai Rak Thai, posted: 24 August 2005/ 14:21 Opinion 4: Sir, I am afraid what you read were porn, not books. Author: ‘Small’ Party, posted: 24 August 2005/ 14:46 Opinion 5: I can’t read, but when the money came I knew how to vote. Author: 55555555, posted: 24 August 2005/ 15:56 Opinion 6: Whose poll is this? I guess it is from the crazy one. Opposition parties and the angry cliques are so desperate nowadays to use this method. Author: The 2nd Thai, posted: 24 August 2005/ 16:37 Opinion 7: Dear Mr. 2nd Buffalo, I think the pool is valid. Author: A Free Buffalo, posted: 24 August 2005/ 17:19

Example 2 Pantip.com Webboard [http://www.pantip.com/cafe/rajdumnern/topic/P3700544/P3700544.html] Topic: A Constructive Topic for Discussion: Let’s Help the Government Find Money to Build our Mass Transit With reference to the government’s plan to slow down the construction of 2 mass transit lines as a result of low rate of return or lack of funding (definitely I think it is about lack of funding).

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 103 . . . Most of the time when government got criticized, many people seem to be happy when the government fought back saying that such criticisms were not constructive because they did not provide any alternative solution . . . Let’s brainstorm to find a solution for this lack of funding issue, of which the total amount is around 200,000 million Bahts. I think if we help each other in this brainstorming, we can find the way to get this money without much difficulty because people in this webboard are very smart. Let me start with 2 proposals: 1) Cancel tax privilege for IP Star satellite19 (16,000 million Bahts) 2) Selling the Prime Minister’s ‘Air Force One’ (2,000 million Bahts) I have already raised 18,000 million Bahts. Other suggestions? When we got 200,000 million Bahts, those who in favor of the government please print out this suggestion and send it to the prime minister. Author: A Moralist, posted: 29 August 2005/ 02:44 Opinion 1: I don’t think 200,000 million Bahts is enough to fund the projects. The government always buys everything more expensive than the usual price, like the case of the CTX.20 What the government has been doing in buying expensive stuff is like pouring water in the leaked container. It’s impossible to fill it up. Author: One Way, posted: 29 August 2005/ 03:59 Opinion 2: We should reconsider the CTX deal and think in a smarter way. Author: Surfperson, posted: 29 August 2005/ 06:31 Opinion 3: We can send out suggestion directly to the Prime Minister at: http://www.rakang.thaigov.go.th/epost.asp Author: In Progress, posted: 29 August 2005/ 08:04 Opinion 4: Let’s make a lot of copyrighted comedy VCDs and sell them to the foreigners. Someday we will get enough money to fund the projects. Author: Aunty the Newbie, posted: 29 August 2005/ 08:12 Opinion 5: This promising discussion topic turned out to be a cynical one. What’s a waste of time? Author: TRAT, posted: 29 August 2005/ 08:34 Opinion 6: Agreed, such an unconstructive proposal. Author: Pornwan, posted: 29 August 2005/ 10:21 Opinion 7: If the government officers stop getting 5% commission, we will suddenly save 10,000 millions out of 200,000 millions. Author: Prajin-Tha, posted: 29 August 2005/ 11:15

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Pitch Pongsawat Opinion 8: Mr. TRAT, please be constructive. Are you a professional brownnoser? If you are a brownnoser, you should donate your income to help raising the funds, haha. Author: bateegoal, posted: 29 August 2005/ 12:03

Irony regarding Thai politics apparently provides the media viewers and discussants in message boards with, simultaneously, the ability to displace the contradiction between the moral ideology of politics and the ability to experience pleasure and amusement in politics that have little to do with philosophical political virtue in a strict sense or with a narrowly defined participatory democratic culture. In sustained participation – reading, writing, discussing – in the message boards, the participants create a distance between themselves and Thai politics as a ‘bad’ subject, enjoying the activity and at the same time affirming a superior relation to Thai politics and politicians. In this way, middle-class individuals across the various ideological affiliations, including those without explicit ideological identifications, can participate and express their agency in politics with pleasure and enjoyment, in the virtual forum. Another example of the ironic enjoyment of politics by the Thai middle class can be seen in the recent popularity of the ‘news discussion programs’ that can be found on every television channel in Thailand; their popularity has in fact led to the reduction of air time for formal news reports. Such programs present news discussions by at least two presenters in an informal way, using daily newspapers as sources of discussion topics. The discussants are free to make cynical jokes on news topics, largely political news. An important ingredient of their popularity is the invitation to viewers to express their ideas, either by sending or texting a message via mobile phone or to vote for or against questions posted by the discussants. The spontaneous polls in the program provide excitement for the viewers, as every vote and expression is counted and presented on screen in real time. To increase votes for the spontaneous and unstructured opinion polls, participants must vote and express their opinion frequently to keep up with rival opinions. The ironic moment emerges when one realizes that many participants get a kick out of the fact that the mobile phone service they use to send the message to disagree with what the prime minister and his cabinet did is owned by the prime minister’s family’s company and the television stations for the shows they enjoy are owned by the respective families of the prime minister and his cabinet members. Thus the connection between the cultural factor and election behavior of individual middle-class voter is obviously not as direct or ‘automatic’ as is presented in mainstream and critical political economy approaches to elections. It is perhaps too serious to interpret the voting behavior of the middle class as an indicator of democracy. Or even to blame them for their supposed love for stability rather than democracy, as in various works on middle-class politics in Thailand (Anek 1996). The point is to understand

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 105 how the middle class enjoys consuming the representation of electoral politics as a significant part of popular electoral practices. This is because, ultimately, the middle class might enjoy the right to hold whatever political view they want and, accordingly, actively produce different meanings in the electoral process rather than being merely actors or victims of fixed economic interest or political attitude. Thus, the analytic point regarding middle-class political practice is not the predictability of their political action towards democracy but the way they negotiate with the political system; producing meanings as their way of living with the complex existing system of dominance while simultaneously reproducing the existing system of dominance they live in. For example, they enjoy politics by making it an inferior activity, such as blaming politicians for being under-qualified and corrupt, at the same time readily going to vote and watching various political programs. In this sense, the middle class in fact reproduces existing political structures without doing anything directly with the state-led mobilization project to establish political order or an externally imposed and fixed ideology from history and economy, as discussed in the previous section.

Note on the Thai media In addition to the enjoyment of the middle class as part of (re)producing politics in electoral practices, we need to look at how the staff in the media produce electoral news as part of political news. My observations and interviews with the political news editors of a newspaper and a weekly political magazine suggested that it was the editors who used their own experiences and perceptions to define what constituted election news and political news. What they did was to reproduce, mainly, the definition of politics as parliamentary activities, and election news as activity relating to voting. ‘Election news’ thus was defined mainly as stories concerning electioneering, the malpractices of electoral campaigns, gossip regarding candidates, and interviews and analyses of policy campaigns. The ensuing hegemonic definition of political news was therefore neither from influences outside the media circle nor the result of direct censorship. However, the 2005 election saw an impressive and dynamic news analysis, especially in the printed media. The incumbent Thaksin government initiated various populist government programs and project proposals just before the official announcement of the election date, thus giving rise to public disputes. In principle, every party must use its own budget to run the campaign, and the campaign should start after an official announcement of the election day, when the ECT will also begin its monitoring process. This government’s attempt to promote its successful projects and propose future projects was deemed as an infringement of the election law as the ruling party using its government position and public expenditure for its own benefit.21 Many print media, in collaboration with opposition parties and

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progressive forces from the senate and democracy advocacy groups, tried hard to raise these related issues publicly and, with the ECT. However, ultimately, the ECT stated that what the incumbent government had done was legitimate.22 Additionally, the printed media had tried to bring various stakeholders together to publicly discuss the impact of the government populist policies campaign, but it did not create a significant negative impact on the popularity of the incumbent government, which was successfully returned to power with a greater number of seats than before, both in the city and in the rural areas.23 It seems that the Thaksin regime knew very well how to set various political agendas for the masses, using media advertisements, sharp spontaneous interviews, and the prime minister’s weekend radio programs. Politics in Thailand has thus come to be redefined by Thaksin as a matter of administration by stronger leadership via populist policy, rather than a matter of democratic deliberations. However, the political domination of the Thaksin regime is not permanent but contingent upon conscious political activities of the progressive media and the social movement, on the one hand, and the ways the masses, particularly the middle class, consume, produce meaning, and reproduce complex political system, on the other.

Towards radicalized democratic politics in Thailand via radicalizing elections Freeing election studies from the obsessive analysis of voting behavior and the economic determinism of voting provides an alternate way of radicalizing democratic politics in Thailand. Skepticism toward middle-class political behavior should be reconsidered by looking at the very processes they use to interact with structural constraints and reproduce the structure of dominance, rather than defining the middle class by their descriptive ideological factors or pure economic interests. The chapter takes the non-essentialist argument of not assuming a direct and immediate link between electoral politics and democracy. It focuses on the way the existing complex political structures are lived out by the middle class, whom we think are the large supporters of the system. What we find is that the middle-class ambivalence toward politics and its role in the perpetuation of existing political structure does not necessarily work in a contradictory way. In other words, political consent can be produced not by direct domination. Thus, in the midst of the frustrations and skepticism of the progressive social movement against the role of the middle class in democratization, ‘what is to be done’ is not to fix the middle class on an ideological spectrum different from the progressive movement. Rather, it is to engage ourselves with the very moment where and when middle-class consumption, production, and reproduction, of the complex existing structure of dominance are still an indeterminate process, and create progressive strategies that are external to their imagination or the way they live out the relationship with the existing structure.

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Epilogue: The anti-Thaksin campaign, the April 2006 annulled election, and the September 2006 coup In the 2005 election, Thaksin Shinawatra won a landslide election victory which made him the first elected prime minister with a single party majority in the Thai parliament and one of the most popular political figures in Thailand’s contemporary politics. However, from the end of 2005 to early 2006, less than a year after he began his second term, he faced the largest series of mass demonstrations in Bangkok, since 1992, aimed at ousting him and bringing in new political reform through a revision of the constitution to prevent large-scale corruption. The anti-Thaksin movement began under the leadership of Sondhi Limthongkul, a media tycoon and a former Thaksin supporter, whose news discussion television program was removed from a government channel in September 2005. Sondhi continued to offer his program on his own multimedia venues, i.e. newspapers, magazines, website, and satellite TV programs (www.manager.co.th) and in public gatherings, including holding a series of large rallies in a public park in Bangkok and in major cities upcountry. Apart from accusing Thaksin of corruption, the demonstrations included political speeches and entertainment programs, ranging from ballads, pop music and Chinese operas, making fun of Thaksin and his cronies. Sondhi criticized Thaksin on three fundamental moral grounds that influence modern Thailand: (1) the King – impinging on royal prerogatives on various occasions; (2) Buddhism; and (3) the nation. In terms of national interest, the anti-Thaksin movement was based on moral outrage from progressive forces, immediately after the sale of his family’s shares in Shin Corp, the telecommunication company Thaksin founded, to the Singapore government investment corporation, Temasek Holdings, two days after an amendment to the telecommunication law that increased the statutory limit of foreign holdings in Thai telecommunication firms from 25 to 49 percent.24 Moreover, this, the largest transaction in Thailand’s business history, was arguably structured to allow the sellers, Thaksin’s family members, to avoid paying any taxes, and to place important national assets in the hands of foreigners ( Pitch 2006). To avoid debates by both the opposition and a group of progressive senators, Thaksin dissolved parliament and enjoyed the status of a caretaker government while waiting to win the April 2006 election with his populist campaigns targeting rural voters. Opposition parties saw through these ploys and boycotted the election. Since the 1997 Constitution stipulated that voting is compulsory, opposition parties and anti-Thaksin movement mounted a ‘Vote for No-Vote’ campaign – the ballot paper would have a ‘No Vote’ option which permits one not to vote for any candidate – and/or the civil disobedience act of tearing up the ballot.25 The election result was approximately 16 million votes for Thanksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party and 10 million ‘no-vote’ ballot papers and invalid votes. Thaksin was thus able to retain

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the prime minister’s post. However, his party faced several law suits of election frauds and another electoral technical difficulty. The 1997 Constitution stipulates that in an uncontested constituency, the candidate who wins the seat must receive at least 20 percent of all eligible votes in the constituency. As a result, 38 by-elections in 15 provinces had to be conducted to complete the election process. This created problems for Thak Rak Thai in two regions: the south-central region which is a stronghold of the opposition party and the deep south where the Thaksin government had decided to take a military solution to the regional religious conflict. Political pressure continued to escalate. Public pressure, with the King’s endorsement, forced the convening of a judiciary review that nullified the April 2006 election. The Election Commissioners were faulted for curtailing campaigning and for failing to shield voters at voting booths. They were further sanctioned for misfeasance in unlawfully allowing candidates to switch constituencies, change application dates and use old identity numbers to the benefit of Thai Rak Thai to win in non-Thai Rak Thai constituencies, during the 23 April elections.26 After the judicial review, a new election was scheduled in October 2006 with a newly appointed Election Commission team. Street campaigns continued and a large anti-Thaksin demonstration was expected on September 20. However, on the night of 19 September, while Thaksin was attending the UN General Assembly in New York, a coup took place. Calling itself the Council for the Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy (CDR),27 the junta was led by General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the Commander-in-Chief, with close connections to the retired but influential ex-prime minister General Prem Tinsulananonda, who is the chairman of the King’s Privy Council. The coup was ostensibly necessary to heal the ‘severe rifts and disunity among the Thai people unprecedented before in Thai history’.28 Martial law was announced: the media was controlled, the largest internet political web board, Pantip.com, closed itself down to avoid heated discussion, and anti-coup websites were blocked or hacked, as in the case of www.19sep.com and www.midnightuniv.org., and public gatherings of more than five people were proscribed. The coup leader promised to transfer power to a non-partisan civilian government within two weeks and to have a new election in a year, with a new constitution. Ex-Commander in Chief General Surayud Chulanont, a member of the Privy Council, was appointed to lead an interim government. An interim constitution, drafted by the legal staffs of CDR, was put in place and a new constitution was to be drafted, under the supervision of the CDR, in subsequent months. The coup seemed to be the panacea for an ironic moment of the peculiar relationship between the middle class and electoral democracy. The controlled media sang praises of the ‘bloodless’ coup. Pictures of people giving flowers to soldiers stationed at many strategic places were presented in the media as evidence that the public welcomed the coup. Many families and tourists, including a couple in wedding dress, went about taking

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 109 photographs with the tanks and soldiers, to seize the exception/emergency moment and transform the state of emergency into familiar, everyday liveentertainment. The plan to organize a ‘coyote’ dance in front of the tanks to cheer up and support the coup, as well as making a music video was banned.29 The spokesman of the CDR intoned: ‘It is not appropriate to entertain soldiers while they are on duty’, and ‘People should differentiate between entertainment and seriousness. A coup is not entertaining.’ From the street and multimedia demonstrations and campaigns to boycott the election, the eventual nullification of the April 2006 election, to the disqualification of the Election Commission, and, finally the suspension of the October election as a result of the coup, the middle class seemed to have come to believe that democratization can be carried out by an institution that is generally considered undemocratic, in order to get rid of demo(n)cratic national and royal traitors like Thanksin. The ‘festive moment’ seemed to be for the middle class a way to energize Thai politics out of the stringent and ultra-rational legal framework of the 1997 Constitution. In other words, while the ultra-rational legal framework of the 1997 Constitution was initially aimed at rationalizing the parliamentary system with stringent measures for checks and balance to fence off corrupt politicians, once Thaksin created his hegemonic regime by being a popular sovereign, the constitution turned its ultra-rational power on the middle class as an ‘iron cage of rationality’, forcing them to go to the ballots knowing that they will lose to Thaksin’s populist elected regime. Without dealing in an analysis of deep ideological conflicts or conflicting economic interests, I would argue that electoral democracy and the consumption of elections in the media as in ‘ordinary time’ were no longer a fun experience that the middle class could enjoy as a melodramatic moment of political irony. The anti-Thaksin demonstration, his dissolution of parliament for a new election, which was boycotted by the opposition parties, created a rupture of unease among the middle-class political audiences. Thus the only option available to them for political enjoyment at the moment of losing their freedom of expression, when the 1997 Constitution was suspended by the coup, was to turn the coup’s structural violence and seriousness into a happy moment by going out into the streets to watch the tanks and soldiers as if some ‘political accidents’ had taken place. If it was the military that took the coup as a serious political intervention to restore peace and democracy, it was the middle class that also actively restored peace and democracy by normalizing such a violent action into festive enjoyment. The middle class consumed the coup by articulating the coup as a festive moment to make sure that politics should be entertaining during an extraordinary time in which election practice (both vote casting and consuming election campaigns on the media) lost its entertaining function. An electronic letter from one of my students, with various photos attached, sent to her ‘western friends’ outside Thailand explained how peaceful the coup was and the cheerful feeling she had while out with her friends, taking

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photos with the tanks and the soldiers during the state of emergency. ‘In fact, I wanted to see a real tank coz I never saw it’, she wrote. Even (though) the tanks are harmful to democracy, I think they save us from amoral leader. Many parts of the world become fall season and maybe many people are thinking that our democracy is falling and step backward now. But in my opinion, our democracy is falling safely and many Thais are falling in love with the things that the coup is doing.

Acknowledgements I would like to thanks Prof. Chua Beng Huat and all the participants at the workshop at the National University of Singapore, Dr Chaiyan Chaiyaporn, Dr Niti and Dr Puangthong Pawakapan, Dr Pattana Kittiasa, Dr Tien Foo Sing, Sarayut Saykhammee, Pattara Kumpitak, Angsumalin Burut, Manuschun Kowapirat, Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Athikom Kunawut, Chanida Jittaruttha, Chukiat Sivavetkul, and Pratueng Muang-On for all their support in various ways. The chapter is dedicated to the late Prof. Pornsak Pongpaew, who was my master and subsequently my senior colleague in the Department of Government, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. It has been a great honor to study and to work with Thailand’s key founder of political behaviorism study.

Notes 1 The largest share of ITV officially belongs to the Prime Minister’s son. Prior to the previous election, Thaksin Shinawatra had disseminated his shares to his family and his close connections, that included his chauffeur and maids, in order to comply with the 1997 Constitution’s restriction that does not allow a politician to directly own any shares in a private company. The first quarter of 2005, ITV’s net profit increased +575.06 percent compared with the net profit in the same period in 2004 (Post Today, 17 May 2005). It is argued that lower concession fees for its station and larger gains in ratings and ad revenues contributed to this profit (Bangkok Post, 11 May 2005). Two huge public controversies took place in 2004 regarding ITV. First, ITV added more entertainment programs into its schedule, which was argued deviated from the founding principle of ITV as a public news television station. Second, the Thanksin government made a controversial decision to lower the concession fee for ITV. 2 See Amorn (1994) and Prawase (2002) for the rationale behind the 1997 ‘People’s Constitution’ as part of the post-May 1992 political reform movement. 3 Thairath, 25 August 2004, and Bangkok Post, 30 August 2004. 4 Of the huge number of non-fictional books on ‘Probing Thaksin’ (Ru Than Thaksin), see Fah Deaw Khan (2004), Pinyo (2004) and Chirmsak (2003). 5 In short, Section 23 of the Organic Law on the Election of Members of the House of Representatives and Senators, B.E. 2541 (1998) Second Amendment, B.E. 2542 [1999] and Third Amendment, B.E. 2543 [2000] stipulates that an elector who fails to attend an election for voting without notifying the appropriate reason for such failure under Section 21 or Section 22 or has notified the cause but it is not reasonable, such person shall lose the right to petition such an

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6 7 8

9

10 11

12

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15

election, the right to be a candidate in an election, the right to request the introduction of bills and local ordinances, the right to request the resolution removing a person under the organic law on counter-corruption, and the right to request the removal from office of a member of the local assembly or a local administrator. The loss of rights shall be for a period as from the election day on which such elector fails to attend for voting to the election day on which such elector attends thereof, see detail at the ECT’s website: www.etc.go.th. Of the major industry of research and graduate research on ‘election behavior’ in Thailand, both national and constituency-specific, see, for example, Suchit and Pornsak (1984). Sombat (1993) and (2003) are examples of commissioned research of ‘deviant’ political behaviors that were supposedly reflected in voting behavior during the post-May 1992 Democratic Uprising and the post-1997 People’s Constitution. Thinaphan was influenced by the notion of political culture in the works of Almond and Verba (1965) and Pye (1969). A university professor of the National Institute of Development Administration who was a classmate of the military junta, Thinaphan was appointed, in 1992, to the Suchinda Cabinet before the government was overthrown by the people’s uprising. For an overview of ‘electoral politics’, see Orathai (2002), and for the story of the Poll Watch Committee, see Callahan (2000). Currently the Poll Watch Committee has transformed itself into the People’s Network for Elections in Thailand (PNET), a people-based volunteer watchdog organization that both monitors elections and provides civic and voter education. My argument follows the same direction as Surin and McCargo’s (1997) notion of ‘the electoral process in Thailand as a bureaucratic function’. General Prem Tinsulanonda, the prime minister during the ‘demi-democracy period’ (1980–88), and later on the Head of the Royal Privy Council, always ‘shows unswerving loyalty to the monarchical institution. His deference and reverence for . . . [the institution] have gained him trust and admiration’ (Likhit 1992: 220, quoted in Hewison 1993: 70). ‘The country is full of both good and bad persons. It is difficult to make all people a good one. Thus it is the duty of the citizen to support the good person to rule the country, and to control the bad ones’ (The 1969 Royal Speech at the Village Scout Gathering in Chonburi). See also the study of the Village Scout Movement as part of the right-wing political movement in Thailand in Bowie (1997). Taylor (1996) argues that elections are double-edged swords in the rise of democracy and in the formation of a dominant, stable, and permanent political order. Therefore, it is political order that is precisely more important than democracy, which has an empty meaning in the ECT democratic campaign. See the interview of the various media agencies who participated in the 2005 political campaigns in the city in Thansetthakit, 30 January–2 Febuary 2005, 17– 18, and the Color Branding Strategy for the 2004 Bangkok Government election in Manager Weekly, 2–8 August 2004, A4. This argument is inspired by Ang (1985), who argues for the consumption of Dallas, an American TV soap opera, as part of a melodramatic imagination and ideology of mass culture. This classification is more complex than the mainstream classification of political culture (Almond and Verba 1965) as: (1) parochial political culture that citizens are only indistinctly aware of the existence of government; (2) participant political culture that citizens contribute to the system they live in, as well as being aware of its existence; and (3) subject to political culture that citizens see themselves not as participants in the political process but as subjects of the government, as is the case in dictatorships. The melodramatic imagination classification is also more complex than an orthodox classification

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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between class consciousness and false consciousness as a result of external ideological domination. See Mulgan (1977). The internet message board of Pantip.com that hosts the Rajadamnern café, or the most famous internet political message board, received 30,000 daily hits in 1999, for example. Buffalo is a Thai expression for a dumb person. IP Star satellite is the most hi-tech satellite owned by Shin Corporation. CTX is a bomb-detector machine which was ordered by the New International Airport of Thailand. The CTX scandal came out when the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigated the ‘foreign corrupt practices’ by a US company selling airport bomb-detectors which revealed the possibility of the involvement of more than US$10 million in bribes, kickbacks or inflated contracts with the Thai officials (see Ehrlich 2005 and Ampa Santimatanedol and Tul Pinkaew 2005). Thai Post, 8 November 2004, and Thairath, 8 November 2004. http://www.tttonline.net/news_show.php?type_id=447 In the 2001 national election, the Thai Rak Thai Party won 248 seats, and the Democrat Party won 128 seats. The deal included the sale of the largest mobile telephone company (AIS), the ITV, and the IP Star satellite. Tearing up the ballot paper is illegal according to the Election Law. ‘Judge rules guilt “Beyond doubt” ’, Bangkok Post, 26 July 2006, p. 3, ‘Election Commissioners in jail’, Business Day, 26 July 2006, p. 1, ‘EC trio jailed’, The Nation, 26 July 2006, p. 1A. The junta later changed the English name to Council for Democratic Reform on 26 September 2006, while retaining the full name in Thai. (See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kingdom of Thailand. Press release No. 428/2549.) According to the press release, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that ‘[the] previous English translation of the junta had led to misunderstanding and false interpretation in some countries and for some foreign media on the role of the Monarchy. The Council, therefore, deem it appropriate to change the English translation of its title.’ And on 2 October, the CDR changed the name and status into the Council for National Security as a result of the 2006 interim Constitution. The full statement of the CDR is As it has become clearly apparent that the administration of the present caretaker government has led to severe rifts and disunity among the Thai people unprecedented before in Thai history, with different sides seeking to win using various means, amidst prospects of the situation worsening with everyday, the majority of the people are suspicious and untrusting of the government’s administration which shows signs of rampant corruption, malfeasance, political interference in government agencies and independent organizations affecting their ability to perform their duties as prescribed by the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand, creating problems and obstacles for the conducts of political activities, as well as several actions verging on lèse-majesté against His Majesty the King who is highly respected by the Thai people. Although many sectors within society have continuously tried to compromise to resolve the situation, the divisions that exist could not be lessened. The Council for Democratic Reform, composed of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the Royal Thai Police CommissionerGeneral, has therefore found it necessary to seize control of the country’s administration for this moment onwards. The Council wishes to reaffirm that it does not intend to administer the country itself and will restore the

Middle-class ironic electoral practices 113 democratic governmental system with a monarch as head of state to the Thai people as soon as possible so as to maintain peace and order within the Kingdom, as well as to extend the highest reverence to the monarchy, which commands the deepest respects of all the Thai people. (http://www.mict.go.th/cdrc/index_en.asp) 29 ‘Go-go girls undermining coup’: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,20490232-5002700,00.html

References Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney (1965) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Amorn Chandara-Somboon (1994) Constitutionalism: The Solution for Thailand. Bangkok: Institute of Public Policy Studies (in Thai). Ampa Santimatanedol and Tul Pinkaew (2005) ‘Scandal Will Bring Down Government’, Bangkok Post, 31 May. Anderson, Benedict R. (1996) ‘Elections and Participation in Three Southeast Asian Countries’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anek Laothamatas (1996) ‘A Tale of Two Democracies: Conflicting Perceptions of Elections and Democracy in Thailand’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ang, Ien (1985) Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodrametic Imagination. London: Methuen. Barker, Chris (2000) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practices. London: Sage. Bocock, Robert (1986) Hegemony. London: Tavistock. Bowie, Katherine A. (1997) Rituals of National Loyalty: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press. Callahan, William A. (2000) Pollwatching, Elections and Civil Society in Southeast Asia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1977) On Ideology. London: Hutchinson. Chirmsak Pinthong (ed.) (2003) Probing Thanksin. Bangkok: Kor Kid Douw Khon (in Thai). The Editorial Board of Matichon Newspaper (2005) Handbook of the 2005 National Election. Bangkok: Mathichon (in Thai). Ehrlich, Richard S. (2005) ‘Thailand Blasted by Airport Scandal’, Asia Times Online, 30 April. Available at: www.atimes.com/atimes/SoutheastAsia/GD30Ae04.html (accessed 1 June 2005). Fah Deaw Khan (2004) ‘The Thaksin Regime’, Special Theme Issue, 2(1). (in Thai). Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publisher. Hall, Stuart (1980) ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 305–346. Hewison, Kevin (1993) ‘The Monarchy and Democratisation’, in K. Hewison (ed.) Political Change in Thailand: Democracy and Participation. London: Routledge. Likhit Dhiravegin (1992) Demi-Democracy: The Evolution of the Thai Political System. Singapore: Time Academic Press.

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McCargo, Duncan (2002) ‘Thailand’s January 2001 General Elections: Vindicating Reform?’ in D. McCargo (ed.) Reforming Thai Politics. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Mulgan, R.G. (1977) Aristotle’s Political Theory: An Introduction for Students of Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Orathai Kokpol (2002) ‘Electoral Politics in Thailand’, in Aurel Croissant, Gabriele Bruns, and Marei John (eds) Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia. Singapore: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Office for Regional Co-operation in Southeast Asia. Pinyo Trisuriyathamma (ed.) (2004) Toxinomics. Bangkok: Open Books (in Thai). Pitch Pongsawat (2002) ‘Virtual Democracy in Thailand: Information Technology, Internet Political Message Board, and the Politics of Representation in Thailand after 1992’, Journal of Social Science (Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University) 33(1): 141–166. Pitch Pongsawat (2005) Locating a Good Sense in Thaksinism: Collected Essays. Bangkok: Open Books (in Thai). Pitch Pongsawat (2006) Book Review of Duncan McCargo and Ukrist Pathmanand, The Thaksinization of Thailand, Pacific Affairs 79(1): 143–145. Prawase Wasi (2002) ‘An Overview of Political Reform Issues’, in Duncan McCargo (ed.) Reforming Thai Politics. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Pye, Lucian W. (1969) ‘Political Culture and Political Development’, in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds) Political Culture and Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sombat Chantornvong (1993) Thai Election in Crisis: Problems and Solutions. Bangkok: Kobfai (in Thai). Sombat Chantornvong (2002) ‘The 1997 Constitution and the Politics of Electoral Reform’, in Duncan McCargo (ed.) Reforming Thai Politics. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Suchit Bunbongkarn and Pornsak Pongpaew (1984) Vote Casting Behavior of the Thai People. Bangkok: The Research Office of Chulalongkorn University (in Thai). Surin Maisrikrid and McCargo, Duncan (1997) ‘Electoral Politics: Commercialization and Exclusion’, in Kevin Hewison (ed.) Political Change in Thailand: Democracy and Participation. London: Routledge. Taylor, R.H. (1996) ‘Introduction: Elections and Politics in Southeast Asia’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thinapan Nakata (1987) ‘Political Culture: Problems of Development of Democracy’, in Somsakdi Xuto (ed.) Government and Politics of Thailand. Singapore: Oxford University Press.

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 115

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Engaging the 2004 general election in Malaysia Contrasting roles and goals Loh Kok Wah Francis

The Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition comprising 14 component parties scored a spectacular victory in the 21 March 2004 general election, polling 63.8 percent of the popular vote. In Malaysia’s first-past-the-post (or simple majority) electoral system, this translated into 198 of the 219, or 90.4 percent, parliamentary seats. This is the ruling party’s highest ever domination of parliament since Independence in 1957. It was also the eleventh time that Malaysia had gone to the polls and the eleventh time the BN (earlier the Alliance) had emerged victorious. Nothing untoward occurred during the election despite the stepping down of Dr Mahathir Mohamed who, as prime minister for 22 years, had dominated Malaysian politics. Although a multi-ethnic society, Malaysia has remained politically stable and maintained a variant of Westminster parliamentary democracy. Changes in leadership have occurred with little violence, except in 1969 when incidents of communal violence occurred in Kuala Lumpur, following which, parliamentary rule was suspended temporarily for about one and a half years from 1969–71, when federal and state-level elections were resumed and have continued to be held regularly every four to five years, as required by law. In spite of these democratic trappings, power is increasing concentrated by the executive at the expense of the legislative, judiciary, the mass media and civil society more generally, through the amendment of the Constitution and the promulgation of coercive laws by parliament, rather than via outright repression. The Internal Security Act (ISA) allows for detention without trial which, together with other coercive laws, actually curbs civil liberties and political rights enshrined in the Constitution. These restrictive Acts include the Official Secrets Act, the Universities and University Colleges Act, the Trade Unions Act, the Societies Act and the Police Act. As a result of the Printing Presses and Publications Act, the opposition and critics have found it difficult to publish and the mainstream media has fallen into the hands of the government or the BN parties (Mustafa 2002; Zaharom 2002). The constitution has also been amended several times to tighten the executive’s grip over the conduct of elections and their outcomes. Specifically, the Election Commission (EC), charged with conducting the elections, has lost

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its original autonomy and acts, nowadays, at the behest of the executive. Every eight to ten years, the EC has redrawn the electoral boundaries ostensibly to cater for demographic changes as required constitutionally. The redrawing of boundaries has benefited the incumbent BN each time (Lim Hong Hai 2003). For example, in the 2003 delineation exercise, the EC added 26 new parliamentary seats and 63 state seats particularly in the states where the BN had performed very well in the 1999 general election. No additional seats were added to states where the opposition Parti Islam (PAS) had scored huge successes in 1999. Election-related laws have also been amended systematically to favour the incumbent BN. In the latest amendments to the Election Act and the Election Offences Act in April 2002, the list of voters, once gazetted, cannot be challenged in a court of law, even when ‘phantom voters’ are found on the electoral rolls. The deposit required of electoral candidates for a parliamentary seat has been increased to a maximum of RM20,000, among the highest in the world. The hike effectively imposes a considerable financial burden on the poorer opposition parties, which are already finding it difficult to raise funds to conduct campaigns. During the 1980s, the laws had also been amended to forbid open-air public rallies. Only indoor ceramahs (‘dialogues’), on application to the local police authorities, are allowed. The official campaign period has also been reduced to a legal minimum of seven days. In 2004, campaigning was only allowed for eight days, the shortest ever, which disadvantages the opposition again. Although the EC determines the election date, it is the incumbent BN that decides when parliament is to be dissolved, enabling the latter to better prepare for the election than the other parties. Add to the coercive laws and other legalistic arrangements BN’s greater access to the so-called ‘3-Ms’ – media, money and electoral machinery – and we can see why elections have become predictable affairs: the BN always wins. Consequently, Malaysia has been described variously as a ‘semidemocracy’, a ‘repressive-responsive regime’, a ‘statist democracy’, and even a system of ‘rule by [coercive] laws’ rather than ‘the rule of law’ (Case 1993; Crouch 1996; Jesudason 1989; Rais Yatim 1995).

Electoralism, political parties and developmentalism Yet, in a survey of the political culture of Malaysia,1 more than 70 percent of respondents reported that they had voted in all or some of the elections. Some 68.4 percent strongly agreed and another 28.5 percent agreed that citizens have a duty to vote in elections. They further believed that the way people vote decides how the country is run (34.0 percent strongly agreed and another 45.6 percent agree). Accordingly, they strongly disagreed (30.1 percent) or disagreed (41.1 percent) when it is stated that ‘it doesn’t matter whether I vote or not’. Furthermore, in the cross-national survey, Malaysians also take their political parties seriously. Almost 20 percent of Malaysians

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 117 indicated that they had joined political parties and another 22.1 percent stated that they ‘might’ join political parties. These numbers are uncharacteristically high relative to other Asian societies; 7.7 percent and 17.1 percent of South Koreans and 11.5 percent and 24.5 percent Filipinos, respectively. It follows that Malaysians are also more inclined than most other Asians to help a political party or candidate during election (slightly behind Filipinos and Japanese but clearly higher than other Asians surveyed), and contribute financially to a party or candidate (highest among all Asians). Such positive sentiments probably indicate that Malaysian political parties and elections are stronger and more enduring institutions than in most parts of Asia, with the possible exceptions of Singapore and Japan. However, whereas the Japanese, South Koreans and Filipinos who registered positive identification with political parties were also inclined to attend a protest or sign a petition, Malaysians were disinclined to engage in these extra-electoral political activities. Although they might agree that one is entitled to express one’s opinion, 36.4 percent of Malaysian respondents thought that people should not be allowed to organize public meetings, the highest percentage of all the Asian countries surveyed. Studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have also indicated that Malaysians NGOs are few and far between, compared to most of their Asian neighbors (Loh 1996). Finally, Malaysians are also imbued with the notion that their country is very democratic! When asked, ‘How proud or not proud are you of the way Malaysia’s democracy works?’, only 11.2 percent replied that they were ‘not so proud’ and another 5.2 percent ‘not proud at all’. Obviously Malaysians have a narrow definition of democracy which is defined by involvement in legally registered political parties and participation in multi-party elections conducted regularly and rejecting participation which extends into the extra-electoral realms. Put another way, unlike elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Singapore excepted), elections and party politics are the stuff of contemporary politics in Malaysia, at least for a majority. I argue that this penchant for electoralism and the high regard for Malaysian democracy, notwithstanding the many restrictions on civil liberties and political rights, are on account of two related factors: the rapid economic growth which has improved the livelihood of the majority;2 and the cultural corollary to that growth that I have called ‘developmentalism’ (Loh 2000, 2004b). Emerging in the early 1970s, when the Malaysian state launched its plans to promote economic growth so as to achieve New Economic Policy objectives,3 the discourse of developmentalism came into its own in the midst of rapid economic growth and new opportunities during the 1990s, associated with the neo-liberal policies of deregulation and privatisation. This new political culture valorizes rapid economic growth, the resultant consumerist habits, and the political stability offered by the BN’s rule, even when it resorted to authoritarian measures. Since no other party has ever ruled Malaysia, many ordinary Malaysians, including the middle classes, cannot imagine that political stability can be maintained in multi-ethnic Malaysia

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without BN rule. A ‘self-policing’ system in support of BN rule – believed essential to maintain political stability, which attracts foreign investment and facilitates economic growth, and ultimately results in higher standards of living and consumption – has kicked in. This ideology is reinforced by the fact that, in contrast, Kelantan and Terengganu, states which had been ruled by the opposition PAS government from 1999 to 2004, experienced relatively lower rates of growth than the BN-governed states. Developmentalism, therefore, is the cultural corollary to the dirigiste developmental state when citizens, especially the middle classes, begin to enjoy improved living conditions as a result of economic growth the state has brought about (Loh 2000). Developmentalism increasingly displaced the ethnic political discourse and practice in the 1990s and has replaced ethnicism to set limits to the discourse of democracy. During this period of economic progress, the BN component parties not only avoided debate over policies, especially when they involved ‘sensitive’ ethnic issues – the status of Chinese schools, ethnic quotas for entrance into universities and acquiring business licenses, Islamization – but also de-emphasize political education and mobilization of ordinary Malaysians. Developmentalism embedded itself into the quotidian of local communities through the BN parties, which as extensions and instruments of the state not merely assist in the maintenance of the status quo, but assist in the delivery of public works and services. Throughout the country, the parties establish ‘service centers’ and complaints bureaus, which are partially financed by the Constituency Development Funds allocated by the government only to elected BN politicians. Lower-income Malaysians, in particular, have resorted to them, instead of the relevant government agencies, in order to resolve their everyday problems and needs, whether personal or local community-wide. These include getting their children into a school of the parents’ choice; applying for passports, hawker licenses and other official documents; seeking help when they have been overcharged for utilities now maintained by privatized entities; and even looking for children and other loved ones who have disappeared! The Chinese-based BN parties, the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), in particular, has established its own university (the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman) and a college (Kolej Tunku Abdul Rahman) with five campuses in different parts of the country and Kojadi, the MCA’s savings co-operative, provides low-interest loans for the children of co-operative members to attend universities and colleges. Finally, the BN parties have ventured into business enterprises, forging close ties with other captains of industry and commerce. Together with the Chambers of Commerce and Industry and other industry-specific bodies like the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers, BN parties have initiated various projects in support of the BN government’s post-NEP economic policies which have been friendlier to the private sector in general. The political parties seem to be encouraging their members to engage in development

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 119 activities first and foremost and to disengage from popular political participation except during elections. In sum, the BN political parties have assumed very different roles from those they performed at the moment of independence, when freedom and justice were clarion calls, and popular mobilization was their raison d’être. Consequently, the high point of the political life of a majority of Malaysians is the periodic general election. Not only is the act of voting understood as ‘the most signal emblem of full citizenhood in the modern age’ (Anderson 1996: 13), in the context of developmentalism, rallying behind the BN can benefit one materially in the form of services and goods, licenses, contracts and projects. Since the tightly controlled electoral system allows for keen competition in some areas, without threatening a surprise defeat of the BN, it encourages the opposition parties to have yet another go at the polls. For its part, the BN is forced to campaign even more vigorously to deny a breach of its two-thirds majority in parliament. Moreover, at a time ‘when the whole world is watching’, the usual curbs and restrictions on civil liberties are loosened or held in abeyance during the brief campaign period and the atmosphere of greater freedom encourages groups like the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to seize the opportunity to promote a wider notion of participatory democracy which extends beyond elections. Hence, despite the coercive laws, the electoral laws favouring the incumbent and the predictable BN victory, there is much anxiety and excitement as elections approach. All this excitement and anxiety is borne out by the high voter turnout rates – more than 70 percent – for each of the five previous elections in Malaysia; in 2004, it registered 76.6 percent. In what follows I shall first discuss how the mainstream media engages with the election. Although they ultimately rally support for the BN, they also generate hype to bring people out to vote. I then focus on the ‘awesome’ election machine of a BN politician in Penang. Next, I discuss how some NGOs, not particularly interested in the electoral outcome, nonetheless engage in the 2004 election vigorously, which they view as an opportunity to promote a participatory democracy beyond elections. Finally, I discuss the electoral contest for the Sungai Siput parliamentary seat in the state of Perak. This case illustrates how engagement in the electoral process could actually transcend electoralism and engender a democracy which is not only participatory in scope, but meaningful in content as well.

Keen contests but different goals From the outset it is important to emphasize that although the BN has won every single general election, and has secured more than two-thirds of all parliamentary seats since 1957, its performance in terms of the popular vote is less impressive. In the eventful 1969 election, the BN even failed to gain a majority of the popular vote. In 1999, it only polled 56 percent and in 2004, 63.8 percent. When one further analyses the electoral results, it is obvious

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that the BN victories have been secured in the semi-urban, multi-ethnic constituencies. Here, it is common for the BN to win 90 to 100 percent of seats. In 2004, it won all 75 such seats, while in 1999, in the midst of reformasi and an uncharacteristic challenge by a united opposition in the polls, the BN still won 60 out of 61 such seats.4 However, in the remaining two types of seats – the large rural Malay majority seats, concentrated in the northern part of the Peninsula, and in the urban Chinese majority seats – keen contests between the BN and the opposition parties usually develop, as though a twoparty system prevail. And in spite of the BN’s advantages, opposition party candidates have won several seats, time and time again. In fact, on several occasions, the BN have failed to poll a majority of votes in such areas. For instance, in 1999, the BN won only 27 of 59 large Malay majority seats but in 2004, captured 57 out of 65 seats. In the Chinese majority seats, the BN won 15 out of 24 seats in 1999, and 14 out of 25 such seats in 2004. The federal make-up of Malaysia, and the holding of federal and statelevel contests simultaneously, further lends itself to keen contests. Technically, it is possible for opposition parties to lose the contest at the federal parliamentary level, but capture some state legislative assemblies. This has happened on several occasions in the large-Malay majority areas. Although the total number of PAS members of parliament have been small between 1957 to 2004, PAS has held power in Kelantan state for extended periods (1959–78, 1990–2004), and in Terengganu periodically (1959–64, 1999–2004). The opposition has also held power in Sabah state in Borneo from 1985–94. Hence, although it is predictable that the BN will win the election, its winning margin is not determined. Unpredictable are the outcomes in the urban Chinese-majority seats and the rural Malay-majority seats where a two-party system might be said to operate. Finally, at least in Kelantan and Terengganu, and previously Sabah too, the opposition can actually emerge as the state government of the day. Under such circumstances, both the BN and the major opposition politicians, and their party supporters, engage in the election with great gusto though for different reasons: The BN’s aim is to secure at least two-thirds of the parliament seats which allow it to amend the constitution at will, something it has done more than 40 times since independence while the opposition will try to break the BN’s potential stranglehold. Both sides target the majority of Malaysians who do not identify positively with any particular party, although Malaysians outscored other Asians with regard to joining political parties in the previously mentioned survey. In fact, due to the existence of the ISA and other coercive laws, and the constant reminder by the authorities not to engage in extra-electoral politics, there has developed a state of tidakapathy (from the colloquialism tidak apa, literally ‘couldn’t be bothered’) among this majority. For the BN, it is important to persuade this group of the importance of elections, of the merits of developmentalism, and to vote BN on polling day. The role played by mainstream media is critical in these regards.

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The role of the mainstream media: from hype to developmentalism The mainstream media is owned and controlled by either the government or the BN parties. However, they do not simply resort to pro-BN propaganda, at least not at the early stages of the election. Overplaying the pro-BN card could turn off the undecided voters or, equally fatal for the BN, discourage them from coming out to vote if they think that the BN’s victory is assured and that their vote does not make a difference. Rather, they highlight the keenness of the election by focusing on the contest for parliamentary seats in the large Malay majority areas, especially in Kelantan and Terengganu, and in urban Chinese majority areas where the results are unpredictable. Typically, about a year or so before elections are due, the media begins to speculate on when the forthcoming general election will be held, usually taking the cue from a call by the prime minister to the BN parties to get ready for election. So-called pundits are also interviewed on whether it is opportune for the BN to hold an election. The usual considerations are whether the economy is performing well, whether the major BN parties are united or embroiled in internal party squabbles, and whether there are scandals involving BN leaders headlining the news. In the run-up to the 2004 election, such speculation began later than usual. Media attention was focused on other matters caused by Dr Mahathir Mohamad stepping down as premier on 31 October 2003: What kinds of policy or administrative changes, if any, might Abdullah Badawi, the new prime minister, introduce in his ‘first 100 days’ in office? Who would he appoint as his deputy? Surely, Abdullah would not go to the polls before attending to such matters. In the event, Abdullah did make an impact in the five months between his assuming office and the 21 March 2004 polls. He proclaimed that he would focus on the ‘software part’ rather than the ‘hardware part’ of development and on developing a ‘first-class mentality’ among Malaysians to accompany the ‘first-class infrastructure’ Mahathir had left behind. These changes pertained to ‘improving governance’, ‘fighting corruption’, ‘restoring safety and security’, ‘improving the delivery of services by the civil service’ and what might be termed a ‘work with me’ style of politics. To this was added his notion of ‘Islam Hadhari’, a vision of a progressive, tolerant and modern Islam which harkened back to the norms and values which prevailed during past Islamic civilizations. It was simultaneously a response to PAS’s program of an Islamic state and an assurance to non-Muslims that they would not at all be discriminated under Abdullah’s Islamization policies. In the midst of all these, he appointed Najib Tun Razak as his deputy on 7 January 2004, which, according to a Malay daily headline, was to meet the challenges of a general election soon (Utusan Malaysia, 8 Jan. 2004). Fueling further speculation, the PM next commanded, after an UMNO Supreme Council meeting that UMNO’s election machinery, at all levels, should be made ready for election. When quizzed by the media when the election would be called, he demurred and only stated that it would be held this

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year, 2004 (Utusan Malaysia, 11 and 16 Feb. 2004). The media hype went into first gear. A series of articles next focused on the preparedness of the Elections Commission (EC) to conduct the upcoming election. Abdul Rashid, its chairman, announced that the new electoral rolls involving some 9.5 million voters were ready (Utusan Malaysia, 24 Jan. 2004). His team was prepared. (The Sun, 7 Feb. 2004). The 130,000 election workers were ‘in the final stages of training’ (The Sun, 14 Feb. 2004). He agreed that the general election would be held soon (Utusan Malaysia, 21 Feb. 2004; The Sun, 20 Feb. 2004). The first round of guessing came to a close on 26 February when an unending stream of BN leaders visited the PM in his office. Photographs of these leaders entering and leaving the main gates to the PM’s office were featured in news bulletins and headlines. Noting the cancellation of Abdullah’s trip to Caracas to attend a G-15 Summit as well as a visit to Los Angeles, where his wife was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, the media concluded that the election would be held on 21 March. Speculation next focused on when parliament would be dissolved and more importantly, who the candidates would be (Utusan Malaysia, 25 Feb. 2004). Parliament was dissolved on 5 March, nomination day fixed for 14 March and the election scheduled on 21 March. With these dates confirmed, the media election hype went into second gear. Attention next focused on potential candidates. At first glance a nonissue, nonetheless, the media created the necessary hype to excite readers as to which BN party might contest the 26 new parliamentary and 63 new state seats added in 2004 (The Sun, 27 Feb. 2004; Sinchew, 1 March 2004); whether an incumbent BN candidate would be ‘kicked upstairs’ to defend a parliamentary seat instead of a state one, or vice versa, and whether an incumbent or someone new would be selected (The Sun, 5 March 2004; The Star, 12 March 2004); who the opposition candidate might be; indeed, where might some opposition leaders like PAS’s Hadi Awang and Mahfuz, or the DAP’s Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh contest (The Sun, 8 March 2004; Sinchew, 9 and 10 March 2004). Would PAS field women candidates for the first time in its history? (Utusan Malaysia, 4 Feb. 2004). There was also speculation as to whether Parti Keadilan would field a trio of charismatic leaders; Youth Chief Ezam Mohd Nor (who had previously been sentenced to two years jail on a charge of disclosing official secrets); deputy leader of the Women’s Wing Irene Fernandez (sentenced to 12 months jail for publishing allegedly false news); and vice-president Mohd Azmin Ali (sentenced to 18 months jail for perjury in 2001). All of whom were legally ineligible on grounds of their convictions. Would Parti Keadilan risk nominating them, and where would they stand? (Utusan Malaysia, 6 March 2004) Beyond personalities, there was also hype as to whether the opposition would be able to seal an electoral pact (The Sun, 7 Feb. 2004) and how seats might be distributed between PAS and Keadilan who were working together (The Sun, 26 Feb.

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 123 2004). And finally, there was much speculation as to whether the BN would be able to recapture the state assemblies of Kelantan and Terengganu from PAS (The Sun, 3 and 4 March 2004). Nomination Day marked another turning point. The media prepared pullout specials which contained information on all the constituencies – the total number of registered voters, the ethnic breakdown of these voters, the results of the previous election – the current set of candidates, and their parties. Space was provided at the end of each entry for the reader to mark in the winning candidates and the votes polled. At the back of the pullout, a ‘score sheet’ to tally the total number of seats won by each party was also provided. Presented in color, with maps depicting where these constituencies were located and photographs of most candidates, these pullouts are geared towards getting the voter excited about the forthcoming elections. A variation of the pullout was again reproduced on the eve of polling day as an invitation to the reader to get involved in the election by filling in the names of the winning candidates, their winning margins, etc., as one would, presumably, if one was at the race course. News items from the EC explaining to the people how they could check the electoral rolls to confirm their eligibility and where they had to go to vote was also provided. To get the people out on polling day, the media chipped in with human interest stories about ordinary Malaysians going to the polls to reinforce the ‘Vote Early’ reminder from the EC. However, there was hardly any discussion of serious issues throughout the campaign period. Indeed, The Star’s deputy chief group editor claimed that there were ‘no important issues’ worth discussing (20 March 2004). The mainstream media began to lobby unabashedly for the BN; on 14 (Nomination Day) and 15 March, and again on 20 and 21 March, the eve of polling, the mainstream carried several pages of advertisements supporting the BN. Wong Kok Keong, a communications specialist who monitored the media concluded that The Star and the New Straits Times carried an overwhelmingly large amount of ‘news, opinions, letters to the editor and pictures’ which were either pro-BN or focused on the BN. This was even more true of front-pages than the inside pages. About 98 percent of all items appearing in the ‘Metro’ and ‘Section Two’ parts of The Star were focused on or proMCA. ‘This MCA-owned paper’ Wong (2004: 14) surmised, ‘showed hardly any interest in journalistic integrity by turning those sections into what some called MCA newsletters’. Similarly, the ‘NST ran close to a whopping 75% of all opinion items focusing on or positive towards the BN . . . The pattern is also largely true of the letters published. Of the 17 letters about the BN, only one was negative towards it.’ The same unabashed support for BN was also true of TV. About 73 percent of all items in its news bulletins were focused on or pro-BN. More tellingly, ‘Abdullah Badawi appeared in 17 (about 71%) of the top 3 items and 23 (about 37%) of all items in the news bulletins during the campaign period.’ Wong’s (2004) survey further showed that the TV3 ‘was even more zealous than TV1 in promoting the

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BN. Close to 64% of all items and 67% of the first three items were focused on or pro-BN.’ There were occasions for some academics to comment. Some views critical of the BN were reported although the vast majority of views carried were pro-BN. A group of academics were invited to help design and conduct an opinion survey funded by The Star. The findings were reported in the daily. Otherwise, academics and students from the public universities, as well as government servants, were reminded by the Chief Secretary, that they were not allowed to get involved in partisan politics or to campaign for any candidate; an announcement which all civil servants received while at work, and which was reported widely in the media. Significantly, much of the pro-BN propaganda pertained to developmentalism. Most of the political advertisements highlighted the development achievements of the BN. One particular advertisement stretched over five pages recalled one after another the major projects the BN had delivered since 1957. On the eve of polling day, some of the stories were: ‘Business community hopes for big BN win’, including interviews with businessmen and accompanied by a graph of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange’s Consumer Index rising during the past three months under Abdullah’s leadership (New Straits Times, 20 March 2004). Another article ‘Abdullah mohon mandate rakyat bawa negara melangkah ke hadapan’ (‘Abdullah requests people’s mandate to take the nation forward’, Berita Minggu, 21 March) reminded one of the development brought by BN in the past decades. The Star’s (20 March 2004) Chief Group Editor, wrote on the front page: ‘To meet global competition and to ensure continued power sharing and balanced development so that no group will feel neglected or alienated . . . Pak Lah is the right man to lead Malaysia at this juncture of our history.’ Implicitly and explicitly, supporting the opposition would undermine all this development. The Information Ministry’s media advisor, Zainuddin Maidin, admitted that [T]he big victory that the BN expects is due partly to the commitment of the mainstream print and electronic media to fight the unethical media [meaning the restricted opposition publications and electronic media] . . . if the unbridled and unethical media was not opposed, the people would end up supporting leaders without credibility and outdated ulama who did not have the integrity to lead the nation. However, he dismissed allegations that the government had used its power to direct the mainstream media to attack the opposition, claiming that ‘it was the editors who had realized the danger’; thus, the mainstream media unabashedly rallied behind the BN. However, through its highlighting of the keen contests in the large Malay majority and the Chinese majority seats and the importance of one’s vote, the mainstream media was also instrumental

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 125 in persuading that proportion of the electorate not identified with any particular party to engage with the election via coming out to vote.

The BN’s election machinery is awesome In addition to the unadulterated support from the mainstream media, after five decades of uninterrupted power to govern, the BN has developed an awesome election machine that works for its candidates. The electoral campaign of a BN candidate (Mr Barisan) for a semi-urban state seat in Penang is illustrative. For reasons that will become clear, Mr Barisan has to remain anonymous. ‘The BN’s election machinery is awesome’, Mr Barisan declared. The apparent non-political activities – what I have termed developmentalism – that the BN politicians engage in between elections, in fact, become an important basis of the election machine. As soon as Mr Barisan could confirm that he was going to defend his seat, he contacted his party supporters and the leaders of the other component BN parties in his constituency to request their support. He then contacted the leaders of the semi-official Residents Associations, the Neighborhood Patrols tasked with helping to maintain public security in a particular locale (Rukun Tetangga), the Community Development Centre, which runs kindergartens for the young and cooking and sewing classes for the women folk (KEMAS), the Village Development and Security Committees (JKKK), the Boards of Governors of schools, Parents-Teachers Associations and non-government voluntary bodies like the Temple Committees, Cemetery Committees and the Phor Tor Committees, which organize local celebrations during the Hungry Ghost Festivals in Chinese religion, and even the volunteer fire fighting squad, reminding its members of how he had helped them in the past, and hoped that they would now come forward to help him in the election. It was payback time! Most of the leaders of these organizations in his constituency responded positively to Mr Barisan’s request. Some even joined his entourage in the march to the nomination centre to file his candidacy papers. These local leaders were leaned on to help Mr Barisan in his campaign. Mr Barisan’s goal was to reach every single household in his constituency. There would be walkabouts and ceramahs. A normal day started at 8.00 a.m. and finished at midnight with lunch and dinner breaks and perhaps a quick nap. The early mornings were spent visiting the wet markets after which he would conduct walkabouts in a targeted neighborhood. After lunch, he would do the same in another neighborhood. After dinner and a short rest, he would conduct ceramahs, especially in the rural areas. When visiting a particular market, Mr Barisan would call on the local leaders to join him. Since they were likely to know the vendors and the shoppers by name, their presence afforded a personal touch to his campaign efforts. As he circulated around grabbing hands, the leaders or his aides would do the introductions. They might also remind the market crowd of some new lighting that he had installed, or some drains that he had repaired

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– financed by the Constituency Development Fund that he had been allocated – in his case, about RM140,000 per year. (BN member of parliament who caters to a wider area is allocated RM400,000.) The same aide would also be taking notes of complaints that needed to be attended to, which Mr Barisan promised to put right after his re-election. Pamphlets would also be distributed. Many of these are reproductions of newspaper cuttings reporting the presence of Mr Barisan on the occasion of a fire or flood disaster, his officiating the opening ceremony of some development project that he had financed with his CDF, or some press statement that put him in good light. The usual BN manifesto in various languages was also made available. Likewise, Mr Barisan called on leaders who were familiar to the residents to accompany him in the neighborhood walkabouts. In rural Malay areas where the houses are scattered, the KEMAS women leaders might organize a cooking class for the neighborhood women in someone’s house during the afternoon, and schedule Mr Barisan to show up to say a few words in the middle of the class. If a funeral wake, or even a wedding, is taking place somewhere in the constituency, these leaders would also wrangle him an invitation. And if there should be a pasar malam (night market), an hour or two would be spent there as well. Usually, evenings are reserved for ceramahs and would involve other BN candidates contesting in contiguous or nearby constituencies. Often, some national BN leader would be invited to join the local candidates on stage. In the absence of these politicians, the local leaders might also share the stage with the candidates. A point of clarification: unlike for the opposition, BN ceramahs are not the main means of reaching to the voters. In rural Malay areas, especially if conducted jointly with other candidates, there might be an audience of 50 or more. In most Chinese areas, however, the turnout is poor. On one occasion, Mr Barisan spoke to only about 20 people. The only time when there is a large turnout is when the ceramah includes a karaoke session. Mr Barisan did not conduct such a session but knows of many BN candidates, especially those contesting in more urban areas, who did so. On such occasions, a song-and-dance troupe is employed to kick off the evening. A better-known guest singer might also be invited. This is a sure-fire way to draw in the youths who are then introduced to the BN candidate and obliged to listen to him/her between tunes by the troupe. There is perhaps an understanding that BN candidates, including Mr Barisan, have little substantive matter to communicate. And if it is about developmentalism, it is best conveyed with a personal presence, with local leaders present, and an aide recording complaints in a notebook. It was obvious that Mr Barisan’s campaign was well endowed. It operated out of his service center. An office where a large map of the constituency is displayed with personnel, tasks and problems identified is campaign nerve center. The rest of the building is open to the public. During the day, it is relatively quiet but at night people do pop in to check whether they are still on the rolls, and where they are supposed to cast their votes on polling day.

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 127 They may also pick up useful information on the candidate and the BN, if they care to do so. Several full-time aides doubled up as his campaign agents. There were always party supporters dressed in party T-shirts and caps accompanying Mr Barisan during his hustings. Plastic posters bearing his portrait as well as those of the prime minister and the Penang chief minister, long lines of plastic BN buntings, BN cloth flags erected on tall poles and billboards were evident throughout the constituency. Apart from the pamphlets, he also distributed a handsome-looking multi-colored booklet, the Penang Report Card, highlighting the development achievements of the BN state government, available in Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English. How did Mr Barisan finance his campaign? ‘My party is really rather rich, and we have a special election fund.’ ‘An election war chest?’ Yes, his deposit to contest the election, his posters, buntings, flags and the Report Card were all provided by party headquarters. The party also gave him an additional sum of money for campaign use. All that was not enough and he had to raise additional money by himself. ‘But that wasn’t a problem.’ The leaders of the school boards and temple committees and donated money to his campaign, and arranged for others to do the same. In fact, it was an opportunity for shopkeepers, vendors, small businessmen and contractors to link up to Mr Barisan, via these local leaders, with a donation. He did not need to pay a single cent to the leaders of the semi-government organizations, nor his party members and supporters. They were quite pleased to receive their free Blue T-shirts, caps and badges, which they proudly donned, and to be part of Mr Barisan’s entourage. There was a sense of pride and self-importance in engaging in the election in this public manner. However, he did have to pay for the help rendered by supporters of the other BN coalition parties. A lump sum was for ‘expenses’ – transport, food, drinks and a small allowance – and facilitated good will among the BN parties. Further, he confided that, like all other candidates, he had to spend a tidy sum of money to put up his posters and buntings. The sum of RM5000 was paid to a leader of the Phor Tor committee. This money, apparently, went to the local secret society members who busied themselves putting up election paraphernalia throughout the constituency every night. Part of the package was a guarantee that these BN posters and buntings would not be ripped down by others. It was rumored that the same secret society members were responsible for ripping down opposition posters which were erected ‘in their territory without their consent’; the opposition had not paid the necessary ‘protection money’. Indeed, amidst all the formal electioneering, groups of Malaysians were using the occasion to conduct quite illegal extra-electoral activities. Another such group was the illegal bookies. Normally taking illegal bets on the horse races, 4-digit lottery and football games, the bookies now welcomed bets on the electoral results as well. Well known to the local community, one of these bookies was a millionaire who lived in one of the finest houses in his village and constantly changed his cars to the newest models. Another, less

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discreet, would hang around the local coffee shop and would invite others to sip a cup of tea with him. It was heartening to Mr Barisan when he learnt through the grapevine that the bookies were predicting that he would win by more than a 2,000 majority, and the odds were whether he would win more or less than that. In the event, Mr Barisan won more handsomely. For Mr Barisan, the day ended with a meeting in the BN headquarters for the federal constituency. Together with other BN candidates and their aides, they discussed prospects and solutions to problems. At one session, he remarked to his colleagues that he was puzzled why the opposition candidate had hardly been campaigning. There were hardly any posters put up by the opposition either. Perhaps the answer was on account of both the lack of any election machine and a shortage of funds. At any rate, Mr Barisan communicated to the others about the bookies’ even odds, i.e. that he would win by some 2,000 votes, whereupon the others congratulated him. It seems that all present had high regard for the bookies’ assessment of how Mr Barisan’s electoral campaign was going.5

NGOs: promoting participatory democracy during the election Although the electoral process is dominated by the BN as evidenced in the laws that frame the elections, the blatant bias of the mainstream media, and the awesome electoral machine of Mr Barisan, nonetheless, the election remains an opportunity for the Opposition, the NGOs and other critics to egg on a participatory politics. This is possible because many of the usual curbs and restrictions on extra-electoral politics are held in abeyance for the duration of the short campaign period. In the following section, I discuss how some of the NGOs engaged with the election.6 Months ahead of the election, the Penang-based human rights reform movement called Aliran began to carry articles on election-related matters in its Aliran Monthly (AM) wherein, issues which they considered important were highlighted and debated. Cover stories like: ‘Is any Opposition better than No Opposition?’ (vol. 22, no. 9) deliberated on the wisdom of voting for the opposition which was led by PAS, which had publicly called the establishment of an Islamic state. In the following issue, another lead writer commented that ‘An Opposition, or rather Oppositions, exist and have existed . . . Even if they were to disappear, other Oppositions would spring up, for the simple reason that the well-springs of discontent and disenchantment are not about to disappear.’ The author called Malaysians to ‘look beyond UMNO and PAS’ and then asked rhetorically: ‘Do we use the elections as an opportunity, or do we allow ourselves to be used opportunistically?’ (vol. 22, no. 10). Interviews with prominent personalities and activists were featured too. One was with Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the president of Parti Keadilan (vol. 22, no. 10). Another was with an NGO activist who emphasized that ‘the opposition lacks vision and must rise above petty

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 129 politicking’. Yet another interview with two leaders of Jamaah Islah Malaysia, an Islamic NGO, called upon the opposition parties to ‘get back to the negotiating table’ and to focus on larger issues. Subsequent AM issues featured articles which discussed the amendments to the Elections Act and the Election Offences Act. One writer claimed ‘blatantly favoured the incumbent yet was hastily passed in parliament’ (vol. 22, no. 3); another analysed the proposed addition of new constituencies and the re-delineation of existing ones (vol. 22, no. 8); yet another reminded Malaysians of the distinction between non-electoral and electoral politics, and that although the electoral process was dominated by the BN, there was still much scope to promote democracy via the NGOs and other non-formal channels (vol. 22, no. 11). A special issue with the cover, ‘DeMahathirising Malaysia’ contained articles by prominent academics, unionists, human rights lawyers and other NGO activists, discussing various aspects of Mahathir’s 22-year-long legacy. Among the questions considered was whether his departure would lead to a more liberal political environment and a warmer and more caring BN/UMNO government (vol. 23, no. 8). The cover, which depicted the new prime minister Abdullah Badawi in the foreground and Mahathir waving goodbye in the background, posed the question, ‘Next Change or Rerun?’ (vol. 23, no. 9). Shortly after Abdullah announced the dissolution of parliament, Aliran quickly prepared a special issue of the AM. It called upon Malaysians to ‘Vote for Democracy’, by which it meant voting ‘for a strong opposition to act as a check on the executive’, ‘for all candidates regardless of party affiliation who support deepening democracy’; ‘for those who promote multiethnic dialogue and cooperation’; and ‘for more democratic and equitable distribution of the country’s wealth to all regardless of ethnic background’. The lead story, ‘Vote for Democracy’ was also translated into Malay and Chinese and all versions were transmitted electronically to their NGO contacts and other ‘sympathetic Malaysians’ who, in turn, passed on this ‘manifesto’. It was also uploaded onto the Aliran website (www.aliran.com) as well as those of other NGOs. There was also the instruction to readers to ‘Print this article and distribute it to your family members and friends’. Aliran also participated in a public forum with the two other NGOs, the Women’s Centre for Change and the Penang Office for Human Development when major issues related to the 2004 election were raised by the speakers. Included in this special were the articles: ‘A Thinking Voter’s Checklist’ ostensibly to aid voters make up their minds; ‘What is a Caretaker Government?’ which highlighted that the government ought not initiate new programs and launch new projects during this period; a list of ‘Election Offences’; a call to the EC to ensure that the election is held freely and fairly; etc. This issue was rushed to the usual newsagents and members and supporters who sold it in electionrelated meetings and ceramahs during the 8-day campaign period. Finally, a new undertaking, the Malaysian Election Media Monitors, was also launched by Aliran in 2004. The initiative was in response to the blatant

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manipulation of the media by the BN during the hotly contested 1999 elections. Volunteers from various parts of the country were recruited and assigned the task of monitoring the mainstream media in all languages. Their observations were posted in the Aliran website. It was hoped that these postings – the first of which, ‘The Media Circus Comes to Town’, that elaborated on the usual machinations of the media – would help the public to interpret mainstream media reports more critically, and prepare them for the usual media ‘surprise’, on the eve of polling day.7 There were many other initiatives by other civil society organizations. Pusat Komunikasi Masyarakat (Komas or the Centre for Community Communication) prepared a VCD ‘Kuasa Undi di Tangan Anda’ (Make your vote count) which was distributed free at many ceramahs in the major towns, informing voters of their rights and encouraged them to come out to vote. It elaborated on the meaning of ‘free and fair elections’, what constituted electoral offences and the importance of an opposition. It also ran ‘Elections and You’ workshops prior to the dissolution of parliament. Women’s organizations launched the Women Monitoring Election Candidates campaign. Its goal was to promote the ‘Women’s Agenda for Change’ (WAC) among all candidates, to highlight the issues of violence against women, especially rape – several recent cases of which had resulted in deaths of the victims – and to convince all candidates, regardless of party or gender, to prioritize the improvement of public security, better policing and respect for women’s rights.8 Another group, Malaysians for Free and Fair Elections (Mafrel), comprising 30 NGOs including the human rights group Suaram and the news-site Malaysiakini, kept a lookout for corrupt and improper practices (www.mafrel.org). Finally, a Penang-based group, Malaysian Voters Union (www.malvu.org), launched an initiative to keep candidates on their toes. They polled selected candidates in Penang on several issues. Among other things, candidates were asked to state their stand on the controversial Penang Outer Ring Road project which would result in the relocation of many people, apart from increasing traffic in particular areas. It should be clear that non-political party-based Malaysians like the NGOs were engaging in the election with the vision of promoting a participatory democracy beyond the 2004 election and electoralism. It is also clear that there are counter-points to the BN’s dominant discourse of developmentalism suggesting that the hegemony of the BN is not so comprehensive after all. Perhaps this is why the ISA and coercive laws, temporarily held in abeyance, are there in the first instance, as the next section will show.

Sungai Siput: the convergence of electoralism and participatory democracy The contest in 2004 was the second time that the BN constituency party, Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) President Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu (Samy Vellu), and Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) stalwart Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 131 (Dr Kumar) faced off against one another. In the 1999 general election, Dr Kumar, then a first-timer, had performed well, reducing Samy Vellu’s majority of 15,610 votes in 1995 to only 5,259 (Devaraj 2003). Since then, Dr Kumar had continued to operate a service center in Sungai Siput and had organized numerous activities to help the workers and farmers in the constituency. There was even an Orang Asli Outreach program to attend to the needs of the indigenous communities in the outlying areas of the constituency (Devaraj 2002). It was therefore with some confidence that Dr Kumar’s team approached the 2004 election, although unlike in 1999, this would be a three-way contest involving not only Samy Vellu yet again, but another Indian representing the DAP.9 Nomination day was particularly anticipated. Supporters began gathering at his headquarters as morning broke, dressed in the red PSM T-shirts with the logo of a clenched fist. However, the flags and banners that they unfurled were mostly in blue, the color of Parti Keadilan under whose banner Dr Kumar was contesting. In red and in blue, the supporters lined up in procession, with Dr Kumar at the front, they marched and chanted on the road to the nomination center located in the district office some 30 minutes walk away. They were waved on by the people in the streets who also clapped and cheered him on. Passing cars honked in support. There was a festive atmosphere to the occasion. Under normal circumstances, any public gathering involving more than five individuals requires a police permit. A street march requires further permission and is often only allowed for religious occasions, funerals, almost never for political purposes. Should political processions or demonstrations be conducted without police permit, the ‘crowd’ is ordered to disperse within a stipulated period of time, usually 10 minutes. Should there be a delay, or if the crowd refuses to disperse, the police move in. Those deemed resisting are immediately arrested. In the event of large gatherings, tear gas may be fired and water cannons turned on. On this occasion in Sungai Siput, as elsewhere in Malaysia, one could actually take to the streets, create quite a din along the way to the nomination center, without interference by law enforcement officers. It was election time and the rules had been relaxed. A second campaign activity was the production and distribution of electoral materials announcing the candidate, party and symbol, and the parliamentary or state seat for which he was contesting. Apart from carrying in fine print the name of the printer as required under the Election Act, Dr Kumar’s supporters were free to put up posters, banners and flags – in Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil – all over the constituency, something normally requiring a permit issued by the local authority. These materials were sorted out for distribution in different locales, depending on the concentration of particular ethnic groups in the area. Preparing his posters was particularly tedious work. Unlike for the BN who resorted to printing Samy Vellu’s posters in plastic, Dr Kumar’s posters were prepared in paper, reflecting relative campaign funding. Dr Kumar’s posters, as well as that of

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his PSM co-candidate who was contesting for one of the state seats within the Sungai Siput parliamentary constituency, had to be placed back-toback, slipped into an empty plastic cover and stapled together, before being attached to a long raffia string that would be stretched across the streets. Otherwise, the posters would not be able to last the entire campaign period in the tropical weather. Thanks to his ability to mobilize a large group of election workers, the tedious work, supervised by a handful of elderly Indian women from the estates, provided the opportunity for the young and old, male and female, working-class and middle-class, and of all ethnic backgrounds to engage in a seemingly mindless task together, a most leveling experience. Indeed, anyone who did drop by Dr Kumar’s election HQ to help must have spent some time preparing his posters. Putting up his posters was a more specialized task conducted by youths at night after they showed up at the HQ after their day’s work. There were also materials to distribute. Like Mr Barisan’s, Dr Kumar’s pamphlets also referred to the various services he had provided to the voters of Sungai Siput, and elsewhere. However, they were no reproductions of newspaper cuttings since, unlike for Mr Barisan, the mainstream media had hardly ever reported on his activities. They came, instead, from the pages of the PSM’s newsletter which had carried reports of his efforts on behalf of urban pioneers and estate workers threatened by eviction, Orang Asli communities which had been provided with free medical services. Moreover, not all the materials distributed or in some cases sold, were related to the elections. They included a booklet on the plight of Indian estate workers in Malaysia; old issues of NGOs publications pertaining to human rights, gender equality and alternative development; a handout on the struggle of university students, and a booklet, Pengundi Hantu (Phantom Voters), launched during the campaign period, which documented the presence of phantom voters on the Sungai Siput electoral rolls in the 1999 election, which the PSM alleged, had been organized by the MIC. It was an opportunity to educate those who came to attend Dr Kumar’s ceramahs, or who dropped by to help. The range of people who rallied behind Dr Kumar’s campaign included his family and close friends, PSM members and supporters, people from the neighborhood whose struggles he had supported over the years, and a surprising number of NGO activists from all parts of the country. Why did these people drop by? Did they think that their efforts would help Dr Kumar to win? A young lawyer from Penang who had been active in the Human Rights Committee of the Bar Council said that she had been a student in the University of Malaya when Dr Kumar was also a student and they had kept in touch after graduation. She came to give him some money that she had raised from friends and also to lend a helping hand. She was in Sungai Siput on nomination day and had driven her Volvo which was decked in blue and red flags, behind the people in procession. She drove Dr Kumar and others back to the HQ after they had filed their papers. She did not expect him to win but he was ‘my kind of candidate’; she wanted to help his campaign but

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 133 also to register her support for his wider struggle. She felt good that she had engaged in the election in this manner. Her friend, a banker, also from Penang, had also been part of the procession. Marching was up-lifting; as a banker, he rarely walked the streets now, at least not since his student days. On a weekend overnight visit, he drove a four-wheel drive into hilly terrain to campaign among the Orang Asli. He had studied anthropology and upon graduation had worked in an NGO concerned with the plight of the indigenous people. Apart from these activities, both the lawyer and the banker spent some time helping to prepare posters and chatting with the others who were doing the same. There were yet other NGO visitors who took time off work to come to Sungai Siput. If around during the mornings some would join Dr Kumar in his visits to the wet markets and surrounding areas. If it were late afternoon, they might join the walkabouts in residential areas, the plantations, agricultural schemes and Chinese new villages. A few days before polling, a couple of these NGO-types persuaded Dr Kumar to distribute balloons printed with messages like ‘Undilah Dr Kumar’ (Vote for Dr Kumar) and ‘Keadilan untuk Semua’ (Justice for All), during walkabout. Cheap and affordable, the balloons were the poor PSM’s response to Samy Vellu’s free distribution of BN badges, T-shirts and caps, and stage shows. Predictably, children dragged their mothers to shake Dr Kumar’s hand and to receive a balloon. The balloons no doubt added color and gaiety to Dr Kumar’s campaign. Such use of balloons as electoral paraphernalia was probably a first in Malaysian electoral history. Another exciting episode occurred when an entourage of about ten cars drove some 15 km from the PSM HQ to the pasar malam at a Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) agricultural scheme in Lasah. About 2 km from destination, the ten cars were met by a motorcade of cars and motorbikes from the FELDA scheme, supporters of the opposition PAS. For many in Dr Kumar’s entourage, principally made up of non-Malays, it was the first time that they had stepped into a FELDA scheme and it was an exhilarating experience to be welcomed in this manner. After distributing pamphlets in the market, there was a walkabout in the settlement. Dr Kumar gave a speech in front of the village chief’s house after which he attended to a medical emergency a few doors down the lane. When the entourage returned to HQ, they related their experience enthusiastically to others who had missed the trip. Dinner was usually prepared for all helpers to partake of, but most of these out of town visitors had their meals in the surrounding coffee shops. A few reported that they had been given discounts by the food sellers, who must have felt that in doing so they were also, indirectly, contributing to Dr Kumar’s campaign; one food seller recounted that the good doctor had previously helped a family member to solve a problem. After a quick dinner, it was time for ceramah. Several, in different places, were usually held each night. Dr Kumar had to rush from one to another within the relatively large constituency. There was, therefore, a need for other speakers whose task it

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was to hold the attention of those present until such time that he arrived. NGO friends who were articulate stepped in. The usual fare was to talk about national issues – human rights abuses, the treatment of the incarcerated Anwar Ibrahim, financial scandals involving BN leaders, or, about Dr Kumar, the people’s candidate. Initially, several ceramahs were held at Dr Kumar’s HQ. However, this stopped because they proved futile, even aggravating. This was because Samy Vellu had rented a building in the next block, in front of which he had erected a stage to hold shows. A concert was held on the evening of 17 March featuring the Kuala Lumpur-based veteran singer, DJ Dave, as well as a team of performers who reportedly regularly appeared on television. Dr Kumar had begun his ceramah earlier. Once the concert began, and DJ Dave started belting out Hindustani and Malay hit songs, Dr Kumar was completely drowned out and his audience began to move next door as well, which was probably the original intention. Subsequently, he decided to move the ceramah elsewhere in the constituency. Many who came to support Dr Kumar did not expect him to win. After all, he was pitted against the president of the Malaysian Indian Congress who had access to significant funds and a large pool of party members. The Hindu Sangham also gave him open support, as did numerous other Indian associations and Tamil dailies. As the long-standing Minister of Public Works, Samy Vellu had also made sure that Sungai Siput received more than its fair share of development allocations. Notably, he had built a flyover that crossed the railway line just outside town, which linked up to a four-lane highway leading into Ipoh, reducing traveling time between the two towns. There was a new multi-purpose hall for indoor recreational activities, concerts, as well as rentals for marriages. Samy Vellu highlighted these and other physical improvements and promised even more development projects during his campaign. Those who came to support Dr Kumar took home with them fond memories of that colorful and noisy march into Sungai Siput town, that motorcade welcome into the FELDA scheme, the visit to the Orang Asli settlement, the look on the child’s face when he received a balloon which read ‘Keadilan untuk Semua’, or perhaps the sense of camaraderie one experienced in the company of elderly Indian women from the estates as one helped prepare those election posters, including the drowning out of Dr Kumar’s ceramah by Hindustani and Malay pop music. These memories registered their efforts to help a candidate that they identified with, and their little endeavor to egg on a more participatory democracy.

Conclusion Coercive laws and other restrictions and the BN’s greater access to media, money and machinery have made elections in Malaysia predictable affairs. The BN always wins and did so for the eleventh time in 2004. Despite the predictability, Malaysians remain rather excited about elections and turn-

The 2004 general election in Malaysia 135 out rates rank among the highest anywhere in the world, as different groups and organizations engage excitedly in these elections in different ways, and for different reasons. First, the mainstream media perform a dual role. While the media unabashedly rally behind the BN ruling coalition, the electoral hype it generates does encourage many Malaysians, particularly those who do not identify with any party and who are normally imbued with tidakapathy, to come out to vote, perhaps out of a sense of duty, perhaps because of developmentalism, but also perhaps they do make a difference in the rural large Malay majority seats, and in the urban Chinese majority seats. Second is the BN’s awesome election machine. Mr Barisan incorporated the local leaders of many semi-government organizations and voluntary bodies into his campaign as go-betweens who lent a personal touch to his campaign and to raise funds locally from people of relatively ordinary means. Members of the secret societies, too, were drawn into the elections when they were contracted to put up posters and buntings and to guarantee that these were not be pulled down. The illegal gamblers no doubt welcomed the election too, for it provided another opportunity to bet, regardless of who won the election. Their concern was whether they could assess the on-going contest accurately, and therein, make money at the end of the day. In the event, their assessments proved rather accurate, even appreciated by the politicians. The NGOs, who by definition are cause-oriented and eschew electoral politics, also engaged in the election enthusiastically, using the opportunity, when some of the usual restrictions were relaxed and the people generally more attentive to political matters, to promote participatory democracy. For example, Aliran, contrary to the mainstream media, tried to raise important issues about the nature of Malaysia’s democracy, the lasting legacy of Mahathirism, the limits of electoralism and the role of NGOs in promoting democracy via its Aliran Monthly. Their impact upon the electoral outcome was probably limited but whether they had connected with the people and raising their consciousness is difficult to assess. Finally, in Sungai Siput, we had a glimpse of how electoralism and the struggle for participatory democracy converged in Dr Kumar’s campaign. A wide circle of people rallied behind the doctor for various reasons, including NGO activists who brought to the campaign some special skills and creative ideas. The activists observed first-hand how the rich and powerful BN conducted its campaign including its bullying tactics. They also took with them pleasant memories of engaging with ordinary people and other like-minded activists from elsewhere in the country who were equally attracted to a wider sense of participatory democracy. Indeed, the campaign could only have been that memorable, in spite of Dr Kumar’s defeat, because of his engagement with hard-nosed politics in between elections. No doubt, the struggles of DR Kumar and the NGOs during the 2004 election and in between elections, suggest that there exist counterpoints to, and contestations of the BN’s discourse of electoralism and developmentalism at the ideological level.

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The BN government’s control of the mainstream media and the usual strict enforcement of the coercive laws constrain attempts to link and build upon instances of contestations, resulting in their manifestation as isolated cases. Ironically, engaging in the electoral process, when ‘the whole world is watching’ and some of these constraints are loosened, allows Malaysians, like those who participated in Dr Kumar’s campaign, more room to maneuver. The opportunity allows them to link up and to develop a greater sense of camaraderie with like-minded Malaysians engaged in that common struggle for an extra-electoral participatory democracy. However, until there develops more sites of struggle like Sungai Siput that confront the awesome might of the BN election machine, and there develop more counterpoints in various forms and in new sites, including in the mainstream media, it appears that electoralism and developmentalism will prevail, namely, the case of Mr Barisan’s successful campaign. Moreover, by using the electoral process to promote an extra-electoral democracy, and in the process generating greater anxiety about the electoral outcome, these advocates of participatory democracy legitimize electoralism, and the BN’s predictable victory. Herein is the paradox. Electoralism is Janus-faced as Anderson (1996: 13) has highlighted. It restricts participation while it allows new groups to enter politics. That said, conjunctures of political and economic crises could give a fillip to these counter-hegemonic and protest efforts, as witnessed in recent developments in neighboring countries.

Notes 1 The Malaysian component was part of a wider survey of the practice of democracy in eight Asian countries led by Professor Takashi Inoguchi and funded by the University of Tokyo. The survey was conducted in 2000 but the data was only made available for analysis in 2002. In each country almost 1,000 respondents were surveyed. The discussion below is drawn from my analysis of the Malaysian data in Loh (2004b). 2 The economic growth which has occurred in Malaysia over the past few decades has been well documented and I shall not elaborate on that in this chapter. See Loh (2000), for example. 3 The NEP, 1971–90, was an affirmative action policy that was launched to improve the economic well-being of the bumiputera (Malays and other indigenous peoples). Its first prong was to eliminate poverty while its second prong was to promote bumiputera involvement in the professions and corporate sector of the economy. Due to sustained economic growth over the 20-year period, the NEP succeeded in promoting bumiputera interests to a large extent. 4 There are two types of multi-ethnic seats – the mixed constituencies wherein no ethnic group constitutes a majority of voters and the small Malay majority constituencies wherein Malays account for 50 to 66.6 percent of enrolled voters. For elaboration on the different types of constituencies, see Loh (2003). For details on the electoral results, see Loh (2004a). 5 Elsewhere, an opposition party candidate who only discovered very late that she was going to contest for a parliamentary seat, and not the one she had previously hoped to contest, likewise, was unable to put up any posters until three days before polling. Her order for posters were only made the day before nomination

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6

7 8

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day and she could only afford to order a limited supply since she was responsible for paying for every piece ordered. Meanwhile, she put up old flags and old posters that were retrieved from the previous election. In comparison to her BN opponent, her effort was pathetic. Elsewhere I have discussed how rapid economic growth spawned the emergence of the middle classes, and how a fraction of that middle class began to establish NGOs. For my argument and the debate about the politics of the middle-class NGOs, see Loh (2000), Abdul Rahman Embong (2002) and Saravanamuttu (2001), among others. A summary of their efforts detailing their evaluation of news coverage by the mainstream media is available. See Netto and Mustafa (2004). In 1999, a position document (WAC) was formulated by 34 women’s groups and subsequently endorsed by 76 organizations. This effort brought together women from human rights, consumer, environmental, welfare and religious-based groups, with different ethnic backgrounds. Dr Kumar could not contest under the auspices of his own party, the Parti Sosialis Malaysia, which had applied to be a political party in 1998, as required by the Societies Act, but remained unregistered at the time of election. In 1999, with the forging of the Barisan Alternatif (BA, Alternative Front) opposition coalition, it was agreed by the different opposition parties that Dr Kumar would contest as the BA candidate under the banner of the Democratic Action Party (DAP) in a one-on-one contest against Samy Vellu. By 2004, however, the DAP had pulled out of the BA coalition due to differences with PAS.

References Abdul Rahman Embong (2002) State-led Modernisation and the New Middle Class in Malaysia. London: Palgrave. Anderson, Benedict (1996) ‘Elections and Participation in Three Southeast Asian Countries’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12–33. Case, P. (1993) ‘Semi-democracy in Malaysia: Withstanding the Pressures for Regime Change’, Pacific Affairs 66(2): 183–205. Crouch, J. (1996) Government and Society in Malaysia. St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin. Devaraj, Jeyakumar (2002) Speaking Truth to Power: A Socialist Critique of Development in Malaysia. Ipoh: Alaigal. Devaraj, Jeyakumar (2003) ‘Lessons from Sungai Siput’, in F.K.W. Loh and J. Saravanamuttu (eds) New Politics in Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 196–209. Jesudason, James (1989) Ethnicity and the Economy: The State, Chinese Business and Multinationals in Malaysia. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Jesudason, James (1995) ‘Statist Democracy and the Limits to Civil Society in Malaysia’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 33(3): 335–356. Lim Hong Hai (2003) ‘The Delineation of Peninsular Electoral Constituencies: Amplifying Malay and UMNO Power’, in F.K.W. Loh and J. Saravanamuttu (eds) New Politics in Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 25–52. Loh, F.K.W. (1996) ‘ASEAN NGOs in the Post-Cold War World’, in Jayant Lele and Wisdom Tettey (eds) Asia – Who Pays for Growth? Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Co., pp. 41–61.

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Loh, F.K.W. (2000) ‘State-Societal Relations in a Rapidly Growing Economy: The Case of Malaysia, 1970–97’, in R.B. Kleinberg and J. Clark (eds) Economic Liberalisation, Democratisation and Civil Society in the Developing World. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 65–87. Loh, F.K.W. (2001) ‘Where Has (Ethnic) Politics Gone?: The Case of the BN NonMalay Politicians and Political Parties’, in R. Hefner (ed.) The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 183–203. Loh, F.K.W. (2003) ‘Towards a New Politics of Fragmentation and Contestation’, In F.K.W. Loh and J. Saravanamuttu (eds) New Politics in Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 253–282. Loh, F.K.W. (2004a) ‘The March 2004 General Election in Malaysia: Understanding the BN’s Victory and the Significance of Electoral Politics’, paper presented at the Philippines Political Science Association International Conference, Manila, 22–23 October. Loh, F.K.W. (2004b) ‘ “Government Knows Best”: The New Political Culture of Developmentalism’, paper presented at the Fourth International Malaysian Studies Conference, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 3–5 August. Mustafa K. Anuar (2002) ‘Defining Democratic Discourses: The Mainstream Press’, in F.K.W. Loh and Khoo Boo Teik (eds) Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices. Richmond: Curzon, pp. 138–164. Mustafa K. Anuar (2004) ‘The Media Circus Comes to Town’, Aliran Monthly 24(2): 19–21. Netto, Anil and Mustafa K. Anuar (2004) ‘News Coverage of Malaysia’s 11th General Election: The Election Media Monitors’ Experience’, paper presented at the Fourth International Malaysian Studies Conference, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 3–5 August. Rais Yatim (1995) Freedom under Executive Power in Malaysia: A Study of Executive Supremacy. Kuala Lumpur: Endowment. Saravanamuttu, J. (2001) ‘Is There a Politics of the Malaysian Middle Class?’ in Abdul Rahman Embong (ed.) Southeast Asian Middle Classes. Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, pp. 103–118. Wong Kok Keong (2004) ‘Propagandists for the BN’, Parts 1 and 2, Aliran Monthly 24(5): 14–17 and 24(6): 13–17. Taylor, R.H. (1996) ‘Introduction: Elections and Politics in Southeast Asia’, in R.H. Taylor (ed.) The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–11. Zaharom Nain (2002) ‘The Structure of the Media Industry: Implications for Democracy’, in F.K.W. Loh and Khoo Boo Teik (eds) Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practises, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 111–137.

Newspapers and magazines Aliran Monthly Berita Minggu New Straits Times Sinchew Daily The Star The Sun Utusan Malaysia

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Fun with democracy Election coverage and the elusive subject of Indian politics M. Madhava Prasad

Election studies are normally a sub-field of political science and sometimes of sociology. Elections are about political power, interest groups, parties and manifestoes. The results of any election can affect policy, causing significant shifts in the direction taken by the economy and society. What interest could Cultural Studies possibly have in such a recurring phenomenon of the political process? No sooner is the question posed than it becomes obvious that the general election as an instrument of reproduction of the modern political order is an event of great cultural significance. When the topic ‘Elections as Popular Culture’ was proposed for the conference, it immediately provoked in me the response: ‘But of course! It’s a cultural event!’ Especially for an Indian, the idea of the popular cultural dimension of the electoral process needs no justification. The most obvious evidence for such an approach to the study of elections in India is provided by the well-known phenomenon of film stars’ widespread induction into politics, that has been going on for several decades now.1 During Indira Gandhi’s years in power, the country witnessed mass mobilization of an unprecedented extent and depth, powered by a quasi-religious fervour (captured in M.F. Husain’s tribute to the prime minister in the form of a series of paintings depicting her as the goddess Durga, the fierce enemy of evil and protector of the good and, in songs that deified her and celebrated her power: Indira ke do haath nahin uske to karodo haath hain (Indira has not two but scores of hands)). While one can cite many such instances to make a case for an investigation into elections as popular culture, it is also true that both the instances cited above are exceptional events with historically specific determinations. Political commentators usually frown upon such developments, as they constitute a sort of contamination of the democratic process by non- or undemocratic elements like charisma, glamour, traditional authority. They would say that ‘culture’ is diluting politics and diverting it from its true purpose. And, that such cultural incursions could at best be attributed to the still immature, still evolving character of Indian democracy. But it seems to me that these phenomena also point us towards another kind of political analysis which requires us to attend in an entirely new way to the nature of the event, the structural properties of the polity, the relation

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between voter and ballot box, the political ideologies that prevail in a specific situation like that of India and which determine the role of the general election in the reproduction of political order. The question of the specificity of Indian political form needs to be raised, and this is possible only if we examine the electoral process within its context, instead of assuming that it is inherently and automatically an instrument of democracy, or for that matter, ‘democratization’. One of the real gains of the conference was the clear separation that emerged between democracy as a political goal and the election as an instrument for attaining it: the general election was repeatedly demonstrated to be a distinctive and recurring event of political reproduction which is capable of surviving in, and contributing to the survival of, all sorts of political regimes, not just ‘democracies’. The ‘cultural study’ of elections can in this context serve as a corrective to the idealist character of the currently dominant discourse of democracy. The study of political ideologies, and the Indian political-ideological form in particular, is a large project, to which this chapter tries to make a modest contribution. In this study, we will focus mainly on the elections held in 2004 in India: the general election combined with some state elections, followed a few months later by the state elections in Maharashtra. We will try to arrive at some preliminary distinctions and definitions that might help to develop a framework for the study of political ideologies. I will be focusing on three aspects of the question of popular culture in Indian elections: the problem of the subject of Indian politics, the evidence of popular selfexpression, and the media’s role in giving a popular cultural character to the election process. In the last section, I will return to the question of a redescription of the political process in India that could constitute the basis for a new investigation.

Is there a subject of Indian politics? Regardless of the nature of a political structure, the political process necessarily involves a popular dimension. It is not only in democracy that the people have a role to play, even monarchs need the assurance that the praja or the people are glad to be ruled by them. Democracy, however, is founded on the idea that the people are themselves sovereign, and they elect one among themselves to represent them at the assembly of representatives, which in turn elects one among them to be the leader. Variations in the mechanisms of representative government notwithstanding, the general election, where all subjects above a certain age (i.e., citizens) are eligible to vote, remains the sine qua non of modern enlightened governance. So much so that in the recent past we have witnessed, in Iraq, for instance, the more or less coercive imposition of ‘democracy’ upon a people whom the United States was determined to improve in accordance with its own principles, or lack thereof. The right to vote is thus as likely to be thrust upon us as it is hard won. Nevertheless, this fiction of popular sovereignty is, without doubt,

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different from previous political forms. The difference between the monarchic and democratic forms of power, as Claude Lefort (1988) has pointed out, is that in democracy, the seat of power is empty. It can be potentially occupied by anyone, since there will always be a gap between the seat of power itself and the one who, at any given time, happens to occupy it. In the general election, the people exercise their right to elect a representative and the right to seek to be a representative. Elections are a time for airing all kinds of opinions, plans, projections, hopes, fears, prejudices, grouses. During this time the polity is in an acute state of alertness and receptivity, as it is during calamities and other crises. The election is a sort of regularly recurring crisis – crisis as uncertainty, but also as opportunity – and those seeking to be elected employ all the resources at their command to ensure the maximum circulation of their manifestoes, symbols, evidence of past performance and accumulated goodwill, not to mention their faces. Public meetings, neighbourhood tours, rath yatras2 and house-calls all contribute to a saturation of messages addressed to the people. I take the expression of popular will and popular desire during an election in any manner whatsoever, to be one of the popular cultural dimensions of elections. There is plenty of evidence, as we shall see, that the electorate takes an active interest in the whole process. For political commentary, the most important expression of popular will is the one that is evidenced by the results. At the end of any election, the theory goes, the people will have spoken. What have they said? Which party have they favoured? What is the mandate they have given to the ones they have chosen? Lokniti, a leading research network known for its election studies recently published one of the most comprehensive post-election surveys ever undertaken in the history of Indian democracy. The National Election Survey (NES) 20043 conducted after the polling but before the counting and declaration of results, has once again drawn attention to the peculiar role the general election plays in the reproduction of the Indian political order. While the Lokniti team stops short of drawing all the possible conclusions from the study, there is no mistaking the thrust of the evidence gathered. One point on which there is now universal agreement, is the irremediably coalitional nature of politics in India. Commenting on this aspect of the 2004 elections, one of the researchers, E. Sridharan offers some interesting observations. According to Sridharan, Indian politics is not governed by the Left–Right ideological polarization characteristic of the classical democracies of Europe. We have ‘multiple cross-cutting axes, e.g., secular-communal, centralistregional autonomist, and a variety of caste bloc-based axes, varying statewise’ (NES, 5418). In addition, party identifications are neither strong nor durable and most parties are clientelist, lacking a well-defined social base. Thus while there are working-class parties like the Communist Party of India-Marxist (the CPI-M) and some parties with a base in the peasantry (the Rashtriya Janata Dal of Laloo Prasad Yadav, which is powerful in

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Bihar),4 these tend to be confined to some states and soon acquire a regional identity that far exceeds their social base identification. Third, due to the peculiarities of the Indian electoral system, where substantial vote shares can still bring no seats, there is a tendency to forge alliances for the purpose of aggregating votes. Elections are often lost because votes were divided between two potentially like-minded parties, or won because even ideologically antagonistic parties managed to consolidate their votes by forging opportunistic alliances: Since electoral coalitions, unlike post-election coalitions, are formed under conditions of uncertainty about which party will get how many votes and win how many seats, there are even greater incentives to add on partners to increase the chances of victory, so as not to take any chance of losing, without being too particular about ideological and programmatic compatibility. (NES, 5418) One structural feature that encourages such a turn in the political process is that in India ‘politics is substantially about access to state resources, as in a political economy of rent-seeking and patronage’. Losing an election in such a scenario means losing access to a whole range of legal and illegal sources of income. Sridharan makes the important point that indiscriminate coalition politics ‘is due to incentives created by a structural characteristic of such systems, not cultural factors’. No cultural predilection is at work here, but rather structural constraints and possibilities emerging historically, have transformed elections from its classical role as a means of political expression, to a unique mechanism for the self-perpetuation of a corrupt sociopolitical order. Even when ideological polarization seems to dominate the political field, as in recent years with the rise of Hindu nationalist politics, such polarization has not been powerful enough to obviate the need for recourse to the entrenched modes of electoral bargaining and alliance formation. Indeed, it could be argued that it is precisely the stalemate caused by the irreversible emergence of regional political formations with a tendency to autonomize and insulate themselves from national politics, that gives rise to attempts such as that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, the party of Hindu nationalism) to re-assert central authority. From the point of view of the regional formations, asserting themselves against Congress centralism, the BJP was a welcome ally because, being a new party, it had to agree to minority status in its state-level alliances, in exchange for primacy at the Centre. Apart from obvious opportunistic measures for gaining power, regional parties’ long-term strategies tend to be designed to confine the national parties to the Centre. The moment the BJP shows signs of threatening the regional ally’s pre-eminence in its own backyard, the latter is sure to begin looking for new partners, and might even go back to the Congress. Effectively, even when Congress rules a

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particular state, it only manages to succeed by developing a regional base comparable to that of the regional party and by being able to provide a regional alternative to rival aspirants to the privileges of power, as was the case in Andhra Pradesh. One more important factor to note is that under pressure of globalization, there has emerged a ‘growing inter-party consensus on the broad direction of economic policy’ (NES, 5419). This means that today, there are hardly any political parties left that strongly oppose the globalizing or ‘liberalizing’ trends in the economy, whose main features are opening the economy to foreign investment, dismantling of the public sector and relaxing labour laws. The BJP, once a proponent of ‘swadeshi’ or self-reliance, is today the most vocal champion of liberalization and public sector disinvestments. Even the Communist parties, fearing the marginalization of states like West Bengal where they rule in the emerging economy, have more or less fallen in line with the new consensus. Diagnosing the state of the Indian polity on the basis of the survey, the team leader Yogendra Yadav has commented on the ‘elusive mandate’ of the 2004 election in his introduction to the survey. What have the people voted for? What is the opinion they have expressed through the ballot box? The only answer seems to be that no opinion has been expressed. In other words, there is no way of translating the complex voting patterns, party loyalties, regional and caste interests, etc., into an expression of national political will. There is effectively no such thing in India today as a ‘political majority’. Majorities are forged by political alliances without consultation with the people. The majorities have no voice because they are not majorities on the ground but majorities struck up by political brokers to meet the requirements of the electoral route to power. It is a purely arithmetical majority with no real political identity or force. Indeed, it is clear – even if the NES understandably stops short of drawing such a conclusion – that there is no such thing as an Indian national polity. This might come as a surprise to most readers outside India, which is, after all regarded universally as something of a miracle – a vast, functioning, Third World democracy. The reasons why things look so different today (it is as much a question of things looking different as of actually being different), are too complex to go into here in detail. The decline of Congress dominance, the rise of regional political formations, the increased visibility and political salience of social cleavages turned identities that were never tackled by the republican state, and the very practical difficulty of conceiving this vast land mass as one nation – all these are relevant explanatory factors. And yet the 2004 general election witnessed an unprecedented advertising campaign focused precisely on ‘India’, splashed across all available mass media including the internet and the mobile phone. Two phrases dominated the BJP’s advertising blitz, allegedly paid for by taxpayers’ money, and coverage by news media: ‘India Shining’ and ‘the feel good factor’. The ‘India Shining’ campaign, handled by top ad agencies, was notable for

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‘production values’ comparable to those of top consumer brand advertisements: sleek, well-designed, colourful hoardings, print ads and television commercials with happy faces and personalized slogans – ‘I make my India shine’ – rather than interpellative appeals to the electorate. One such advertisement hoarding showed a group of working women on bicycles smiling at the camera, with the slogan printed below. Mounted as a moodsetting pre-election campaign designed to exploit the widespread optimism among the ‘trained’5 classes, the ads were, on the surface, free from any straightforward election slogan. The standard practice among incumbent governments is to advertise, mainly in the print media, the achievements of particular ministries, with the minister in charge and the prime minister (and sometimes other party leaders who may not be in government, such as Sonia Gandhi) appearing as mascots. This kind of advertising, paid for from the ministry’s budget, serves the double purpose of publicizing good works and gaining electoral goodwill.6 In the Rajiv Gandhi era, government advertising took a new turn. Television spots celebrated India’s unity and diversity, and featured celebrities from the fields of sports, cinema, music, etc, mobilized to run, sing or otherwise perform in the concert of India. ‘Mera bharat mahan’ (My India is great), was probably the first state-sponsored slogan to employ personal pronouns, offering to the citizen not a message from the state, but a sentiment which could be his or her own. The ‘India Shining’ campaign worked along similar lines, resorting again to youthfulness as a key ‘patchwork quilt’. The difference was that this was mounted before an election. With minimal copy, the ads concentrated on the production of an atmospherics of hope and prosperity. Commenting on these ads, Ronald Inden7 rightly points out that while older government ads were informational, these were aspirational and personal. Inden compares India Shining mainly to the conventional political advertising that has remained more or less the same for decades. But in order to understand the significance of the recent campaign, it is also necessary to consider the new mobilizing effects that the Rajiv Gandhi era introduced into public life. It was an era when people all over the world were being recruited to sing and make declarations using the first person singular or plural (‘We are the world’): it was a true shift in the discursive strategies of mobilization, a key factor in the constitution of what is now known as the global civil society. In addition to all the accumulating rights that the people of the world are gaining, they also seemingly gain the right of enunciative priority. This is the subject, the one who says ‘enough of your speeches, it is my turn to speak’, whom the India Shining campaign tried to restore to centre-stage.

Romancing the electorate: politics as entertainment Alongside ‘India Shining’, and drawing on the same discourse, the campaign managers of the BJP also came up with a catchphrase, which was liberally

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used by its spokespersons on television, giving media coverage of the campaign an amusing focus. This was the so-called ‘feel-good factor’ and meant that the electorate was feeling good because the economy, after five years of BJP rule, was in the pink of health. Quickly dubbed the ‘fool-good factor’ by the opposition, this phrase provided the media with an entertaining way of organizing its coverage. Both ‘India Shining’ and ‘feel good’ must be seen in the context of the recent transformation of India’s economy. These slogans are drawn from the rampant hyperbole that the media generates in its celebration of the Indian economy’s liberalization in the past 15 years. For a long time, Indian capitalism was reined in by a combination of ‘socialist’ policies and entrenched agrarian and bureaucratic interests. In such a protected climate, the social elite enjoyed access to resources and employment avenues provided by the state, without significant competition from the vast majority of people. Liberalization came at a time when this class no longer needed, or was no longer satisfied with, the privileges provided by a protectionist policy. The employment opportunities provided by the new economy, particularly in the IT sector, had the additional charm of seeming to be somehow particularly suited to the Indian ethos. Success stories of IT professionals abroad, of companies started by modest-looking middle-class engineer-entrepreneurs, and other ‘feel-good’ stories have become the staple of Indian media content. The BJP government inherited the policies of the previous Congress government and deepened India’s integration into the global economy, exploiting the prevailing enthusiasm. The poor showing of the party in the elections has led to the interpretation that the people did not buy these slogans. But the people who did had already bought into these slogans long before the BJP put them to use. However, this was only a small segment of the Indian population. It was the BJP that was fooled by the power of ‘feel good’, a largely urban phenomenon which it relied on too heavily for its own good. If this was how the ruling party’s election campaign was run, the media added its own spice to the campaign. News is always a popular item among Indians, and innumerable television news channels have cropped up to meet the demand. During elections, however, news becomes a hot commodity. The premier English language commercial news channel NDTV is reported to have raised its ad rates for election-related programmes from Rs. 10,000 per 10 seconds to Rs. 40,000–50,000. Commercial breaks during election programmes can go up to 20 minutes per hour. Given such enthusiasm for election news, pre-election surveys are in great demand. Every channel wants to sponsor its own survey, predicting outcomes. In the 2004 election, not a single pre-election forecast proved to be anywhere near accurate. And yet, a few months later, when the Maharashtra state elections were held, the pollsters were back at their job, unrepentant, and the channels were beaming. Predictions were broadcast on programmes with titles such as And the Winner Is . . . (NDTV, Maharashtra), as if it were the Oscars. Election coverage also drew on the epics for programme titles: ‘Maha

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Sangram’ or ‘The Great Battle’ punning on Maharashtra – The Great Nation – and Maha for great; popular television programmes, such as Kaun Banega Mukhyamantri, or ‘Who will be the Chief minister?’, evoking the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and cowboy films, How the West is Won was the title of a programme about the elections in the western state of Maharashtra, with cowboy graphics. Digitally animated politicians were raised up and dropped down from the gadi (seat of power) as predictions show them winning or losing. Reporters followed leaders on their campaign trail, from morning to evening, showing them eating, sleeping, talking, walking, and sharing intimate details, during car rides, about their private lives and personal difficulties. Aaj Tak, which ran one of the most colourful election coverages, rounded off each day’s programming with a qawwali8 programme in which two qawwali troupes, male and female, representing the two major alliances fighting the election, chided and cajoled and wooed and rebutted each other in a romantic diction. Film stars have been a constant feature of Indian elections for a long time now. Among those who won elections this year were Jayaprada and Dharmendra, aging actors from an earlier generation of popular stars, and Govinda, one of the currently reigning stars who has a strong following among rural, semi-urban and urban lower middle-class youth. Navjot Sidhu, a former test cricketer who has made a name for himself as a cricket commentator with his entertaining, colourful English expressions (now known as Sidhuisms), also won a seat in Punjab. During the tense days following the election, when Sonia Gandhi finally declared her unwillingness to be sworn in as Prime Minister, the entire group of winning Congress MPs stood in line and one by one took the mike in Sonia Gandhi’s presence, and pleaded with her, sometimes with tears in their eyes, to reconsider her decision. The whole parade was telecast live on several television channels and newspapers vied with each other to find the most grandiloquent praise and page design with which to show their admiration for her sacrifice. The Calcutta-based Telegraph probably came out winner with its entire front page splashed with Sonia Gandhi’s photograph and her short speech declining the throne, and nothing else. The maudlin atmosphere that prevailed in the country for two or three days was quite unprecedented – no dramatist could have come up with a more entertaining script. The BJP’s Sushma Swaraj had rather hastily declared that if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister, she would shave her head and go into sanyas. This was a puzzling resolve, for no one understood why she should shave her head, which is required of upper caste Hindu widows. In any case, when Sonia declined, the euphoric celebration of her sacrifice by the press was accompanied by digitally doctored photographs of Sushma Swaraj with a shaven head and widow’s garb. The main feature was spiced up with a comic interlude. Mother, saint, unparalleled stateswoman – Sonia Gandhi was celebrated in different guises for a few days, before Manmohan Singh took over the reins. When his turn came to speak after

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Sonia’s renunciation speech, Govinda’s appeal to her was couched in the language of Hindi melodrama. He said it was not only her ‘netritva’ (leadership) that inspired people but also her ‘matritva’ (motherliness). Her renunciation was like a mother abandoning her children. The vernacular press is usually far more flamboyant in its election coverage than the English language newspapers. Judging by the coverage of the Telugu newspapers, it would seem on the whole that here the press gets more deeply involved in the campaign process and also reflects a wider spectrum of popular participation than is the case in the English papers. In Andhra Pradesh, the national elections and the state elections were held simultaneously and the Congress alliance emerged victorious in both. Telugu journalism has adopted a baroque style marked by liberal use of proverbs, heavy fonts, dramatization of news events in mythological idioms, since the historic advent of the Eenadu newspaper about 25 years ago. Even so, during elections, the dramatization of the news touches new heights. Delhi becomes Hastina or Hastinapura, the name of the capital of the Kauravas in the Mahabharata,9 considered by many to have been located in present-day Delhi, and the election, a battle between epic formations. The voter is sometimes figured as a peasant speaking a regional dialect and declaring what he wants and whom he will vote for. This is the picture of the voter as an innocent victim of political manipulation, who has wants that seem obvious to everyone except the politicians. Reporting of election malpractices is also more detailed and vivid. Headlines use first person phrases highlighting politicians’ shamelessness. Poems sent in by readers are published every day, as are a wide range of opinions from high and low. Distribution of cash, liquor (and this time cricket gear!) in return for votes is reported in great detail. All in all, the regional press is far more engaged in its coverage of election campaigns than the English language press, and it is here that one gets a strong sense of people’s participation. This confirms the observation of the NES that it is at the state level that voters are most active. It is at the statelevel (going by the nature of news coverage at any rate) that different interests within a community are fighting for power. The Telugu papers’ coverage of the national elections also gives a sense that the national outcome is an aggregate of the outcome of the state elections. The newspapers (and the regional television channels like TV9) come across, not as neutral observers, but as themselves fully caught up in the democratic process as interested agents. One thing that is common to both the national English language newspapers and the vernacular press, however, is that they address a reader who is assumed to know that Indian politicians are corrupt. This comes through most clearly in the little snippets of political gossip that is published in the features pages, where the writers take liberties in writing about politicians that they cannot in the standard news reports. Allusions to nefarious activities, innuendoes about motives, allegations and rumours, etc., are all grist to the mill. But it goes further: the media person may also seek the reader/ viewer’s collusion in turning this given fact into an item of entertainment.

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The premier television channel NDTV’s anchors, for instance, routinely intersperse their news and features programmes with this knowing gesture towards the viewer. The anchors, after they finish talking to the politicians, turn to the camera and make remarks like, ‘Well, that’s all we can get out of him for the moment, obviously he will not say anything more in public’, or to the politician, with a smile directed at the audience, ‘Admit it, you are now attacking the ruling party, but when you were in power, things were no different’, and so on. There is a resignation built into that gesture, but also the reassurance that this ‘knowing’ offers an enjoyment that is probably the only benefit of participating in democracy via television. The enjoyment comes from identifying with the journalist as one’s representative out there, who is confirming one’s suspicions about politicians’ real motives. It comes from the discomfiture experienced by politicians in front of the cameras. News channels manage to get someone to come to the studio to represent a party, even when that party is charged with something impossible to defend.

Desire for democracy? It is the idea of enthusiastic popular participation in the electoral process, the people’s active engagement in the production and circulation of ideas, in the expression of their own grievances and expectations, in the sight of millions mobilized by their sovereign right into frenetic political activity, giving expression to their preferences by participating in rallies and meetings, raising slogans, dancing and singing, adding colour to public events by dressing up as Gandhi or Nehru, or even some mythological characters: it is all of these activities that first come to mind when we think of the popular cultural dimension of the electoral process in India. Election coverage in the media is usually supplemented by such sidelights. Seen from this angle, elections in India have always been a spectacle of colour, enthusiastic popular participation, innovative modes of selfexpression. The sheer diversity of the Indian cultural map makes the elections an event of kaleidoscopic variety and changeability. One of the most interesting features of Indian elections has been the unusually high number of independent candidates who contest. In the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, there were 4,648 candidates contesting for the 543 parliament seats; this works out to an average of 8.5 candidates per constituency. Of these, only 1,299, about a third, belonged to the seven parties recognized as national parties. 750 belonged to 40 parties which were only recognized as state parties. Another 654 came from an array of officially recognized but very localized parties, and the rest, a whopping 1,945, were contesting as independents. Even after accounting for various party rebels who contested as independents, this was a large number. And the local parties added to this figure because they were often one-person parties, not very far removed from true independents. In the 2004 elections, the total number of candidates had risen to 5398, and the number of parties in the fray stood at 220. Independents

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clocked in at 2,369.10 If you add to this about 150 one-person or one-locality parties, half the contestants in the elections were individuals. The fact that many party hopefuls contest as independents when they are denied tickets is also a sign that the party affiliation is not always the most important determining factor in a candidate’s calculations. Independent contestants are often ordinary local people, teachers, descendants of freedom fighters, and others for whom the election campaign is an avenue for selfexpression. Considering that contesting an election costs a minimum of Rs. 10,000, this is a very expensive mode of participation in public life and is often subsidized by sympathetic people of a locality. In some localities, there are people who have been contesting as independents or as candidates of their own tiny parties, with names like ‘Stomach party’, for several decades. They do not win but they are recognized and respected or at least affectionately regarded in their neighbourhoods, even if often with a tinge of amusement. Performative elements whose symbolic significance is not always easily decipherable are also a common feature of popular participation. An independent candidate in Allahabad constituency, Rajendra Kumar, came to file his nomination papers dressed as Ravana, the demon king of the Ramayana. In the picture (The Hindu, 10 April 2004), he is accompanied by at least two others also dressed in mythological costume. Ravana is seriously putting his signature to a set of nomination papers. What expressive intentions could be contained in this act of dressing up as one of the most reviled figures of Indian mythology, whose effigy is burnt every year in north India during celebrations of Ram Lila?11 In the Andhra Pradesh state elections, which were held simultaneously with the national elections, a disabled person was begging for money on the streets of Tirupati to pay his deposit and stood for election against the then invincible-looking chief minister of the state, Chandrababu Naidu (Andhra Jyothi, 22 April 2004). He was one of several candidates put up by the state disabled network. Party loyals wished their leaders luck by giving them swords, maces and cardboard crowns at public functions. These instances, of which there are thousands reported mostly in local newspapers and television stations, are a form of self-expression not always backed by any realistic ambition, but at the same time expressing a seemingly unshakeable faith in the democratic process. Another group of people who also engage in similar forms of un-motivated self-expression are individuals who are loyal to political parties without being members, or being only ordinary members without any significant role to play. They engage in different activities including dressing up in colourful costumes, undertaking cycle yatras and other feats, in some way giving expression to their loyalty, often in an idiom of filial obligation. It is easy to get carried away by such simple and touching demonstrations of faith in democracy. However, the fact is that they remain an insignificant element in the electoral process overall, making little difference to the outcome. They are a sure indication that the people are interested in democracy but there is no corresponding sign that democracy is interested in the people.

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Conclusion What general conclusions can we draw from such a scenario? It seems to me that there are two ways in which we can read the elections in India as popular culture. Where there is strong evidence of the exercise of popular will and the expression of people’s desires and hopes, and where such expressions get the attention they deserve, we can say that there is a democratic culture that is in formation, taking diverse routes to public manifestation, even as it remains relatively marginal in determining the final outcome. Secondly, it seems that given the relative impotence of the popular will faced with a political class engaged in opportunistic wheeling-dealing, the media and the parties together serve up an entertaining medley of popular culture as a substitute for the absent popular will. Here it is interesting to note that the media fraternity, the intelligentsia, and some political leaders frequently employ two symptomatic expressions in their attempts to come to grips with the complexities of Indian electoral politics. Routinely, after every election, commentators declare that they feel humbled by the people’s wisdom: this usually means that the people have voted the way the commentators wanted them to vote but did not think they would; or simply that the outcome was totally unexpected. Another telling expression that is frequently repeated is the idea that what we have in India is a ‘democratic experiment’. Reading these two locutions from the discourse of political commentary symptomatically, one can arrive at a re-description of the Indian political structure that might point the way to a new approach to its study informed by cultural theory. In order to understand electoral politics in a country like India, we need a theoretical detour that will help us make sense of the historical devolution of the political machinery of democracy. Our understanding of the world of modern nation-states is informed by what can be broadly termed a theory of equivalence. This theory is practically present in our thinking in the form of the idea of the universal reproducibility, the infinite re-cycling of a democratic tool-kit fashioned in the European world. Further, it is assumed that when thus re-deployed, the democratic apparatus creates a nation-state equivalent to the ones that serve as the classical instances, i.e. the nationstates of Europe. This symbolic equivalence is also propped up by various international agencies like the United Nations, even as hard-fought battles for influence at such bodies belie the claim of equivalence. The equivalence in question is not to be taken as an objective fact so much as a subjective disposition that the people of the nation concerned, and the nation itself conceived as a subject, are assumed to acquire. If it appears that this is isomorphous with the theory of democracy itself, i.e., that it seems to propose a state of affairs at the level of nation-states that is modelled on the idea of the equality of all citizens within a nation-state, the appearance is not coincidental. Not only are all states assumed to be equal, they are also thought to have been ‘born free and everywhere in chains’ in the Rousseau idiom,

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until the general election and the modern state-form together restore the lost freedom on the new terms of equality. The state of non-freedom itself is no longer necessarily of the old colonial kind, which with some reason gave rise to the theory of equivalence in the first place. Now the causes of nonfreedom are strictly internal: bad rulers deprive their own people of the state of freedom that is rightfully theirs. The democratic diagnosis proceeds with the precision of modern-day psychiatry. The war against Iraq was thus really nothing more than an act of mercy, a lobotomy. Modernity has demonstrated that it has the power to reduce the artificial complexities of pre-modern society down to the irreducible natural forms of human society. Thus the nuclear family has emerged from all kinds of family forms, as the residue that outlives the subtraction of the pre-modern family’s political, moral and economic functions. Likewise it is a universal truth produced by modernity that nations are the true, irreducible units of political-economic life. The nation-form, forged in Europe, has now conquered the entire planet. This sometimes leads to the false impression that all the political units of the modern world are nation-states, where with a few exceptions, the people rule themselves through the exercise of political sovereignty. The theory of electoral democracy undergoes a certain shortcircuiting whereby the general election becomes the reified proof of popular sovereignty. But there is a chicken-and-egg question lurking behind such an understanding, which has never been addressed: are the people sovereign because they vote or do they vote because they are sovereign? One could answer this question by saying that there is no precedence here, that sovereignty is realized in its exercise at the ballot box. But when we examine the political process in a country like India, we cannot help being sceptical about such a theoretical resolution of the question. Does the currency of adult suffrage, the vote, truly embody the sovereignty of the voting subject? Does such sovereignty inhere in the voting subject or in the vote itself ? Does it outlast the act of voting or is it exhausted in it? The recourse to the idea of democratic ‘experimentation’ that is so central to the rationalizing moves of political commentary in India, shows that these questions haunt the thinking of even the most optimistic of commentators. Using Partha Chatterjee’s terminology, one could say that civil society looks on as political society plays with the tools of democracy and learns to use them. Recently the National Geographic television channel aired a programme about an experiment that was conducted in a poor neighbourhood of Delhi. A private firm set up a few computer terminals operated by touch outside its offices, facing the street where children passed by everyday on their way to school and back. The curious children soon started to fiddle with these, and within a few weeks they had become savvy internet users. Hidden cameras captured the whole process. When commentators talk about the democratic experiment, one cannot help feeling that they have something like this in mind. They are saying that the Indian electorate is a treat to watch: its

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enthusiasms, its sincerity, its naïve belief in the power of democracy, all these are heartwarming for the experimenters. Even if we ourselves are unable to sustain our faith in the face of all the bad news that the media brings everyday, we can take heart from the way the people are able to sustain theirs, in spite of all the obstacles. This gaze of civil society, which is the gaze of democracy itself, is an integral feature of our political structure: some of us are watching, others are being watched. Political news coverage on television reflects this split, and so do the opinion polls and exit polls that constitute a staple of election coverage in India. The methodological section of the NES 2004 is one of the most fascinating parts of the whole survey, because it shows how the achievement of accuracy in opinion gathering is predicated not on listening but on looking. One reason why opinion polls in India turn out to be wrong more often than not is because the techniques of psephology were developed in countries where broad class differences can be assumed to be the predominant axis of variation in an otherwise homogeneous population of sovereign subjects. These subjects express their opinion, you listen to them, and you arrive at a reasonable estimation of the trend of public opinion. If you try to employ the same method in India, you can end up with very poor results because, as already mentioned, the Indian electorate is not a homogeneous, class-divided electorate: there are multiple axes of differentiation, including caste, religion, ethnicity, language and geography. The methodology of NES 2004 is designed to meet the challenge of such a complex social formation. And the key to their differential approach is that they do not just listen and record, they look: the specificities of the Indian political landscape are taken into account, and sampling is based upon this information. There are decisions to me made about who can be taken to represent which population segment: the opinions of the people of one state often cannot be taken to be representative for other states, therefore there must be state-wise samples. Within states, certain regions may turn out to be at odds with the rest, making it necessary to draw from them to make your sample complete. And so on, until individual constituencies, and sometimes specific polling booths require special representation in the sample. It is a commendable job of reliable sampling: but what is it a sample of ? It is the sample of an actually existing social order with complex internal variation, not a sample of the opinions of citizen-subjects. The sampling is sensitive to axes of variation that have no democratic standing, as it were. What is sought is not opinion so much as a clue to behaviour. The pollster is looking at the voter, not just listening to him/her. Without going further into these questions here, I want to suggest, by way of re-description, that the Indian nation-state is not an organic entity; it is not a modern community. This means that no single principle of community unifies the population. On the other hand, various instruments of such wished-for unification are all present here: the general election is one of them.12 We can understand India better when we conceive its socio-

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politico-cultural order as an inorganic compound, consisting of organic premodern communities and modern integrative, homogenizing political and social technologies. These co-exist without any attempt at resolution of the conflict between them. The stalemate between these two divergent forces is nevertheless so organized as to be centred on the inorganic elements. Indian politics must operate through the general election. This is an imperative imposed by the constitution of inorganic cultural compounds in the course of the historical uneven devolution of democracy, and sustained by the police states of the contemporary global order. As the reified, importable machinery of democracy, the general election thus constitutes for the ruling elite both a symbol of respectability in the global arena, and a periodic nuisance/opportunity for change, depending on whether you are in power or in the opposition. Even pre-modern enthusiasms and loyalties can no longer be accessed except through this machinery. The dance of power must be danced around it. For how long can the fiction of democracy be sustained in the face of this reality? The NES 2004, as already mentioned, stops short of declaring the entire process undemocratic. But the question is not whether it is or is not, democratic.13 Rather, we should recognize here the exhaustion of the democratic revolution’s transformative energies, thanks to the binding of those energies to the task of maintaining the present world order. There is no longer any scope for the reproduction of democratic revolutions on the classical model. This does not mean that the nations on the periphery of that revolution are culturally recalcitrant, as some nationalists would like to believe. It only means that the way to social transformation may no longer lie in that direction.

Notes 1 See the writings of Sivathamby (1981), Robert Hardgrave Jr. (1993), M.S.S. Pandian (1992), and Madhava Prasad (1999). 2 Processions or journeys undertaken on ‘chariots’ by political leaders to mobilize support; the most famous of them being the 1989 yatra undertaken by L.K. Advani of the BJP. 3 Economic and Political Weekly, December 2004. (Further references are given in the text as NES, followed by page number.) 4 The parties do not always proclaim their regional status. Thus while the Telugu Desam of Andhra Pradesh clearly proclaims its Andhra-specific identity and aspirations, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (literally National People’s Party) clearly doesn’t, even though it has very little support outside Bihar. 5 Under pressure from the global economy, Indian education has ceased to be education in any real sense, except for the privileged few. For the rest, what is offered, and what is increasingly desired, is training. The service sector orientation of the new middle class is in many ways an extension of the more privileged but ultimately dominated service-sector culture of the civil servants of yore. The cultural horizons of this vast labour reserve have so far not attracted the attention of sociologists and cultural studies scholars. 6 Here sometimes there is a blurring of the difference between ruling party and government. Such advertising has increasingly come under judicial and Election

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Commission scrutiny. The BJP government mounted a huge campaign to highlight its road building project, just before the elections, with Vajpayee, the Prime Minister, featured prominently as the ‘architect’ of the government’s economic miracle. When the elections were announced, the opposition complained that these hoardings, which were meant to publicize government work, were doubling as campaign advertising, and demanded their removal. Interview in The Hindu Sunday Magazine. The qawwali is a form of musical performance associated with sufi shrines, but also widely adapted by Hindi cinema for romantic scenes and other secular occasions. The Telugu film industry, based in Madras until recently but catering to the Telugu-speaking population of Andhra Pradesh, is still well known for its distinctive and popular genre of mythological films based on characters and stories from the epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata) and puranas (narratives of gods). Eenadu, the newspaper whose rise to pre-eminence coincided with and contributed to the rise of the actor N.T. Rama Rao to chief ministership of the state, was no doubt trying to exploit the association of Rama Rao in the popular mind with various mythological characters. The Mahabharata is a massive compendium of narratives, at the core of which is the internecine conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Figures for the 1999 election from the website of the Election Commission of India. Figures for the 2004 election from www.indian-elections.com/facts–figures.html Unlike the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the story of the noble king Rama who wages war against Ravana to recover his abducted wife Sita, has acquired privileged status as a holy text, and the hero Rama has become the focus of Hindu nationalism’s recent campaigns. The demolition of the Babri Masjid, a Muslim shrine which the Hindu nationalists claimed was built on the birthplace of Rama, was a turning point in modern Indian history, the culmination of a politics based upon introjected European fantasies of Indian/Aryan supremacy. Elsewhere I have discussed another inorganic element that operates within Indian culture – romantic love – and proposed a theory of the inorganic (Prasad 2004). Much of Indian political theory is preoccupied with comparing Indian reality with the ideal type of European democracy, and suggesting ways of adapting the reality to the ideal. Most of the prescriptions tend to be orthopedic in nature, requiring a change of ‘mindset’ on the part of the electorate, which in a way conforms to the Brechtian idea of the ruling elite’s desire: change the people.

References Hardgrave, Robert Jr. (1993) ‘When Stars Displace the Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil Nadu’, in Essays in the Political Sociology of South India, New Delhi: Manohar. Lefort, Claude (1988) Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pandian, M.S.S. (1992) The Image Trap, New Delhi: Sage. Prasad, Madhava M. (1999) ‘Cine-politics: On the Political Significance of Cinema in South India’, Journal of the Moving Image 1: 37–52. Prasad, Madhava M. (2004) ‘Popular Cinema and the Dissemination of Romantic Love in Indian Society’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Cinema and Society’, Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, September 2004. Sivathamby, Karthigesu (1981) Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication Madras: New Century Book House.

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Net power and the politics of the Internet media in South Korea Keehyeung Lee

New media cultures are connected cultures. (David Marshall) The Internet is a particularly malleable technology, susceptible to being deeply modified by its social practice, and leading to a whole range of potential social outcomes. (Manuel Castells)

Wiring the nation and the emergence of the ‘networked society’ in South Korea Since the mid-1990s information and mobile technologies have been the most heavily invested and utilized industry under a state-led informationalization ( jungbojwa) policy in post-IMF Crisis South Korea (E. Kim and H. Kim 2005). Reflected in such often-touted slogans and mantras as ‘building an info-rich nation [ jungbokangkook]’ and IT-based ‘dynamic Korea’, official and dominant views on IT have been implicitly framed by and through a triumphant techno-developmentalism, in which IT was given supreme power to single-handedly revolutionize society and economy. It is fair to say that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been major material and institutional means of social transformation since the latter half of the 1990s. They are also ideologically endowed with a powerful normalizing agency of change and revolutionizing potential. In other words, in South Korea what Castells (2004) calls the informational paradigm as dominant discursive practice has been emphatically and enthusiastically propagated through, and put into practice by high ranking government officials, industry leaders, specialists in media and scholars of statecraft. Such technical and ideological meta-discourses inevitably have far-reaching and concrete effects on the political arena. This chapter will focus on the use of IT and the Net as powerful cultural technologies and multifaceted spaces of politically charged discursive deliberation and cultural performance in political mobilization for election and other political events through the Net in contemporary South Korea.

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ICT-related social transformations and the Net in everyday life Thanks to rapidly developing information and communication infrastructure the number of Internet users in South Korea has exploded exponentially. In 1996, it was estimated that there were only 73,000 users, the numbers soared to 3.1 million in 1998, and 28.6 million by June 2003, according to the Korea Network Information Center (Y. Kim and S. Yoon 2005: 305). A report from the Ministry of Information and Communication also shows impressive growth in broadband Internet service subscribers, 7.8 million in 2001, 10.4 million in 2002, and 11.2 million in 2003. According to a survey done in 2002, the average time spent on the Net was estimated about 14 hours per week (H. Song 2003: 26). Average citizens routinely access and use internetrelated services – email, audiovisual images, shopping, banking, searching, downloading data, chatting and networking – via far-reaching informational channels, search engines, and through relatively inexpensive broadband access. Finally, according to UN Global e-government survey 2003, South Korean was ranked 13th in the world in terms of its index of e-government readiness (cited in Y. Kim and S. Yoon 2005: 58). Along with Nordic countries, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea is one of the most heavily ‘wired’ countries in the world. With the extensive emplacement and use of ICT technologies in various social institutions and at home, the social use of the Net and routine cultural activities performed and mediated through the Net are becoming ever more ubiquitous. As a result, the fabrics and rhythms of everyday life of South Koreans have been radically transformed. For the majority of South Koreans, the Internet has become the main means of gathering information and communicating with others through various online channels, portals, and communities, especially so for younger generations who have acquired relatively high levels of media/computer competence. For the so-called ‘2030 generation’ – those who are in their twenties and thirties in South Korea who collectively manifest distinctive generational characteristics1 – the Internet has undoubtedly become a crucial instrument of acquiring, disseminating, and sharing information, interacting and socializing with their peers, expressing their opinions and feelings, engaging in fun, and various entertainmentrelated as well as pleasure-seeking activities (D. Lee et al., 2005; H. Song 2003; E. Hwang 2004). For instance, the Cyworld mini-homepage – or dubbed ‘mini-homepi’ locally – is a highly popular and inventive form of communication as well as socializing medium for the 2030 generation. Sales of mini-homepages to users, along with advertising, constitute the main sources of revenue for Cyworld. Mini-homepages consist of several rooms (bangs) where the users can upload various kinds of narratives, photos, music, cartoons, and multimedia images, with a defining visual element; the so-called ‘mini Me’, avatar which is supposed to personalize the users. Compared with blogs and other homepages on the Net, Cyworld mini-homepages are visually oriented rather

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than textually accentuated. Such visual characteristics cater to the imageconscious younger generation Koreans and reflect the ubiquity of cellular phones equipped with digital cameras. The ‘Cy users’ use a particular form of cyber money called dotori in purchasing ‘skins’ – colorful and distinctive background images and pictures – and other items, including background music, to constantly redecorate and redesign their mini-homepages, to give personal flavors. Users maintain customized boards whose functions they can specify, for instance, they can flexibly create individual profiles, diaries, jukeboxes, galleries and photo albums. They can also issue customized e-letters and e-papers to their acquaintances as a way of reaching out to others. Cyworld mini-homepages are a highly inventive, immersive, and evolving form of interpersonal communication, customization through multimedia, in the era of interactivity and channels. These mini-homepages are an emerging cultural feature of the landscapes of new media cultures in South Korean society that embody popular desires and will to narrativize and express everyday experiences. This seems to embody what Marshall (2005) calls the ‘art of making producerly subjectivities’ through the Net. The world portrayed by these mini-homepages usually presents a greatly sanitized and idealistic version of a user’s life and personality, or virtual personae. Serious social and political issues are rarely mentioned or often avoided. Instead Cyworld users narrativize their daily experiences, happenings, and mood onto their mini-homepages, creating a personalized feel which is, in reality, conditioned by the very format and menu provided by the Cyworld company. The company asserts its managerial dominance and regulative role by providing and managing technical features as well as enabling formats and choices of presentations, which users utilize to compose their mini-homepages. For instance, each mini-homepage is bestowed value in terms of its popularity, sexiness, reputation and wealth of information by the Cyworld company; these ‘values’ act an incentive and pressure on users to properly maintain one’s mini-homepages. To put it ironically, Cyworld fulfills the personalization of people’s needs to connect with others and express their individuality in radically new ways by inventively blending play, people’s desire to tell stories and intimate networking.2 But, what one sees at a mini-homepage is, then, a polished and patterned coexistence of something like narcissism, exhibitionism, ‘interactive voyeurism’, as well as shared sentiments for symbolic play and having fun. Mini-homepages have been a runaway hit among the youth and young urban professionals in their twenties and thirties. It is estimated that in 2005 there were more than 14 million mini-homepages (Hankyoreh Daily, March 12, 2005). Users routinely visit, and navigate cyworld mini-homepages of their friends and acquaintances as part of their routinized daily media pilgrimage. Some local experts are concerned that the highly immersive nature of Cyworld has turned many youngsters into ‘cyholics’ or ‘cy addicts’ (Korea Times, April 14, 2005). Indeed, it is almost impossible to think interpersonal relations or generation-specific social morphology of younger

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generation South Koreans, without considering the presence and symbolic significance of these mini-homepages. Attentive to the huge popularity and potential of cyworlds among youth and young urban professionals, politicians have attempted to capitalize on this ‘cy boom’ by creating their own homepages. For instance, Park Geunhye, the daughter of late president Park Chung Hee, and chairman of the Grand National Party, the main opposition party, has a very popular cyworld mini-homepage, cyworld.nate.com/ghism. By carefully unveiling her personal and family photos from her youth, providing vignettes from her public and family life, and providing responses to visitors who stop by on her minihomepage, Park attempts to project a ‘down-to-earth’ personality and a friendly, compassionate, and caring politician. Such ‘impression management’ or character building is obviously an attempt to interact with and recruit younger generation voters. Created in February 2004, it attracted nearly three million visitors in one year. Other politicians have also started to jump on the cyworld bandwagon. To take another example, Goh Kun, the 67-year-old former prime minister and another potential candidate for the next presidential election, also opened a Cyworld mini-homepage in early 2005. Within 20 days of its opening, the combined hit numbered 100,000. Cyworld mini-homepages are obviously becoming newly found venues for local politicians in the context of the growing importance of image politics in South Korea and blurred boundaries between politics and popular culture.

The phenomenal emergence of IT-based alternative media in South Korea One of the major outcomes of phenomenal growth of the IT infrastructure, the environment and the widespread social use of mobile and information technologies in contemporary South Korea is the emergence of the Internet or the ‘Net’ as new realm of mediated communication and as a new ground for various forms of social interaction and political participation. Onlinebased alternative media forms have appeared since early 2000 in the modes of online newspapers, webzines, portals, and parody sites. Collectively they have started to radically alter the ways Koreans use and acquire information and views on crucial political and social issues at the daily level. They have drastically restructured the media landscape as well as the ways political expressions and acts are enacted. In terms of symbolic power relations, these alternative media forms have transformed the ways political discourses are generated and received by challenging established forms of media. In South Korea, traditionally the leading newspapers – Chosun Daily, DongA Daily, and JoongAng Daily – have maintained strong ties with, and assisted dominant political elites and parties, especially under the authoritarian regimes during the 1980s through early 1990s. Historically, they interfered deeply in political matters and

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elections by providing news and views which were favorable to the ruling bloc. As a result, they were considered ‘king-makers’ during past presidential elections. In addition, these conservative dailies have functioned as a disseminators and gatekeepers who produce and circulate rigid conservative ideologies and values (S. Park and K. Chang 2001). Ideologically, these three papers have been decidedly tilted toward conservative agendas. Since the emergence of more democratic forms of government under Kim Dae Jung (1997–2002) and Noh Moo-hyun (2002–present), the conservative media’s strategic alliance with, and symbiotic relations with the ruling bloc have been exposed and contested. In consequence, they have had rocky relationships with the government as well as progressive social forces. The Noh Moo-hyun government, in particular, has set the media reform as its prime concern and Chosun and DongA Daily have started to attack Noh’s government, whose political stance was regarded as ‘leftist’ by conservative media.3 The media landscape of conservative daily newspapers has been radically transformed with the emergence of the Net-based media in early 2000. Online newspapers and political webzines have brought in radical changes in journalism and reception practices of news and political discourses by providing much-needed alternative spaces for progressive agendas as well as alternative channels of public expressions (W. Lee 2005). They function as a new kind of communicative agent and forum where mediated political debates and deliberative communication are actively engaged in and performed (W. Chang 2005; Y. Choi 2004). For example, OhmyNews, founded on February 22, 2000 by a former journalist, is a radically new kind of online newspaper which has drastically changed the ways news and political discourses are produced, framed, circulated, and interpreted. It provides various kinds of news, commentary, reviews, and opinions in the form of hypertext, visual and graphic images, and streaming audio and video service. What is distinctive is that its news and narratives are predominantly provided by ‘citizen reporters’ (siminkija), who are not the journalists in the traditional sense. In 2005, there were more than 38,000 citizen journalists along with 40 regular staff (Y. Oh 2004).4 OhmyNews has created a new kind of relatively open and ‘Do It Yourself ’ journalism culture and mode of participation. OhmyNews and other progressive Internet media have ushered in an era of democratization of news coverage, production and reception, challenging and subverting the once powerful information monopoly of the dominant newspapers and their ability to produce discourses and ‘common sense’ on politics. By providing an online forum for citizens and alternative views on crucial political matters, OhmyNews could solidify its presence and position in a fairly short time span, especially in politically charged moments. For example, in the recent presidential and parliamentary elections as well as demonstrations against dispatching South Korean troops to Iraq, OhmyNews functioned not only as an alternative site of everyday news reception for the popular masses, but as a new kind of discursive forum which helped to

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galvanize and accelerate popular opinions and mobilization from below.5 What is inventive is its mobility and interactivity: the paper can swiftly responds to socio-political events by dispatching journalists to the ‘hot spots’ and providing a series of detailed real time news and analysis. Indeed, it has emerged as a trendsetter in the field of media and journalism by emphatically providing swift coverage of, and alternative representation of important socio-political issues and, in particular, by popularizing new kinds of interactive practices: that of reply culture (rippulmunhwa), the two-way feedback mechanism that enables attentive readers to freely express their opinions and obtain views on the particular online articles they have read, online. The reply culture enables readers to connect with like-minded others to debate and challenge with significant depth crucial sociopolitical issues. Active intervention and responses of readers to the posted news items and contentious sociopolitical issues have become a widespread interactive form of opinion-forming and argumentation on the Net. Sometimes, readers’ reply lists are far longer than the length of the article they read. During the impeachment of President Noh Moo-hyun on March 12th, OhmyNews’ coverage attracted 533,704 hits. On March 20th, there was a huge demonstration in Kwanghwamun in downtown Seoul, and OhmyNews’ headline story about this historic gathering generated over 85,000 reader responses (Y. Oh 2004: 217; 220). Literally, the space of OhmyNews became a highly active public forum where citizens came to express their opinions, views, and emotional responses to the illegitimacy of impeachment, brought about by opposition parties. Such an active interactive format obviously helps to maximize the responsiveness of Internet-based media and online discussion boards. The flourishing of the reply culture as an emergent form of (inter)active readership as well as the relaying and transfer of crucial news articles and opinion pieces by readers across various online sites and channels reflects the strength and differentiated possibilities of newly launched Internetbased media. Nowadays, even the Internet versions of offline dailies tend to imitate the inventive format of OhmyNews. The year 2002 also saw the emergence of new kind of Internet-based media, political webzines that challenge the once formidable conservative dailies. Political webzines and websites that specialize in the production of political discourses and analysis vividly demonstrated their presence and power during the presidential election that year. Nonkak refers to writers who regularly contribute their writings to the online webzines, including both common people and highly educated urban professionals, educators, and social activists who tend to share progressive values and the will to intervene in the field of politics. One distinctive characteristic of nonkak journalism, embodied through online articles, opinion pieces and editorials, is that they take issue with the so-called ‘objective’, impartial, and valueneutral journalism propagated by offline media, especially conservative dailies. Nonkaks see such a journalistic convention as a ‘myth’ which is blind to the historical and institutional realities surrounding the politico-ideological role

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of the conservative dailies. To say the least, conservative dailies have traditionally maintained a close relationship with political elites and big businesses in South Korea. Their internal structure is dominated by members of the families who founded the dailies and who can exercise power over the editorial process. Highly partisan, argumentative, expressive, and interventionist in nature, nonkaks consistently confront and counter the conservative media and political forces by providing detailed analysis and alternative interpretations of key political issues on their own terms. This type of journalism is called ‘expressive journalism’ and ‘journalism of intervention’ (K. Lee 2005). Seoprise, Daejabo, Jinbonuri, and Breaknews are some of the best-known political webzines that act as sites of significant contestation against offline dailies during key political events and conjunctures by generating political discourse and analysis of socio-political matters rather than merely providing daily news coverage. Significantly, each political webzine tends to adopt a specific political stance and ideological line: Seoprise has been an active support base for President Noh Moo-hyun since 2002. Daejabo is a progressive webzine without any particular party affiliation and acts as an independent watchdog site against powerful conservative dailies and conservative political forces. Breaknews, founded by people who worked for Seoprise who disagreed with its direction, is formatted like a hybrid webzine, with an online newspaper providing both analysis of political matters and a variety of news articles on entertainment, culture, and less political issues. Jinbonuri is a webzine which supports the Democratic Labor Party, the most radical party in the institutionalized political arena. In politically critical moments, these political webzines became more than instrumental in setting counter-agendas and escalating political debates by actively providing detailed analysis of pressing political issues and generating symbolic support for progressive political forces; Seoprise and Daejabo have functioned as important Net-based forums of deepened political discussions and a fertile ground for discursive intervention (Y. Choi 2004).6 They are part of key nodal points and strategic sites for producing, mediating, and relaying various forms of politicized discourses that deal with crucial sociopolitical issues: the reform of public institutions and party politics, issues surrounding the problem of conservative media as well as major government policies are extensively discussed; such thorny and contentious issues as national security law, the ‘sunshine policy’ towards North Korea, the legitimacy of the Noh Moo-hyun government, and media reform are some of the items hotly debated in these political webzines (W. Chang 2005; K. Lee 2003; 2005). With these political webzines, for the first time in South Korea, concerned citizens came to have their own public spaces for expressing political views, values, and opinions without being mediated or intervened through the established journalistic institutions. Obviously, ‘Net power’ – the manifestation of symbolic and discursive forms of power expressed through counter-discourses and various Net zones, such as online papers

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and webzines, electronic bulletin boards, online media sites, communities, and cafes – has emerged as a crucial and powerful element of the political arena in recent years and has drastically changed the field of symbolic as well as institutional politics in South Korea. This rise of Net power reflects the ongoing process of the ‘relativization of knowledge production’ and tremor of cultural struggles in contemporary South Korean society; in political debates and/or production of weighty sociopolitical discourses, nameless netizens now routinely challenge established experts and opinion leaders in dominant media institutions. On the Net, social ranks and status matter little and established power is often contested and ridiculed. In this respect, some netizens and nonkaks have become a new breed of analysts in discursive conflicts and public opinion-making (Y. Choi 2004; K. Lee 2003; 2005). Due to their self-consciously politicized role, nonkaks are often compared to Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ or intelligentsias who are committed to radical social change and progressive political causes. In other words, the Internet has become a new kind of public forum or wild publics in which a diverse range of public opinions and discourses on social and political matters, and political passions converge and at times collide.7 I find it useful to employ the concept of wild publics over Habermasian ‘public spheres’ in that the Internet media and sites are hotbeds not only for – or not limited to – rational political discourses, but also for more inclusive and heterogeneous forms of public political debates and highly visceral expressions that mediate public desires, creating a polyphony of voices coming from different political impulses and positions. Now interested citizens can easily acquire detailed information on political candidates or particular party’s positions on particular issues and policies in order to make informed decisions especially during political elections and campaigns. This means political parties, politicians, and offline media have to pay attention to, and engage actively with these (counter-)publics on the Net. Now let me turn to the mobilizing capacity of the Net. The Internet as a new political arena and means of broadly defined participatory political communication, demonstrated its potent power vividly during series of candlelight demonstrations. Protest rallies during the turbulent days of democratic struggles in the 1980s through early 1990s were violent affairs. In the confrontations and collisions between demonstrators and the riot police, rocks and Molotov cocktails flew. The rallies were organized by radical students and social activists who followed particular lines of political ideology, especially socialism, through a tight-knit organizational structure. In contrast, in the series of candlelight demonstrations of 2002 through 2004, there were very few such violent confrontations between participating crowds and the police. Furthermore, the citizens who showed up at the candlelight demonstrations were not mobilized through already-existing networks in the social movement sector. Rather, they were politicized but relatively amorphous ‘smart mobs’ – people who came to know about the rally through the Internet media and discussion sites.

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In late 2002, the accidental killing of two junior high school students and the US Army’s acquittal of the soldiers who were responsible infuriated many Koreans and ignited a series of peaceful civil rallies which lasted until the end of 2002. Citizens protested against the acquittal and started to form series of Internet-triggered offline candlelight rallies. In one instance, a nameless netizen, nicknamed Angma, proposed staging a candlelight demonstration in Kwanghwamun, center of downtown Seoul in a readers’ forum on the Internet site of the progressive Hangyoreh Daily. Tens of thousands of people responded and showed up to protest against the US Army and the Korean state for turning a blind eye to the US Army’s negligence of basic human rights of Koreans. Since then, this kind of Net-triggered candlelight demonstrations has increasingly become an established format for a new kind of demonstration culture and rallies, in which online debates and cyberprotests are intricately articulated and swiftly mobilized into offline activities, characterized by horizontal links among citizens and voluntary supporter groups (W. Lee 2005). Certainly, online protests, networking, and deliberation can and have produce the ‘sparks’ for offline gatherings and guide demonstrations, signaling a radically new mode of popular expression and mobilization practice in the local political arena.

Net power in elections and political events The Internet has been considered by many to be a crucial mediator of massive socio-political structuration and cultural shift in the twenty-first century. In South Korea, the Internet has also been at the center of tumultuous socio-cultural transitions in the wake of the further consolidation of democracy since the late 1990s. For example, the Internet played more than a significant part in the presidential election of December 2002 as an empowering technology of social mobilization and a new kind of political influence for citizens who supported then-presidential candidate Noh Moo-hyun. He had been steadily falling behind his main competitor Lee Hoi-chang for most the presidential campaign. One of the main factors which enabled this political underdog to turn the tide and eventually win the election was the participation of his supporters who utilized the Internet effectively as a channel for disseminating political discourses and a tool of voluntary mobilization (E. Kim and H. Kim 2005). In 2002, Noh Moo-hyun was considered the very icon of progressive change by many South Koreans, especially the younger generation. A commercial high school graduate without a college degree and a human rights lawyer who had supported the progressive cause for years, in many ways, Noh has been a truly unconventional political figure who boldly challenged received political norms, such as boss politics, authoritarian elitism, factionalism, traditional regional rivalry, and the strategic alliance between the conservative media and political elites. This was rare among politicians and it made him an enormously fresh and appealing political figure to the popular

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masses in 2002. His main competitor, Lee Hoi-chang, was a former prime minister, also former chief justice of the Supreme Court, and more importantly, he was fully supported by the mainstream media and conservatives political forces. Lee was therefore perceived as a symbol of the establishment (Kidekkwon) and ‘old’ social values. The established elites’ influence over the media and the parliament put Noh under enormous pressure and created adversarial situations in his path to the presidency. In the beginning of the election, his chance of winning was uncertain, if not low. However, as the heated campaign was underway, Noh’s supporters, in particular, Nosamo, a highly organized voluntary online-based support group composed of citizens from all walks of life, came to play a huge part in boosting his popularity and putting him into the central stage in politics. Nosamo, translated literally as ‘people who love Noh’, was founded in April 2000 by people who were impressed with Noh’s valiant effort to challenge the deeply-entrenched regionalism, rigid and scandal-prone party politics. Noh had steadily argued for deep political reforms and his impassioned campaign with radical messages appealed to voters, leading many to join Nosamo. With only seven founding members, Nosamo’s membership grew rapidly: it had grown to 45,486 in May 2002, 73,446 in January 2003 and 108,921 in January 2005 (Y. Kim and S. Yoon 2005: 243). As if accentuating their use of information technology, the first Nosamo meeting was held in a PC café. During the latter stage of the election, Nosamo and the Internet media – OhmyNews and Seoprise – collectively staged highly coordinated and effective campaigns. Nosamo utilized its website – www.nomuhyun.org – as a main base for informing and persuading potential voters by continuously providing and disseminating interpretations of Noh’s political vision and agendas. Members also proposed and provided inventive campaign strategies and techniques: Thousands of small piggybanks named ‘the pig of hope’ (himangdoeji) were distributed among the members and supporters of Noh. Through cell phones and the website, members and willing citizens donated money for Noh’s camp. Among the Nosamo members, the so-called ‘386’ generation – individuals in their mid-thirties and early forties who can vividly remember the struggles for democratization in the 1980s8 – formed a core group who were particularly enthusiastic and active. On the eve of the election, one of Noh’s political allies, Chung Mong Joon suddenly declared that he would no longer support Noh. Things began to look really gloomy for Noh’s supporters.9 Yet a kind of reversal of fortune happened at this critical juncture. Upon hearing the shocking news, Noh’s supporters took swift action and staged an incredible rescue job just before voting began (U. Hwang 2004).10 They posted and exchanged updated news on the election in real time, analysis of public opinions, and impassioned messages to vote online. In addition, they held a series of rallies at various urban sites, made phone calls, and sent SMSes ceaselessly to inform and galvanize voters who were considered Noh’s supporters and likely swing

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voters. Such voluntary mobilization, with the use of the Internet, during the presidential election was truly unprecedented in South Korea, where traditionally, political campaigns were conducted mainly through party organs and members. Another distinctive feature was that Nosamo was not a hierarchical organization and all the important decisions were made through the discussions on the Net and e-voting by all the participating members. In doing so, Nosamo opened a new way of intervening in political events by citizens. ‘Yellow revolution’ was the name given to its activities during the election, as members used yellow banners, handkerchiefs, balloons, and t-shirts to create a collective and visible identity. In the Nosamo phenomenon, the citizens voluntarily became involved with the election process, not the usual card-carrying party members or paid staffs. It can be argued that in Nosamo, socially conscious fandom with a passion for reform met politics for the first time in South Korea. Nosamo again played a significant role during the attempted impeachment of President Noh Moo-hyun, in March 2004. A total of 195 lawmakers of opposition parties in the opposition-controlled parliament voted to suspend Roh’s presidential power. Opinion polls showed seven out of every 10 Koreans opposed the impeachment (Hangyoreh Daily, March 29, 2004). Since the impeachment vote, thousands of citizens had already turned out onto the streets to denounce the decision; the number of citizens grew as time passed. Nosamo took action to rescue the president. They gathered first in front of the National Assembly building; then, moved and gathered at Kwanghwamun, central Seoul for a candlelight rally to call for an annulment of the impeachment. In their initial stages, Pro-Noh groups, including Nosamo, the ‘Power of People’ [kukchamyeon], and other civic groups played leading roles in organizing anti-impeachment rallies. Soon, other progressive groups joined and formed a huge coalition including more than 300 civic groups (Korea Times, March 28th, 2004). As is illustrated by Nosamo, the segmented and polycentric nature of online-based networks and associations was mobilized through ‘the strength of thin [yet resilient] ties’ (see Bennett 2004: 125). The loosely structured networks are often compensated by a high degree of coordination and voluntary actions. Organizers of one of the anti-impeachment rallies said that in Seoul, during one candlelight vigil in Kwanghwamun, an estimated two and half million people took part! During the presidential election, the Internet media was a crucial ally of the president and it also played more than a significant role in bringing about Noh’s victory. Spearheaded by OhmyNews and Seoprise, a kind of check and balance mission against the major newspapers – Chosun and Dong-A Daily11 – which supported Noh’s rival, Lee Hoi-chang and conservative political forces, was performed. By providing informed analysis of Noh’s political views, countering the offline media’s portrayal of him as a ‘populist’ and ‘left-leaning liberal’, and galvanizing netizens’ participation in the election process, the Internet media played a formative role in successfully

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moving political gravity to Noh’s favor. Conservative media and political forces vastly underestimated the democratizing and mobilizing potential of the Internet and they paid the price.12 It is fair to argue that the Internet has been perhaps the most powerful enabling cultural technology and political catalyst in contemporary South Korea in the era of post-authoritarianism and detraditionalization. By providing a rapid and networked flow of information, competing political views and alternative discourses on key issues, and working as new kind of public arena to connect people beyond the geographical distance and generational difference, the Internet has emerged as the very center of political participation and cultural expression.

Performing Internet politics: the power of parody Parody can be defined as ‘a self-conscious and exaggerated use of dominant conventions for the sake of comic effects or ridicule’ (Buckingham 2003: 165). It is a kind of ‘parasitic’ language whose grammar is often borrowed from an ‘original’ text. In other words, parody is a way of appropriating as well as resignifying popular and conventional images for something other than their normal use; a parodied object becomes an object of public ridicule, satire, resentment, and criticism. It has become a favorite means of expression on the Net to the 2030 generation in South Korea, who grew up in multimedia environments and are familiar with visual forms of meaning-making. What makes parody different from pastiche is that parody is not merely mimicking or unconventional recycling and quotation of popular cultural images, which is often found in advertising or pop art. Parody as a transgressive and calculated act on the Net is highly expressive and visceral appeal to netizens. By injecting acute political meanings, wit, irony, and transgressive messages, parody often works as a semiotic guerrilla practice and a symbolic act of rebellion. Borrowing French cultural critic de Certeau’s terms, Internet-based parody is a form of ‘making do’, what he calls ‘tactics’ which are employed by the ruled – say, average netizens – against ‘strategies’ employed by disciplinary powers, including the state, political parties, mainstream media, and other powerful social forces. With the widespread availability of softwares – such as Photoshop – any netizen who knows how to use such software can easily upload parodied images onto Internet sites, and, once exposed, these images can be rapidly transferred onto different sites by other. Parodied images have become quite popular among netizens and major portal sites and online newspapers have independent parody sections. Take the example of the impeachment of President Noh Moo-hyun in March 2004. It triggered massive on- and off-line protests of citizens from all walks of life; people found the decision a fundamental breach of political rule and more importantly, against the spirit of democratic political order which South Korean Society has achieved since 1987. Many regarded the Impeachment Bill as a highly politically motivated, irrational decision without substantive ground. Over 70 percent of citizens were against the

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Impeachment Bill passed by the members of parliament whose term would expire within a month (Hangyoreh Daily, March 27, 2004). Without the leadership of the president’s own party, Uri Party, netizens responded and moved swiftly. A number of online sites of protests were instantly formed. Two of the most active sites were established at Daum – ‘Don’t threaten people!’ one of the biggest Internet portal sites in South Korea, and Ddanziilbo, a famous parody online site. What was interesting was the inventive use of visual images and narratives which criticized and acutely parodied the politicians who passed the impeachment motion. In one popular parody Noh was compared to a filmic character, Gandalf, from a widely popular film, The Lord of the Rings. It had captions that read ‘The Return of President Noh’ and ‘Reform of all the reforms has just begun’.13 Obviously, these captions celebrate the annulment of impeachment by the court. The outpouring of anger and the call to support the president were widely shared. This was reflected in the parliamentary election in April 2004. President Noh’s Uri Party emerged as the majority party against the expectations of many political analysts before the impeachment. Parodied images, once articulated with powerful political events and popular interests, seem able to generate powerful symbolic resonances and discursive effects which are relayed and echoed throughout the Net. They have visceral appeal and are disseminated by willing netizens freely. Relative to the time demanded to read a dense and politically charged article on the Net, handy and easy to understand, evocative and consciousness-raising at times, parodied images definitely generate attention-gathering as well as emotionally charged power. No wonder that major Internet portals, political parties and offline dailies have started to pay attention to their popularity and omnipresence, and, even conservative parties and media employ parodied images which mock or criticize the current government and progressive political figures.14

In lieu of conclusion: net power and the changing faces of politics To recap, as the Internet and new media are becoming ever more ubiquitous in South Korea, ICTs have become familiar aspects of everyday life. The interactive Internet communication and network participation of citizens have vividly demonstrated the growing presence and power of the Net in political events, such the presidential election in 2002, the impeachment crisis of March 2004, and the parliamentary elections in 2004. During these and other dramatic political events, the Net became a main conduit of political discussions as well as a crucial base for popular mobilization from below. It became a platform that facilitated and circulated subterranean information widely as well as provoked alternative interpretations of political issues and events. The surprise victory of Noh Moo-hyun in the December 2002 presidential election and his return to the normal state of things in April 2004,

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after the failed impeachment, would not be thinkable without the intervention and influence of the Internet. In both instances, voluntary civic associations and online communities, including Nosamo, and young voters effectively utilized the potential of the Net, thereby elevating themselves to the main agents of recent socio-political transformations in South Korea. The flourishing of the Internet-related public forums, various Net-based communities, subcultures, and wild publics in South Korea can partly be attributed to the relative backwardness and inefficiency of its political parties and the dominance of conservative media institutions as major ideological shaper. Under conditions in which the established political system was unresponsive or driven by narrow political-cum-ideological interests, the Internet demonstrated its formidable intervening power and innovative practice for more participatory forms of cultural politics led by citizens. Thus, at crucial political conjuncture or crisis, the Net functions as the galvanized medium of political mobilization and influence, challenging political conventions and strategies. As well, in provoking new forms of examining politics and articulating connections between the populace and the political process, the Net encourages the culture of dissent. These new tendencies seem to signal a new and much more positive kind of networked politics and dynamics for the further political democratization of South Korea. However, this undeniable force of Net power exercised by ordinary citizens, intellectuals, and cultural intermediaries seems to pose problems and display flaws too. Since the failed impeachment, conservatives have been greatly impressed with the Net power exercised by pro-Noh Moo-hyun groups and the progressives. As a result, several political webzines and online papers which carry exclusively conservative messages and an anti-Noh stance have emerged and started to attract supporters. These kinds of conflicts and confrontations have started to shape Net-based political culture: Net-based media and discussion sites are increasingly divided along rigid ideological and political differences driven by almost blind partisanship. Partisanship appears to have returned as the determinant rather than one of the many filters and framing devices across the Net-media. This ‘unhealthy’ fragmentation of online media by intolerant partisanship shows a lack of a more mature and rational network culture for more inclusive forms of political communication and deliberation. And, once galvanized, Internet forums and public access points are increasingly fragmented and ghettoized (Y. Choi 2004). Skeptics may charge therefore that the Net at the current juncture looks not like an expanded and working version of Habermasian public sphere(s), but one increasingly dominated by what Gitlin (1998) calls ‘public sphericules’ – many social groups often blindly pursuing their own narrow political interests and ideological influences. To be fair, it seems that the Net has demonstrated both possibilities and limitations. The online-based communication forms and the pattern in which they have been utilized have made apparent that new kinds of cultural and political struggles can and have been activated with the emergence of Net

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power and citizens’ participation into the Net. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear that, perhaps unfortunately, the Net reflects the social world beyond the Net: political rigidity, excessive partisanship, factionalism, and the will to overpower and dominate. It remains to be seen how the newly emerged Net power with its new forms of popular participation can overcome problems and limitations in the coming years.

Notes 1 The generational characteristics of 2030 generation include non-traditional or networked forms of individualism against collectivism – Confucianism – pursuit of personal autonomy, pluralistic values, and security, quest of cultural and personal diversity, and media and visual literacy, etc (D. Lee et al., 2005). 2 When using a cyworld mini-homepage, there is a matter of ‘peer pressures’ – one has to visit others’ mini-homepages and leave short messages in order for others to visit his or her homepage, thereby maintaining virtual friendships. 3 Such a labeling, in reality, is politically motivated and incorrect in that the Noh Moon-Hyun government advocates neo-liberal policies in economy and laborrelated areas. 4 OhmyNews has also started to issue an international edition. It has about 600 international citizen journalists. 5 One recent survey ranks OhmyNews and Pressian, another online newspaper, as two of the top 10 most influential media institutions in South Korea which compete with and challenge offline newspapers (Sisa Journal, March 13th, 2005). Whereas major offline newspapers traditionally adopt conservative stances, online newspapers are considered ‘progressive’ and they have challenged offline papers’ authority and political role. 6 Media reform is centered on the role of Chosun Daily. Chosun Daily is the biggest newspaper in South Korea which carries (ultra)conservative values. It steadily supported former authoritarian regimes and has been deeply implicated in politics by actively providing discourses of the conservatives as well as highly politicized and biased representations of sociopolitical affairs to its readers. Since the Kim Dae Jung government (1997–2002), it has incessantly criticized the ruling regime and progressives. 7 It is widely accepted that the progressives have exercised dominant power in cyberspace up until lately. Since the impeachment, conservative forces have learned a valuable lesson and now there are several online newspapers and political webzines which carry, defend, and promote conservative values. 8 The 1980s in South Korea is often defined as the era of ‘negotiated revolution’. Many university students, social activists, and workers fought dictatorship in order to pursue democratic reforms. A number of ‘386’ generation (in)directly participated in organized struggles against the authoritarian state throughout the 1980s. Some of the activists and leaders of student movements came to join the Kim Dae Jung and Noh Moo-hyun government. 9 Chung was another candidate for the presidential election before he struck a deal with Noh Moo-hyun to form a joint campaign by yielding his candidacy and creating an alliance with Noh’s camp. Chung saw his political stock rising to its peak in 2002 by joining forces with Noh Moo-hyun with the aim to outrun Lee Hoi-chang of the Grand National Party. He, however, broke off his alliance with Noh only a day before the December 19th presidential election and his influence and popularity in politics have plummeted with Noh’s triumphant run to the presidency.

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10 Nosamo is the first ‘fan’ group of politicians in South Korea. It has become a norm for political fandom phenomena in Korea. It now boasts some 109,200 members. The 2030 generation’s participation in political election was usually fairly low compared to that of the population over 40. But during the presidential election of 2002, the younger generation’s turnout rate for the ballot was much higher than expected. Such a turnout was due to the fact that the election’s result was uncertain until the very last minutes and Noh’s camp, including Nosamo, did mobilize younger voters successively through online petitioning and offline rallies. 11 Chosun Daily, especially, often has played an active role in past presidential elections by presenting unbalanced news stories and opinion pieces which deliberately support particular political candidates. 12 Up until recently, leading online newspapers, webzines, and major portal sites could be categorized as ‘progressive’ or anti-conservative in their ideological character and Noh Moo-huyn was heavily favored over Lee Hoi-chang. Things have somewhat changed and the conservatives learned a hard lesson: now there are several highly active online newspapers and political webzines which promote ‘conservative’ values in the local scene. Also, the supporters of conservative politicians have formed supporter groups following the example of Nosamo. 13 Yoo Shimin, renowned social critic and a member of the National Assembly presented a framed parody image to President Noh Moo-hyun after the impeachment was annulled, and Noh came back to power. 14 It seems that there emerge new trends surrounding parody culture in the contemporary setting: first, parodied images on the Net are becoming devoid of political meanings and desires. Some of the parodied images are circulated for fun and visual consumption. Second, conservative online papers and webzines have started to produce their own parodied images to attack and mock the Noh Moo-hyun government.

References Bennett, W. Lance (2004) ‘Communicating Global Activism: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics’, in Win van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul Nixon and Dieter Rucht (eds) Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements. London: Routledge, pp. 123–146. Buckingham, David (2003) ‘Media Education and the End of the Critical Consumer’, Harvard Educational Review 73(3): 309–328. Castells, Manuel (ed.) (2004) The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Chang, Woo-Young (2005) ‘Political Dynamism of Online Journalism’, Economy and Society 13(2): 157–188. Choi, Youngmook (2004) ‘Internet Media: Between Public Spheres and Base of Political Functionaries’, Inmulkwa Sasang 77: 120–141. Gitlin, Tod (1998) ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ in Tamara Liebes and James Curran (eds) Media, Ritual, and Identity. London: Routledge. Hwang, Uihyun (2004) e-Politics. Seoul: Gagio Publishing Co. Kim, Dongwhan and Kim Hyunsik (2005) Candlelight@Plaza. Seoul: BookKorea. Kim, Eunmi and Kim Hyunju (2005) ‘The Modalities of Communication and Consensus Making on the Internet’, in Choi Yangsoo (ed.) Cultural Transformation and Media in South Korea. Seoul: Hanul, pp. 316–360. Kim, Youngchul and Yoon Sungi (2005) Electronic Democracy: The Search for a New Political Paradigm. Seoul: Orum.

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Lee, Donghoo, Kim Youngchan, and Lee Keehyeung (2005) ‘IT and the Formation of the New Generation’, in Choi Yangsoo (ed.) Cultural Transformation and Media in South Korea, Seoul: Hanul, pp. 240–278. Lee Jungduck (2005) 21st Century South Korea’s Cultural Revolution. Seoul: Sallim. Lee Keehyeung (2005) Internet Media in Contemporary South Korea: ‘Public Spheres’ or Sites of ‘Ghettoized Political Discourses?’ Seoul: Hanul. Lee Keehyeung (2003) Researching Political Contents in Internet Media. Seoul: Hanul. Lee Wontae (2005) ‘Internet Politics: Democracy or Populism?’ in Association of Scholarly Groups (eds) A New View of the Korean Society, pp. 348–369. Seoul: Hanul. Marshall, David (2005) New Media Cultures. London: Arnold. Oh, Yeonho (2004) OhmyNews. Seoul: Humanist. Park, Sengkwan and Chang Kyungseop (2001) Media Power and the Dynamics of Agenda-setting. Seoul: Communication Books. Song, Hokeun (2003) South Korea, Which Future It Will Choose? Seoul: 21st Books.

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The depersonalized is politically correct Japanese electioneering practices in mid-life crisis Kaori Tsurumoto

Introduction: investigating election practices as ‘popular culture’ It is the aim of this chapter to seek the whereabouts of ‘popular culture’ in the Japanese House of Councilors elections held on 11th of July, 2004. It will employ three distinct conceptions of ‘popular culture’. First, in analyzing a Japanese election drama series called Atarashii kaze (Fresh Breeze), which was aired in the period immediately prior to the actual election taking place, ‘popular culture’ is understood as a concoction of textual encoding/ decoding and of the context within which the social meaning of the drama was forged, i.e., as cultural and social formation. Second, it engages with a notion of ‘popular culture’ as everyday life practices. During the election period, I carried out fieldwork research by literally walking and sitting in the downtown area where campaigning was most concentrated. I will recount my subjective experience of having occupied that urban space as an instance of ‘popular culture’. Finally, the chapter employs a notion of ‘popular culture’ which cleaves to the ‘media’ as its primary base. Here, my intention is not to problematize the presumption that the media is ‘popular culture’, but to simply discuss what was or was not represented in television news coverage of the political campaign, and how. Deploying the analysis of the three ‘popular culture’ sites, one can suggest that Japanese electioneering practices manifest in the realm of ‘popular culture’ are, by and large, de-personalized, and the Public Office Election Law (POEL) is largely responsible for this state of affairs. The chapter is arranged as follows. First, a prologue, being the precampaigning period leading up to the 2004 House of Councilors election, describing one vain television attempt to merchandize electioneering practices through ‘personalizing’ it as a drama show. Focus then shifts to the official campaign period. I, as a researcher who has first-hand knowledge of the field, will soliloquize upon my own experiences, and recount my own inability to personally engage with electioneering practices. Then, there is a set change, from whence the mode of narration is no longer chronological, but

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 173 will be topically organized. An overviewof the Public Office Election Law is provided, and sections of the law which are most relevant to the discussion at hand are emphasized. Subsequently, the study moves onto a discussion of media representations, in particular, television representations of electioneering practices; we will particularly focus upon how POEL circumscribes the media, and how it forbids representations of personal interest stories. The epilogue argues that the findings regarding the whereabouts of ‘popular culture’ in the 2004 House of Councilors election are indicative of what one might call a ‘mid-life crisis’ in Japanese political elections, which can no longer depend on its present popular cultural practices to assert itself, but has yet to create other ways to be popularly cultural.

Trendy drama: political election = oil: water A well-developed topic of academic interest within Asian Cultural Studies concerns the social meaning of the torendii dorama (trendy drama) genre in Japanese television, which rose to social prominence in the early 1990s. Targeting second-generation baby-boomers born in the 1970s as its audience, the content of these dramas was distinctive in that if offered a detailed and visual blueprint of a ‘trendy’ lifestyle – including such minutiae as what shape of collar one’s sweater should be, in which shops one should buy one’s pet food, how to order what drinks in which cafés or restaurants, how to smile romantically, what kind of job one should aspire to – to a generation of youths who could still taste the exuberance of the Japanese bubble economy.1 These dramas were also successfully marketed in Asian locations, such as Taiwan or Hong Kong, and the consumption of these dramas involved multi-layered reading processes which were locally-specific and circuitous (Iwabuchi 2001). It is in this manner that I would now like to discuss the social meaning of Atarashii kaze (Fresh Breeze),2 which aired between April 15th and June 24th of 2004 (11 episodes, 54 minutes each). Let me set the cameras rolling by roughly sketching out the storyline. The main protagonist of Fresh Breeze is Niimi Takashi, a newspaper journalist. The first episode establishes the fact that his first wife died of illness not long after giving birth to their daughter, Moe. Moe is now an adorable-looking 7-year-old and Takashi is as yet single, in spite of being tall, good-looking, honorable and capable. Even before he appears on the screen, the audience has already been introduced to Mako, a willowy 26-year-old young woman with doe-like eyes and silky long black hair, who loves children and aspires to be a children’s book writer. Engagement between Takashi and Mako is a fait accompli, and the narrative quickly parades through their wedding ceremony. Soon after the commencement of their married life, Takashi has the opportunity to interview a veteran politician. On this chance meeting, the politician takes a personal liking to him, and soon after suggests that he should run for the upcoming House of Representatives election. On the strength of this suggestion, he decides to leave his journalist job and run for

174 Kaori Tsurumoto office. This turn of events serves as the cornerstone upon which the rest of the drama unfolds. The ensuing episodes carefully depict why Takashi’s decision to run for office borders on professional suicide. First, there are financial obstacles. In order to run for office, he must quit his job. As he is the sole breadwinner of the family, this jeopardizes his family’s financial well-being. Furthermore, running a campaign costs money, and if he loses, he is likely to run himself into deep debt. Second, there are family relationship issues to consider. The audience is told that Mako and Moe’s relationship is off to a rocky start, with Moe rebuffing Mako’s overtures to mother her. Also, Mako’s mother was not necessarily in favor of the marriage, and if Takashi were to quit his job, even the more so. Indeed, being a political candidate’s wife is a grueling and full-time occupation, and Mako herself is aghast when she hears Takashi’s intention, as she did not consent to marriage with this possibility in mind. Third, the conventions of the political campaign system are stacked up against Takashi’s bid. The show portrays how running a successful political campaign requires expertise and experience, which he does not have. Moreover, it also shows that having a build up of loyal supporters which has been nurtured over many years is crucial to winning elections. As Takashi decides to foray into campaigning at a late hour, he will have difficulties in even having voters remember his name and face. Despite the odds being set overwhelmingly against his favor, he decides, of course, to run for office. The rationale provided for the viewer is exemplified in the lines that he utters during a campaign speech: The other day, my wife’s sister told me something. She said that she used to think that politics was not something that had any relation to her because she did not understand it. However, this is not so. Even if one doesn’t understand it, one has to demonstrate one’s anger. She told me that she now realizes this. . . . I think so as well. Every single person has to show one’s anger toward the political situation, question it full-on . . . By doing such things, won’t something change? Small puffs of breeze can merge into a whole and in this way bear a large swell of change.3 This guileless posture of the underdog that Takashi adopts works its magical charm, and after a further interim of twists and turns in the plot, he not only manages to be elected to office but also convinces a significant number of his constituency – including his wife, Mako, who decides to become his political secretary (while maintaining her career as a children’s book author and also being a good mother and wife) – that personal involvement in politics is meaningful and life-enhancing. Protagonists of trendy dramas are, by and large, Japanese sarariiman (salary men) or oeru (office ladies), company employees. If the protagonist is to come from a more affluent or less mainstream stratum of society, they may be doctors, or perhaps an heir to a family-run business. Sometimes,

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 175 they may be journalists, artists, cooks, detectives, policemen, teachers, fashion designers, athletes, university students, stewardesses, nurses, hairdressers, part-time workers, government bureaucrats or simply unemployed. In other words, very rarely has a character of a trendy drama been an aspiring politician. Fresh Breeze was ‘fresh’ in that its protagonist was an aspiring politician, suggesting that the show’s producers meant to introduce a new type of practice, i.e., involvement in election campaigns – in the already long list of what constitutes ‘trendiness’. However, it is not only the producer who has the ultimate say on what is ‘trendy’. Ultimately, it depends on viewers’ approval or rejection of a program by either watching or not watching it. In the 1990s, when the popularity of the ‘trendy drama’ genre was at its height, audience ratings in excess of 20 percent were not uncommon. In the case of Fresh Breeze, the first episode had a rating of 6.9 percent, and an average rating of 5.9 percent. In all fairness, trendy dramas no longer enjoyed their previous domination in the rating wars by 2004; even then, these numbers are exceedingly poor, where a hit will still regularly draw an average audience rating just above or below 15 percent. When compared to other drama series of equivalent time slots and length shown during the same television season, Fresh Breeze’s audience ratings were by far the worst.4 These numbers would suggest that the Japanese audiences unequivocally rejected the conception of electioneering practices as trendy or fashionable practices. June 24th, the day of the final episode, coincided with the commencement of the official campaign period of the 2004 House of Councilors elections. Before the election, it was commonly recognized that the outcome of this election was vital, as it would significantly shape the topography of Japanese politics until the next House of Representatives elections, which, it was estimated, would only take place in three years. Despite the importance attached, voter turnout for this election was 56.57 percent, the third lowest rate in the post-war period, in line with a recurring tendency of Japanese voting patterns particularly since the 1990s. It may be said that this general lack of interest in exercising one’s right to vote was mirrored in the lack of popularity of Fresh Breeze. However, this is only one small slice of what might constitute the relationship between ‘electioneering practices’ and ‘popular culture’. To engage more fully with this relationship, a different approach to research is required, a one which would apprehend ‘popular culture’ in a wider context, in the very fabric of everyday life and experiences, which is the task of the next section.

Experiencing election practices as popular culture on the streets In Japan, the law limits the campaigning period for a House of Councilors’ election to 17 days leading up to polling day; all prior campaigning being strictly forbidden. In this election analyzed, the official campaign period was

176 Kaori Tsurumoto between June 24th and July 10th, 2004. Due to legal limitations on what constitutes legitimate campaigning activities (which will be discussed fully in the next section), I was able to experience and witness most relevant campaigning activities by quite simply walking the streets of Sakae, the liveliest shopping quarter of Nagoya City,5 on the two weekend days of Sunday, July 4th and Saturday, July 10th. Let me begin by providing a sample account of the first hour of my fieldwork experiences told in first-person narrative. On the streets, July 4th, 2004 It is July 4th, 2004, Sunday, a little before 10 a.m. I force myself out of my bed, still feeling sluggish and tired. If I had a choice, I would still be in bed. At this point in my life, I am having to commute to Tokyo every week in order to build up my CV. Such being the case, spending weekends doing fieldwork on election campaigns does not enthrall me in the least. Besides, it is HOT and HUMID in Nagoya City. The temperature will likely hover in the upper reaches of the 30s today. By the end of this day, I will be even more dehydrated, sunburnt, and tired than I am now. Why, oh why, have I agreed to do this? My mother, as zealously cooperative as she always seems to be in matters related to my ‘career’, is calling me from downstairs to say that I should be out and about doing fieldwork, Kaori-‘chan’.6 Yes, I know that, mother. Just let me have some coffee first, please . . . Approximately an hour later, I have managed to gather bits of my fragmented self just enough to brave the outer elements. I take my first photograph to prove the moment that I commence my fieldwork. It is 11:20 a.m. The plan is to first go and cast absentee votes,7 at a polling office located in the local elementary school, and then make my way to Sakae to get some ‘data’. I am now at the polling office. When I find myself standing at the polling booth, I’m afraid that all I can do is indiscriminately put a check in two of the candidates’ boxes, as instructed; double-fold the slip of paper to make sure it’s secret, as instructed; and meekly cast it into a nearby box, again as instructed. As I cast my vote, I try my best to look innocent, harmless and earnest, and ask a nearby volunteer proctor if I could be allowed to take a photograph of the polling room. There was no one else there but me and my mother casting votes. The man, probably in his sixties, looks at me with an expression of shock and mild disdain coupled with judicious amounts of curiosity, and simply says, ‘No, no, you can’t’ very quietly. My mother, whose bright idea it was to request permission to take the photo in the first place, butts in, saying ‘She’s doing research’, but the answer remains ‘No’, and I’m feeling drained already. Thereafter, the hour-long drive to Sakae commences. Mother drives, ever mindful of my role as a fieldworker, I look for any traces of election campaigning on the street. What I note is a significant number of small posters, posters, posters, plastered haphazardously here, there, everywhere on buildings, windows, as well as large white billboards

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 177 situated in every public school, park and other property owned by Nagoya City. I dutifully take photographs of these posters, thinking that were I not specifically assigned to the task of noticing them, I would not be inclined to pay any attention, precisely because they are so prevalent, and all look so THE same. Each poster contains a head shot of a smiling person of average to below average looks, a name which is presumably the name of the candidate, and the name of the party. That’s about all there is to notice. They are exceedingly boring texts to look at. Besides, the streets of Nagoya are full of so many other posters and signs, and there is, after all, not much difference in terms of format between signposts that herald the existence of a bank, karaoke bar, apparel shop, acupuncturist, or an English conversation school, or fitness club in comparison to that of a campaign poster. While the above thoughts are streaming through my consciousness, we finally arrive in Sakae. It is 12.45 p.m. In the middle of Sakae is a fairly striking-looking light-blue tiled fountain known as the Fountain of Hope. It is something of a local landmark. In the area in front of the fountain, there are maybe 7–8 people wearing blue T-shirts. I know from experience that campaign volunteers usually wear uni-colored T-shirts that are typically part of the rainbow palette. It is now probably over 35 degrees Celsius. The fountain is adjacent to a busy four-lane road with traffic speeding past. Some pedestrians are hurrying to and fro, probably eager to reach an airconditioned destination. My mother drops me off in front of the fountain. With a rather large small sigh, I resign myself to sitting on a bench near the fountain to observe what will happen next. Maybe 10–15 minutes later, a small van with big loudspeakers fixed on the roof arrives. The running candidate of the Democratic Party of Japan, Sato Taisuke, has arrived. He looks like a nice man in his fifties. He is wearing a white polo shirt with gray trousers. Except for the fact that he’s wearing a light-blue sash diagonally across his chest and is sporting white gloves, he could be my next-door neighbor out on a leisurely walk. He and other people who seem to be on the campaign trail are now speaking, using a microphone. I’m broiling under the sun and cannot be bothered to pay full attention to what they’re saying, but trite phrases such as ‘Liberal Democratic Party is no good’, ‘Liberal Democratic party is not trustworthy’, ‘time for change’, ‘your support’ do momentarily register on my addled brain. Being so bored, I allow myself to drift off into a casually surreal reverie, wondering about the white gloves . . . Why do politicians in Japan always wear white gloves? What do they signify? Purity . . . ? Wholesome intentions . . . ? Taxi drivers in Japan wear white gloves. If a candidate were to run for elections without wearing white gloves, would he get fewer votes . . . ? Maybe taxi drivers are political candidates in disguise . . . ? In short, I am not able to give significant meaning to the fieldwork data that is in front of me. The experience is not engrossing, and in the few minutes that I’ve spent watching and listening, what new information I have managed to ascertain amounts to the observation that the candidate seems to be a nice man.

178 Kaori Tsurumoto In the ensuing hours where I doggedly stuck to the task of ‘doing fieldwork on election practices’, that is, walking around, sitting and generally observing the streets, trying to spot campaigning activities, I continued to see much of the same as described above – more small vans with loudspeakers, more people wearing uni-colored T-shirts, more fragments of trite phrases spoken over the microphone, more white gloves, more posters of similar formats, on and on and on. I would suggest that an average pedestrian who would have had less vested interest in paying attention to these activities, and in most cases, probably spent far less time exposing himself/herself to it, would have found as much or as little meaning as I did. The above account of my fieldwork experiences is both fictional and nonfictional. There is no possible way that I can accurately reproduce every single detail and emotion of my experiences. In this way, the account is fiction. However, I have made a genuine attempt to convey the general impression that the experience left me with, i.e., that of feeling tired, disgruntled and dislocated.

An outline of the Public Office Election Law (POEL) The above findings would beg the question, why did I find election practices on the streets so dull? The answer is to be found in the POEL, a legal code presently comprising 17 chapters and 275 articles8 that lays out the procedural parameters of Japanese elections. In the case of a House of Councilors election, 17 days before the polling date, potential candidates must file an application for candidacy to the local election administration commissioner’s office. Upon receiving the application, the commissioner’s office will hand over the following emblems and markers to the candidate: • • • • • • • • • •

A nameplate to be displayed on the building of campaign headquarter office. A sign board to be displayed on the automobile and ship used for campaign purposes. A sign board to be displayed on the loudspeaker used for campaign purposes. A flag to be displayed during campaign speeches made on public streets. An armband to be worn by those riding the campaign automobile and ship. An armband to be worn during campaign speeches made on public streets. An official seal to be stamped on postcards certifying that it is the candidate’s. A paper slip to be glued to postal packages certifying that it is for campaigning purposes. An authenticating certificate to be displayed on newspaper ads, and A certificate stamp, issuance certificate or approval certificate to be displayed on campaign posters.

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 179 During the campaign period, the above authentications must be displayed appropriately. Otherwise, the candidate is deemed to be breaking the law. What would be considered to be legal campaigning activities are also precisely designated by POEL. They comprise the following: •

•

•

Display and/or Distribution of the Following Paper-Based Materials: Postcards, posters, placards, lanterns, billboards, newspaper advertisements, leaflets. Public orations in the form of: Private speech meetings, roadside speech meetings, intermission speeches, calling from automobile or ship using a loudspeaker. Others: Making telephone calls canvassing votes; person-to-person interviews.

Each of these campaigning activities is, in actuality, more minutely circumscribed in POEL. For example, measurements of each of the paper-based materials that are allowed for the campaign are fully-designated, as are the number, period and locations where they may be distributed and/or displayed. Any other activities that would fall outside the parameters of the above are considered to be illegal. The following is a list of typical examples of illegal activities: • • •

•

• •

bribery of any kind; making house calls to places such as personal homes, companies and shops in order to canvass votes; advertisements by the candidate or his/her support group which hail potential voters in the form of season’s greetings, congratulation/ commiseration, or in any auspicious manner; except for modest amounts of tea and snacks/fruits, and a specified number of lunch boxes to be distributed to election campaigners, any giving of drinks and food is forbidden; signature-collecting campaign to ascertain votes; campaigning activities such as parades utilizing many cars or wellordered ranks of people, which cause undue public attention.

A bird’s-eye view of POEL would suggest that election practices in Japan are, in fact, so riddled with bureaucratic rules and regulations to the point that they cannot help but be dull and mind-numbingly similar in their content, since any campaigning practices that significantly diverge from those specified by POEL would be considered illegal. Consequently, it has been said that not all the rules are always adhered to, even with the best intention (Abe et al., 1994: 146–147). However, on July 4th, while I was conducting fieldwork, I was witness to an event attesting to the seriousness with which POEL is upheld. As stated earlier, July 4th was a very hot Sunday, and some of the campaign volunteers standing in front of Fountain of Hope were holding a

180 Kaori Tsurumoto bunch of paper fans. My mother, who had, in the meantime, come to join me, had the temerity to ask a volunteer if she could have one of the fans as a souvenir. The volunteer looked a little surprised, but gave my mother a fan without any fuss. It so happened that the present member of the House of Representatives, Akamatsu Hirotaka, was standing quite close to us – he was there campaigning on behalf of Sato Taisuke. My mother spontaneously proceeded to ask him to autograph the fan, which he happily did and he also posed for a photograph with my mother and the fan. My mother then pushed me to ask Sato Taisuke to autograph the other side of the fan – all in the name of ‘doing research’. I took on board my mother’s suggestion, and Sato Taisuke took on board my request. He very obligingly signed the fan, ‘For Kaori Tsurumoto, by Sato Taisuke’. During all this time, one of the campaigners – who, unlike many of the others, was not wearing a campaign t-shirt but was plainly dressed in a beige shirt – had been quietly observing from the sideline. He suddenly approached me and said ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid we have to request you to return the fan. These fans are only to be distributed to volunteers, and not to potential voters. If we give you this fan, it would be considered a form of bribery, and we’d be breaking the Public Office Election Law (POEL).’ I was aghast, since the fan, for me, was important ‘fieldwork material’. I said to the man, ‘Okay, well, I’ll return the fan, but you’ve got to let me take a photograph of the fan before I return it to you.’ He looked a me for a split second and said, ‘Okay, I guess photographs are all right, but please return the fan.’ And thus it is that ‘the fan’ remains with me today only as a photograph. Nowadays in Japan – or at least in central Nagoya – in the summer season, shops/companies often have paper fans printed with their logo and some sort of advertisement and distribute them free to passers-by. Indeed, this is so common that one could easily collect two to three such fans in a couple of hours. This is probably why when my mother first requested a fan, the volunteer gave her one without thinking that she was doing anything wrong. However, under POEL, even this most common of advertising practice is, in fact, illegal, and, at least in the instance I was involved in, POEL was, in fact, upheld. This is an indication of the sincerity and solemnity with which campaigners will try to conform to POEL.

Media coverage of election campaigns Under POEL, since almost all forms of campaigning which involves direct and personal contact between the candidate and potential voters – such as e.g., making house calls, sending personalized messages via the media, giving even the smallest of token gifts – is strictly off-limits, we may say that the overriding characteristic of direct-contact campaigning activities is the street-campaign, whose general ineffectualness I have already pointed out. Thus, if one happened to stay secluded at home during the 17 days leading

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 181 up to polling day, it would be possible for one to remain completely ignorant of the fact that there even was an ongoing House of Councilors election campaign. However, this is unlikely. At the very least, the government does send a single postcard to registered addresses of eligible citizens, informing them of their duty to vote on polling day at their registered polling location. Moreover, there are mediated means through which the presence of election, campaigning and candidates can reach the private sphere of the Japanese home. Most Japanese homes have at least one television set and many households will have a daily newspaper delivered to their front door,9 and there is also no denying that there is fair bit of media coverage of election during campaign period. Of course, there is no guarantee that pieces about the election in the media will grab the attention of the reader/viewer in their home. Just as one can walk past a campaign poster without really noticing it, one could watch election news coverage without seeing it; one’s eyes could simply roll over articles on the election without apperceiving it. Or, one could, more simply, just turn the page, or switch to another channel – as often seemed to have been the unfortunate case with the above mentioned Fresh Breeze. Nevertheless, media-mediated contact with the voter has legally permitted campaign access to impinge upon the personal space of individuals. Of course, again, the altogether all-too familiar POEL makes its indelible presence felt in itemizing how the election is to be covered by the media. During the official campaigning period, the political parties for which the candidates have registered may produce short programs which introduce their ‘political opinion’ on air. These short programs will be broadcast on NHK (Nippon Broadcasting Company) and other major television broadcasting companies without any editing being allowed. They take two program formats, the first being what is known as Seikenhdsd (Political Opinion Broadcast), the second being Keirekihdsd(Background Broadcast). During this particular campaign, Political Opinion Broadcast (hereafter POB) programs were aired on the six different days: July 1st and 2nd, 5th–8th, between 11:00 and 11:50 or 11:55 p.m., all on the NHK station. No Background Broadcast programs were aired. The following is a description of an actual POB program which was made by the Liberal Democratic Party and aired on July 5th, 2005, at 11 p.m., on NHK. Abe Shinzd, Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party is quietly standing in the middle of a room. He is wearing a dark navy suit and a white shirt with beige necktie. He lightly rests his hands on a small ash-blue podium placed in front of him. The camera captures Abe Shinzd at mid-distance. We can see that he is standing in a room with beige walls and ash-blue carpeting. The only other objects on the screen are a woman dressed in dark brown suit – she is providing simultaneous sign language interpretation, and a sign board at the top of the screen which reads ‘Jimintd (Liberal Democratic Party’. Abe Shinzd begins to speak in a monosyllabic rhythm:

182 Kaori Tsurumoto This is Abe Shinzd. I will introduce the candidates that the Liberal Democratic Party has nominated as their candidates in the division of proportional representation. Votes for the House of Councilors’ proportional representation election are cast by acknowledging either the personal name of the candidate or the party name. Please cast your vote by writing either the names of the proportional candidate that will be introduced now or ‘Liberal Democratic Party’. So now, let me introduce to you, in alphabetical order, to the 33 candidates that LDP have nominated as a representative in each area.10 Abe Shinzd steps aside and vacates the space in front of the podium. A thirtyish-looking Japanese man wearing a navy suit, light blue shirt and a dark blue tie calmly walks into the screen and takes Abe Shinzd’s place. He bows deeply to the camera. Abe says, ‘First up is our youngest candidate, the 32-year-old Mr Akimoto Tsukasa-san’, after which Mr Akimoto (presumably) makes a 23-second-long speech, transcribed/translated below in full: This is 32-year-old Akimoto Tsukasa, born in the 46th year of Showa. In this era which sees the emergence of consumer-oriented and aging society, the biggest theme facing Japan today is how we, the young, will mobilize and support this society. Please entrust the future of Japan to us, the younger generation. Please count on me. Please give your support to Akimoto Tsukasa, 32 years old.11 At this point, Abe Shinzd, who has been watching from the side with an avuncular expression, says, ‘Let’s make a good effort’, and Akimoto Tsukasa replies, ‘I will make a good effort.’ They lightly bow to each other; Akimoto Tsukasa walks off the screen, and is replaced in turn by the second candidate. After this, the program continues along this pattern. Each of the 33 candidates is given a one-sentence introduction by Abe Shinzd, followed by a short speech by the candidate lasting approximately 20 seconds – which basically allows no information but their name and one slogan-like point to be made, and ending in a light bowing ritual between Abe Shinzd and the candidate. The finale of this 16-minute show is provided by Abe Shinzd, who, after the 33rd candidate has left the screen, steps back in front of the podium and says: ‘With Japan as a theme, the LDP will work to responsibly resolve various issues. On the polling day of July 11th, please choose either the name of the candidates introduced today or LDP. Thank you very much.’12 He takes a final bow. End of program. There are several variations in the formats that POB programs can take. For example, two days after the above show, on July 7th, 2005, the present party leader and Prime Minister of Japan, Koizumi Junichiro gave a speech regarding his party’s policies and his own personal views lasting approximately 20 minutes. Another format is to have the party leader and an appropriately chosen partner in a question-and-answer session, in which party policies are clarified. In each case, the broadcasts were recorded in the

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 183 afore-mentioned beige-walled and ash-blue carpeted room. On the whole, it may be said that these programs were inundated with concrete pieces of ‘facts’, e.g., who the candidate is, what their names are – as well as giving the opportunity to party leaders to give longer speeches on the general policies of the party. They, in the main, were cut and dry, very boring programs filled with mostly unnecessary information arranged neatly into numerical and serial order – for anyone who might choose to watch them, that is. To be honest, this was the first time that I had taken any notice of POB programs. I have never observed any of my friends and/or family members watching POB programs, and I have never been witness to anyone discussing the contents of POB programs in daily conversation, as in, e.g., ‘Hey, did you watch last night’s POB?’, ‘Yes, I did. I sure know which one I’m going to vote for now!’ . . . Not a chance. There is, of course, a ‘good’ reason for this phenomenon. It is all in the name of a clean and straight election. Just as political parties and candidates are not allowed to ‘manipulate’ information, the media industry is also forbidden from doing so, sometimes to a ludicrous extent. This I found out in the most naïve way possible. On July 4th, after a whole day of loitering and observing at Sakae, I came home to watch and videotape as much of the media coverage of the election as I could. My interest was to compare my own perception of what I saw on the street to media representations of it. However, regarding coverage of the campaign trail itself, I did not spot anything of what I saw out in Sakae that day on television, until I saw segmented body parts on the local news. I was not recording at the time, and cannot accurately reconstruct what I saw on the news that day, but on July 10th, I was ready with my recorder. Below is a description of a short news piece lasting 55 seconds, aired sometime between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m. on the local Tdkai television news program on the 10th. The following is a translation of the transcribed script that was read on air: With polling day of the House of Councilors election coming up tomorrow, candidates are channeling their efforts into making their last plea for voter support, since morning, in places such as on the street. (A) Amongst those, one candidate running for Aichi prefecture (B) gave a wayside speech in the morning in places such as in front of Nagoya Station, pleading for support from shoppers who happened to be passing by. (C) The results of this election would amount to public judgment of the Koizumi Administration which has reigned in government for over three years. In the three prefectures of Tokai Region, there are 7 candidates in Aichi, (D) 3 in Gifu and 3 in Mie prefecture. Today is the last day of the 17-day campaigning period (E) which started on the 24th of last month, and candidates are straining their voices (F) in an attempt to further expand voter support. (G) Except for few areas, polling will begin from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. tomorrow, and results will be announced (H) the same day (I).13

184 Kaori Tsurumoto In the above transcription, I have inserted A–I in brackets. They indicate the moment of transition from one visual image to another. Below is a list containing a brief description of each of the images:

(A): (B): (C): (D): (E): (F): (G): (H): (I):

mid-range shot of the upper-half of a body of a young woman in her twenties, reading the news to the camera close-up of a hand and microphone close-up of a loudspeaker with half a head of a person and a gloved hand, shown from behind close-up of walking pair of legs in navy trousers and black leather shoes close-up of half a back wearing a white shirt, half a head and a waving hand, shown from behind close-up of standing pair of legs in beige trousers and a hand shaking another hand close-up of a gloved hand, waving close-up of the words ‘House of Councilors Election July 11th’ which is part of a signboard mid-range shot of the upper-half of a body of a young woman in her 20’s, reading the news to the camera.

In short, in what paltry amount of coverage there was regarding street campaigning, the viewer is not able to ascertain which campaigner’s body part is being shown. Indeed, unless a voter was to go to great lengths to investigate the matter, there is no easy way to ascertain with any degree of certainty that the body parts are actually the campaigner’s. All the bodies shown in the piece are anonymous, except for the young woman who reads the news. Is this an Orwellian novel, or a science fiction parody? Nay, this is Japan. I would suggest that POEL forbids any journalist or cameraman from engaging with the material that candidates may choose to produce on the street. In forbidding the media from editing electioneering practices for fear of bending the truth, the law forbids any kind of ‘truth’, except in the driest and most skeletal form possible, from being dispatched to the viewers. Perhaps I am overstating my case, for there were other forms of television coverage aired aplenty during the campaigning period. For example, one typical and often seen format is the round-table discussion. Most television stations have, do and will likely continue to air live shows where they invite established politicians to discuss and debate the various pros and cons of election issues, along with other well-informed commentators who might be former politicians, journalists, university lecturers, professional commentators. This format is permissible because as they are live shows, and thus

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 185 cannot be liable to be accused of ‘manipulating’ information. I have, indeed, witnessed moments in such shows when the discussion heats up, and some of the individuals actually raise their voices and express emotion. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Japanese media is severely limited in reporting on elections in a way that would grab the interest of the viewer, since there can hardly be any ‘personal’ portrayal of the campaign which diverges from the official version provided by the government. This means the lack of a personal slant in election news coverage; let’s face it, people, in general, are more attracted to gossip than official ‘fact’. Indeed, on the evening of the 9th of July, when news programs should have and would normally have reported on the culmination of the campaign period as their top story, Soga Hitomi kissed her husband, Charles Jenkins, in front of television cameras, and Japanese audiences were privy to it, quite happily so, it would seem.14 For example, on Tsukushi Tetsuya News 23 (CBC, scheduled running time between 10:54 and 11:50 p.m.), an established news program presented by the much-revered anchorman Tsukushi Tetsuya, the moment that Soga Hitomi kissed her husband was re-played three times. Reporting on the election campaign took a greatly reduced second-seater on the program that day. Similarly, front page news on the Asahi newspaper on July 9th and 10th reported on Soga Hitomi’s passionate reunion with her family, overshadowing news pieces on elections. Rather than having a variety of media mis/representations of the campaign, the public have access to virtually no mis/representations from which to formulate their judgment. Given such a state of affairs, it is no wonder that Japanese electorates are disinclined from voting at all.

POEL and the Historical Emergence of Japanese Polling Culture To briefly summarize the discussion thus far, we have seen that electioneering practices did not manage to enter the category of ‘trendy’ everyday activities of the 20–30-somethings, if we are to use the low viewer rating of Fresh Breeze as an indication. My own experience of doing fieldwork is a personal testament to how discouragingly boring I find it to be, and that my half-hearted but also very earnest attempt to take personal interest was resoundingly unsuccessful. Finally, when I focused upon television reporting on the election, I found coverage of the election in abundance, but much of it was presented in a very cut-and-dried informational mode, and not as personal interest stories. Here, we may perhaps discern what Foucault might pronounce as a much skewed instance of the ‘modern’ experience. If Foucault had made any general prognosis of the modern experience, it might be as follows. Foucault brilliantly pointed out that the efficacy of the modern experience rests on the productive relationship between impersonalized, socially existent structures and opportunities for personalized elaborations of the self, and it is because they exist as opposing and yet

186 Kaori Tsurumoto complementary poles that the modern experience is so inexorable.15 In the case of Japanese election practices, we can say that one pole in the equation, i.e., that of structure, is very present in the most detailed manner imaginable. However, the other element in the equation, the ‘personal’, is severely missing, and in each instance POEL seems to be the imposing figure to assure that things remain thus. This would cause us to focus upon the historical emergence of POEL to learn what one might call the ‘polling culture’ of Japan. Such an investigative path would not necessarily provide us with an answer to ‘why’, but it may tell us ‘how’ POEL came to be. The rationale for POEL, first promulgated in 1950, was to ensure clean and fair elections, and was hand-in-glove with the ‘democratic’ aspirations set forth in Article 14 of the American-endorsed postwar Japanese Constitution which states that ‘[a]ll of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or origin . . .’ However, POEL cannot simply be seen as an American imposition, for much of what is found in POEL was already to be found in the ‘polling culture’ of pre-war Japan, whose nascence became a matter of necessity with the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution of 1889, which introduced the possibility that the representational voting system could be a natural right of ‘citizens’ for the first time in ‘Japanese history’. When Ito Hirobumi and other Meiji oligarchs set off on the course to bring the modern nation-state of ‘Japan’ into being, they recognized that they would have to institute some sort of national election in order to be recognized as a modern nation-state. Thus, it is that the first national election was held in 1890, in which no women were given voting rights, only men aged 30 years old or above. Obviously, the system was hardly universal; voter eligibility was restricted by sex, age and annual tax-money the individual filed. One had to have paid a total of over 15 yen for over 1 year in land and income tax or income tax for over 3 years to qualify as a voter. At that time, to pay 15 yen of annual land tax one had to own 19,830 m2 of land, which is approximately half the size of Tokyo Dome (46,755 m2). These restrictions were eased in following years; the annual tax requirement fell to 10 yen in 1900, 3 yen in 1919, and then, in 1925, were finally abolished. Nevertheless, the sex and age restrictions were not removed, so that the percentage of citizens with voter eligibility was 1.1 in 1890, and never more than 20 percent in the pre-World War II era. On the side of candidature eligibility, although they had of course to be Japanese men above 30 years of age, the requirement that they had to be adequately affluent (i.e., pay tax of any sort) was dropped in 1900. Rather, candidacy was restricted by disentitling certain social groups from standing for office. In 1889, no one who was an official employee of the Imperial Household, Judicial Branch, Accounts and Inspection Office, Revenues Offices, or public servants working at the prefectural, county or municipal level could stand for office. Nor could Shinto priests or Buddhist monks and teachers. In other words, from the very beginning, the option to stand for office was largely closed off to men of nobility, the samurai class and religious

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 187 leaders, those who would have been in possession of a certain amount of ‘cultural capital’ that might make them aspire to be politicians. This restriction was strengthened in the ensuing years, with elementary school teachers also being barred from running for office in 1900. Given such conditions, whether these men paid taxes was largely irrelevant, and could be dropped in 1900. While the government did not impose campaigning procedures in the early-Meiji period, by 1925, laws and regulations similar in content to that of POEL were in place. Restrictions included the following: (1) who could be campaign head officer and staff; (2) where campaign offices and campaign lounges could be located; (3) that house-to-house visitation to canvass for votes was illegal; (4) that third-party members could only participate in campaigning in a very restricted way (5) that there was a restriction on paper-based material used in elections; and (6) that there was a restriction on campaign expenses. Thus, long before 1945, the present framework where campaigning activities are limited by the law was already in place. The most obvious answer why the present system is such is that the procedural rules were put in place so that those who wielded power could continue to maintain their dominion over the running of the state. The party which has basically monopolized political rule in Japan since the end of World War II, the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), has had little incentive to change the present system, at least, until very recently. Until the 2004 election, the commonly held view was that low voter turnout was advantageous to the LDP, the party in power, because it meant an amplification of the proportion of votes by party loyalists, against the absent votes of nonpartisans. The results of this particular election overturned this stone writ. The LDP’s score was its third-lowest in a House of Councilors election since the party was founded in 1955. This may very well encourage changes to the present election system in the near future. While I would not dispute the view that the present situation exists because it has, for the most part, been the most expedient arrangement for those in power, I would question whether expediency was the only conscious reason for puting such a system in place. There is a historical document called Furukikoto osedasaresho (Records of the Old Way of Doing Things). First published in 1881, it contains a near-verbatim record of the statements made by the rank of samurai men whose job was to wait upon the last Tokugawa Shogun. In the book, these men are, with great amount of detail, able to recall, e.g., what the Shogun ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, where and when he took a nap, whom he conversed with, what he read for pleasure and how he acquired reading material, who did his hair up, what he wore during which season and for what occasion. Indeed, it was their very job to know every detail of the Shogun’s day-to-day doings and to ‘serve’ him accordingly. That such a book was realizable is an indication of the extent to which if one were to be a ‘public person’, i.e., a person who was worthy of social regard, one had to necessarily give up any claim to privacy. If this were the case in Edo period, that the ruling classes subscribed to the belief that being a responsible member of society was to

188 Kaori Tsurumoto submit to a life which was accounted for by others, then it is only rational that they would expect those who have been given a similar right to government to submit themselves to the same ritual. Perhaps it is this cultural baggage that is reflected in the minute rituals that campaigners must submit themselves to in order to become a campaigner, and in the wearing of white gloves, as a signal of their identity as a ‘public servant’. To provide a definitive account of the present situation which gives due attention to historical specificity with any kind of justice is beyond the purview of this chapter. Indeed, as the aim of this chapter lies in noting the strangeness of the present Japanese electioneering culture, the most noteworthy facet that one should retain from the above deviation is the very fact that I can plausibly ‘remember’ the rational nature of Tokugawa surveillance as the antecedent to what is discerned in my fieldwork.

Epilogue I found Japanese elections to be incredibly clean and proper affairs. Obviously, there are always those individuals who knowingly engage in illicit activities. However, here, as I write the concluding paragraphs of this chapter, I remember the expression of disapproval on the man’s face when I attempted a minor breach of the law when I asked if I could take a photograph of an empty polling booth. I remember the teacher’s pet-like smiles on the campaign volunteers’ faces. I remember that my autographed fan was very politely and earnestly taken away from me because strictly speaking, it was a form of bribery. I remember the ludicrously impersonal media coverage of the elections. My experiences tell me that the Japanese election, as a system and as a culture, is the diametrical opposite of a soap opera. In any case, whether a set of rationalized rules and regulations of the kind found in POEL, which, in effect, thus disempower the personalization of politics has any contemporary relevance is questionable. In Japan today, there are abundant sites and ways – fashion, sports, travel, fitness – from which one may choose to describe oneself as a private individual. Given the wealth of relatively facile choices that are now laid out for the Japanese consumers, can the present Japanese election system attract people’s sustained interest? Maybe not. Perhaps I, myself, am too inexorably ‘modern’ to feel otherwise. Given my feelings on the matter, I can only conclude as follows. The results of the 2004 House of Councilors election is indicative of what one might call a ‘mid-life crisis’ in Japanese political elections, which can no longer depend on its present popular cultural practices to make its presence felt, but has yet to create other ways to be popularly cultural.

Notes 1 See Iwabuchi (2001) and Iwabuchi (ed.) (2004). 2 Although there is no exacting criteria for what qualifies as a ‘trendy drama’ (see Iwabuchi 2004), it may be said that Fresh Breeze belongs to the category of

Depersonalization in Japanese elections 189

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14 Soga Hitomi is one of the five Japanese nationals who returned to Japan on October 15th 2002. She and the other four Japanese were abducted by members of the North Korean government during the 1970s. There is believable evidence to suggest that more Japanese were abducted by the North Korean government throughout the 1970s and 1980s, some made to work as teachers of Japanese language, and others made to work doing manual labor. However, the exact number of Japanese nationals abducted during this period is not known. This incident is known as the rachi mondai, or ‘abductee problem’ in Japanese media now. Soga Hitomi was the only member of the five abductees who did not return to Japan with her spouse, as her husband, Charles Jenkins, was American. After some period of negotiation, on July 9th, her husband and their two daughters flew out of North Korea and were reunited with Soga Hitomi in Indonesia, and on July 18th, and then return together to Japan. The whole affair received much media attention, and the first moments of their reunion, where Soga Hitomi passionately kissed her husband as he stepped off the airplane from North Korea, was replayed in the media many times. 15 See Foucault (1982, 1991) for his discussion of the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘subject’.

References Abe, H. et al. (1994) The Government and Politics of Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 208–226. Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 87–104. Iwabuchi, K. (2001) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Iwabuchi, K. (ed.) (2004) Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Strinati, D. (1995) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London and New York, Routledge.
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Websites http://www.gctv.ne.jp/~irisan/ds/st00/0404.html (23 March 2005) http://www.houko.com (20th May, 2005) http://www.pressnet.or.jp/data/01cirsetai.html & http://www.pressnet.or.jp/data/01cirtakuhai.html

Index

191

Index

Page numbers followed by {n} represents endnotes Aaj Tak 146 abductee problem 190n Abdullah Badawi 129 accidents; political 109 action; social 28 activity; free speech 101 advertisement 16 Aguilar, Jr F.V. 17, 72–92 Akimoto, T. 182 Aliran Monthly (magazine) 128–9, 135 Amien Rais 66 Andersen, B. 5 Anderson, B. 3, 69, 97, 119, 136 anti-democratic legislations 11 Aquino, C. 12, 79 Arroyo, G. 74, 79, 91 Atarashii kaze (Fresh Breeze) 172–5, 185 Australia 6 Australian Ballot 73 authoritarian rule 6 background; ethnic 132 Badawi, A. 121 Bailey, M.A.; et al. 6 Bakhtin, M.; carnivals 47 Bakhtinian model 68 Barisan Nasional (BN) 16; coalition 115, 128; election machinery 125; in Malaysia 115–20, 125 Barker, C. 98 Benjamin, W. 8–9 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 14, 142 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 3–4, 97–8 Breaknews (webzine) 161

campaign: effectiveness 8; election 175; election operation 31; guerilla-like 30; media 180–5; national election 59; political 25, 172; political system 174; professionalization 6; state-led 99; strategy 25–7, 164; street 7 Canon, D. 8 capitalism 4; economic system 40 carnivals 12, 57; Bakhtin 47 Castells, M. 155 Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines 91–2 Catholic Church; hierarchy 91 celebrities: elections 57, 64; performance 66; politicians 66–8 Central People’s Government (CPG) 40 centralism; Congress 142 Chao, K. 28, 29 Chatterjee, P. 24 Chen, K. 29 Chen, S. 18, 26–7, 35 Chinese Communist Party 41, 47, 50 Chosun Daily (newspaper) 158 Chu, T. 28 Chua, B.H. 1–19 Chung, M.J. 164 citizen rights 99 civil rights; freedom 41 civil society; organizations 130 civilizations; Islamic 121 class 95; dichotomy 55; difference 152; dominant 5; labour 5; samurai 187; trained 144 coalition: Barisian Nasional (BN) 115; rainbow 45 Cold War 29 collectivity 25, 31

192

Index

colonialism 29; American 73; Spain 73, 77 Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) 141–2 community; leader 35 compulsory voting 6 Congress 86, 147; centralism 142; dominance 143 congressional system 73 contesting candidates 13, 14, 15 corruption 15 cosplay 17–18, 27, 32 cricket 146 crowd 3, 7–11, 14, 15–16; all-male 15; focus of 9; generating events 11; mass events 8–11; pervasive visibility of 8; physicality 11; pulling 7; physical 15; ubiquity 15 crowd-generating activities 10, 11 crowd-pulling 7, 61–4; events 7, 8, 11 culture 139; corollary 117, 118; cyber 49; democratic 104; Filipino political 73; identity 38; media 38; political 97; popular 96–105; Western-democratic civic 97 cyber-culture 49 cyber-world 46 Cyworld 156, 157 Daejabo (webzine) 161 Dahrendorf, R. 2 de Certeau, M. 166 democracy 1, 7, 140; culture 6, 11; in the developing world 2; electoral 108; electoral-mania 96; festival 6; fun 139–53; hegemony of 1, 12; in Malaysia 117; new 11; partial 38–51; political science theory of 1; pro 40, 42; promotion 1; quasi 11 Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong 42, 47, 49–50 democratic process 149 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 14 democratization 12, 39, 140; process 43; Thailand 95, 97 demonstrations 12, 14 Deng, X. 40–2 Devaraj, J. (Dr. Kumar) 130–6 developing world: democracy in 2; voting in 6 developmentalism 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 135–6; mainstream media 121–5; techno 155 dichotomy; class 55

discrimination; cultural 29 disorder; social 12 dissent 11 dissident 12 distinction; elite/non-elite 56 diversity; unity 15 divisions; ethnic 22 dominance: class 4; Congress 143 Dong-A Daily (newspaper) 158, 165 earned media 8 Eco, U. 12 economic system; capitalist 40 economy: global 145; political 97–8 election 9, 13; attender mentality 9–10; campaigning 10; celebrities 64; coercion techniques 2; crowd mentality 7–11; cultural barriers to study of 13–18; distribution material 132; effect of television on 62; Flash Mob phenomenon 50; free 12; Hong Kong 45–50; and idea of nation 2; impact of language on 18, 29; impact of television on 36; independent candidates 148–9; Indonesia 55–70; informed choice model 2–3; as institutionalised form of contest 11, 72; Lok Sabha 148; Malaysia 6; materiality of popular support 7–11; and media 100–5; metaphors for 81–3; multi-party 117; order and transgression 11–13; participation 83–4; process 10, 25; reliability of results 84–5; and religion 24; structure of gambling match 76–8; survey of local practice 13–18; symbolism of candidate kneeling 33–4; universality of process 15 election campaign 5–8; antiThaksin 107–10; and celebrity 57; communication technology as new tool in 10–12; effect of internet 48; effect of television 56–7; festival atmosphere 63; relative freedom of 11–12 Election Commission (EC) 115–16, 122–3 Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) 95, 105–6; tautological moment of national election campaign 98–9 electioneering practices; Japan 172–88 electoral cultural practices; middle-class 94–113

Index electoral system; India 142 electoral-mania; democracy 96 electoralism 135–6 elite: game 3; political 163 emotions: mobilization 30–6; politics 27–30 Empowerment Conventions 26, 31, 35–6 environment; liberal political 129 Estrada, J. 12, 74, 90 Europe 4 events; socio-political 160 familiarization 56 Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) 133, 134 Fernandez, I. 122 festival: cultural 4; medieval 4 festival of democracy; pesta democrast 6 film stars 139 Flash Mob phenomenon 50 Foucault, M. 185 free elections 12 free speech; activity 101 freedom 14, 64, 69, 119; civil rights 41; fighters 149 Fresh Breeze (Atarashii kaze) 172–5, 185 Gandhi, I. 139 Gandhi, R. 15, 144 Gandhi, S. 146 Gardiner, M.E. 4 Geertz, C. 72 general election 1, 2; Malaysia 115–36 Ghai, Y. 39 Gitlin, T. 168 globalization 143 Goh, K. 158 government 5; anti-democratic 12; British colonial 39; coalition 6; incumbent 1; legitimacy 11; New Order 64 guanxi 24 guerrilla warfare 23 guerrilla-like campaigns 30 Guided Democracy 61 Gunster, S. 4 Habermas, J. 24 Habermasian public sphere 168 Hall, S. 4, 5, 45 Hangyoreh Daily (newspaper) 163

193

Haz, H. 55 hierarchy: Catholic Church 91; social 72, 77, 78; superiority 77 Hirschman, A. 45 Hong Kong 16, 39; Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood 45; Basic Law 39, 42; British colonialism 39; Central People’s Government 39, 42–4, 47, 49–50; Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference 47; Civil Human Rights Front 45, 47–8; Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement 44; cyber-politics in 45–50; Democratic Party 44–5; economy 44; electioneering in 45–50; Frontier 44–5; Legislative Council (LegCo) 38–41, 48–50; Liberal Party 41; mass rallies in 39–45, 50; National People’s Congress 39, 42, 47; partially democratic 39–42; People’s Republic of China in 39; popular resistances in 45–50; Special Administrative Region 14, 39–45, 48–50 human rights; reform movement (Aliran) 128 Humphrey, C. 4, 12, 20, 57 Husain, M.F. 139 identity: culture 38; political 143; politics 27–8 Inden, R. 144 India 139–53; Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 14–15, 142–3; independent election candidates in 148; Lok Sabha election 148; Maharashtra 146; modern nation-states in 150–1; National Election Survey 2004 (NES) 141–3, 152; New Delhi Television (NDTV) 148; regional press in 147; Shining campaign 144 Indonesia: Christian Party 58; Communist Party 61; Democrat Party 58; Development Unity Party 58, 60, 62; election in 55–70; Golkar 58–9, 61–2; Golongan Karya 58; independence declaration 55; national election 57–9; National Mandate Party 60–1; Nationalist Party 58; People’s Consultative Assembly 58; People’s Institute of Culture 61; People’s Representative Council 58; President Megawati

194

Index

Sukarnoputri 15; President Soekarno 57; rallies resembling weddings 63–4; Soeharto regime 58 Indonesia Democracy Party 58, 60, 62 information technology (IT) sector 145 informed choice model 2–3 Institute of Philippine Culture 17, 73, 80, 89 interactive voyeurism 157 interest exchange; power networking 24 International Security Act (ISA) 115 internet 10, 11, 162; effect on politics in South Korea 156–69; newspapers 159–60; Nosamo 164–5; politics 162, 166–7; ‘smart mob’ phenomenon 162; South Korea 155–9; websites 16, 52n, 129, 164, 189n; webzines and politics 160 Irama, R. 62 Iraq 1 Islamic civilizations 121, 128 Islamization 118 Japan 172–88; Atarashii kaze (Fresh Breeze) 172–5; electioneering 172–88; electoral television broadcasting 181–5; first national election (1890) 186; Furukikotu osedasaresho (Records of the Old Way of Doing Things) 187; Keirekihdsd (Background Broadcast) 181; land tax 186; Liberal Democratic Party 181, 187; Meiji Constitution 186; Nippon Broadcasting Company (NHK) 181; Sato Taisuke 177; Seikenhdsd (Political Opinion Broadcast) 181; torendii dorama (trendy drama) 173; voter eligibility 186 Japanese Constitution; (Article 14) 186 Java: Tanggulsari 66; tayuban 63 JoongAang Daily (newspaper) 158 journalism; expressive 161 Kau, S.K. 46 Kim, D.J. 159 Ko, Y. 7, 13, 18, 22–36 Koizumi, J. 182 Komintang (KMT) 14 Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange 124 Kumar, Dr. see Devaraj, J. Kumar, R. 149

Lacson, P. 75 language 30; and elections 18, 29; Han-Chinese 22; Min-nan speakers 22, 28 leader: community 35; religious 187 leadership 6, 80; centralized 96; good 84; political structure 6 Lee, T.H. 27 Leena, J. 95 Lefort, C. 141 legitimacy 12 liberal political environment 129 liberalization 143, 145 Lien, Chan 26, 32 Lindsay, J. 15, 55–70 Loh, F.L.K. 10, 16, 115–36 Ma, L. 47 Maidan, Z. 124 mainstream media; developmentalism 121–5 Malaysia 10, 16, 17; Barisan Nasional parties 115–20, 125; ceramahs 126, 134; Community Development Division (KEMAS) 126; democracy in 117; elections in 6; General Election (2005) 115–36; illegal extra-electoral activities 127; lower-income earners 118; Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in 129, 135; Parti Keadilan 128, 131; Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) 130–3; street marches in 131; United Malay National Organisation 16; Women’s Agenda for Change (WAC) 130 Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) 118 Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) 130–1 Manila 17 Marcos, F. 12, 17, 78–80 Marshall, D. 157 mass: media 8, 12, 16; rallies 5, 13; support 10 material presence 7 materiality; proper support 7–8 maturity; political 12 May Massacre 94 media 42; advertisements 5; campaign 180–5; and communication 16–17; culture 38; and election 100–5; images 15; industry 16; mass 8, 12, 16; sources of information 86–7; South Korea 155–67; Thai 105–6

Index middle class 3, 10, 88, 100, 106, 108, 132; ironic electoral cultural practices 94–113; political 105; Thailand 104; voter 87 military regime; paternalistic 95 Ming Pao (newspaper) 42 mobile phone 10, 16; cell phone 157, 164 mobilization 144, 160; emotion 30–6; festive 36; mass 139; political 168; popular 119; project 105; social 163; voluntary 165 modernity 24, 76, 151; political 12 Mohamad, G. 69 Mohamed, Dr. M. 115, 121 money; protection 127 Moralist, A. 103 motorized parades 15, 59–61 movement: social 106; street 36 multiparty system 78–80; Philippines 90 National Assembly Election (2005) 94–113 national election; Indonesia 57–9 New Order 56, 59–62, 64, 65, 68; government 64; Old Order 58 New Straits Times (newspaper) 123 Nie, N.H. 7 Nietzsche, F. 28 Noh, M.H. 10, 159–67 Nomination Day 123; score sheet 121 non government organization (NGO) 10, 117, 119, 128, 133 Nonkak 160 Nor, E.M. 122 North Korea; as pariah state 1 Nosamo 170n Nugroho, G. 62–3 OhMyNews (internet newspaper) 159–60, 165 Old Order 55 operation: election campaign 31; mediamediated 31–4; spatial 31, 34–6 opinion; political 181 Orang Asli Outreach Program 131 order: political 140; politico-cultural 153; social 12; transgression 11 organizations; civil society 130 pariah state 1 Park, C.H. 158 parliamentarians 6 Parliamentary Election 2, 27

195

Parti Islam (PAS) 116, 120; field women candidates for 122 Parti Keadilan 128, 131 participation; illusory 7 patriotism 41, 43, 44 peace; social 11 Pemberton, J. 64 People Power 12, 78–80, 99 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 14, 19, 22, 27–30, 39; see also Hong Kong performance: bodily 25; celebrities 66; factor 55–70; staged live 61–4 Philippine Constitution (1987) 79 Philippine Daily Inquirer (newspaper) 91 Philippine Senate 91 Philippines 72–92; elections (2004) 90–1; Fair Elections Act 74; metaphors for election 81–3; multiparty system 90; participation in election 83–4; ‘People Power’ 12; President Aquino 12, 91; President Estrada 12, 74; President Marcos 12; reliability of election results 84–5; selection of election candidates 85–9; Vice-President Arroyo 74 Pitch, P. 101 Poe, F. 75, 91 polarization 142 policy; ethnic 22 political maturity 12 political modernity 12 Political Opinion Broadcast 181 political parties 16; see also specific parties political practices; emergent 43–5 political sphere 10 political structure 4; leadership 6 political system: campaign 174; complex 106 political webzines 160–1 political will 2 politician: celebrities 66–8; media pressure on 32; and underhand crime 32–3 politics 121; and crowd mentality 7–11; cyber 38–9, 45–50, 51; democratic 101, 106; effect of webzines on 160–1; emotions 27–30; identity 27–8; Indian 140–4; internet 166–7; modern 72; partisan 124; radical democratisation of 106; and religion 24; of ressentiment 28, 29–30; structure 140

196

Index

polling: day 16; Japan 185–8 polls 10 Pongsawat, P. 16, 56 poor 5, 80–5; voter 87 popular culture 3; contemporary 17; Hindi movies 18; and ritual 4; traditional 17 popular participation 6 popular support 2, 7 popular will 1 popularity 7 Powell, G.B. Jr. 6 Powell, L.; and Cowart, J. 6 power 29, 30, 58, 91, 141, 143, 169, 187; net 155–69; people 99; political 11 power networking; interest exchange 24 Power of People (kukchamjyeon) 165 Pradesh, A. 147, 149 Prasad, M.M. 2, 139 Prem, T. 108 Printing Presses and Publications Act 115 production value 144 professionalization; campaign 6 project mobilization 105 propaganda; political 48 proper support; materiality 7–8 protection money 127 protest: intense 30; violent 30 Public Office Election Law (POEL) 172–3, 178–80, 181, 186 public servant 188 public sphere 24, 162, 168; Habermasian 168 Qiao, X. 42 quasi-democracies 12 Radio Television Hong Kong 48 rainbow coalition 45 rally: in Hong Kong 39–45; in Indonesia 61; mass 38; resembling wedding 63–4 Ramos, F. 79, 90 Rashid, A. 122 reform movement (Aliran); human rights 128 regime: military-authoritarian 15; repressive-responsive 116 relations: economic 186; social 186 religion; and elections 24 repressive regime 12

ressentiment; politics 28, 29–30 rights; citizen 99; see also human rights ritual: process 73; structure 76 Roco, R. 75 Rose, R. 1 Rousseau, J.J.; idiom 150–1 rural patronage systems 79 samurai 187 score sheet; Nomination Day 121 Scott, J. 46, 47 Second World War (1939–1945) 57; pre era 186 Seoprise (webzine) 161, 165 Shae, W.; and Wong, P. 38–51 Shinzd, A. 182 Singapore 6 Slater, D. 9 social class see class; dominance; middle class; upper class social political life 5 society: hierarchy 77; multi-ethnic 115; networked 155–6 solitary space 3 Soong, J. 33 South China Morning Post (newspaper) 42 South Korea 155–69; 2030 generation 156, 166; e-government readiness in 156; Grand National Party 158; media 155–67; nonak 160–1; Nosamo 164–5; reply culture (rippulmunhwa) 160; Seoul 163, 165 Spain; colonial rule 73, 77 Sridharan, E. 141, 142 state 128, 151; pariah 1 strategy; campaign 164 street: movement 36; protests 13 structure: economic 95; political 105; politics 140; ritual 76; social 25, 77 Suchinda, K. 10 Suharto, President 15 Sukarnoputri, President M. 15 Sungai Siput 130–4 superiority; hierarchy 77 Surayud, C. 108 survey; political 74 Swaraj, S. 146 Taiwan 14, 19, 22–36; Democratic Progress Party 26, 30–2; election of Taipei mayor 35; elections (2004) 22–36; Empowerment Conventions 31, 35–6; Kuomintang 26–30;

Index Martial Law in 22–3, 26; People’s Republic of China in 14, 27–30; Solidarity Union 27; Taipei City 27 Takashi, N. 173, 174 Taylor, R.H. 69 tayuban; Java 63 technology; information and communication 16 Telegraph (newspaper) 146 television: Japanese electoral broadcasting 181–5; National Geographic channel 151; New Delhi Television (NDTV) 148; Nippon Broadcasting Company (NHK) 181; soap opera 188 Telugu film industry 154n Tha, P. 103 Thailand 10–11; anti-Thaksin campaign 107–10; Chart Thai Party 95; Council for the Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy 108–9; Democrat Party 95; democratization 95, 97; Independent Television (ITV) 94; King’s Privy Council 108; Mahachon Party 95; middle class 104; Prime Minister Thaksin 94–5, 107–10; radicalised democratic politics in 106; Thai Rak Thai Party 94–5, 102, 107–8 Thaksin, S. 94–5, 107–10 The Star (newspaper) 123 theatre; popular 61 Thurber, J.A. 6 Tien, J. 41 Tokugawa Shogun 187 transformations: social 156–8; sociopolitical 168 transgression 5, 12; order 11 Tsang, H. 47

197

Tso, W. 50 Tsukasa, A. 182 Tsukushi, T. 185 Tsurumoto, K. 172–88 Tung, C. 38, 41, 46–7, 50 Turner, V. 76 two systems; one country 50 United Malay National Organization (UMNO) 16 United States of America (USA) 1; army 162; National Geographic television channel 151 unity; diversity 15 upper class 88 value: pro-materialist 43; production 144; social 164 Verba, S. 7; and Nie, N.H. 7 violence; state-sponsored 97 visibility; persuasive 8 vote; buying 88; begging 24, 34 voter: eligibility in Japan 186; middleclass 87; poor 87 voting; in developing countries 6 Wan Azizah, Dr. W.I. 128 Washington Post (newspaper) 42 website 52n, 129, 164, 189n webzines; political 160–1 Widodo, A. 63 women; rural 83–4 Wong, K.K. 123 Wong, P.; and Shae, W. 38–51 Wu, W. 47 Yadav, Y. 13 Zaharom Nain 138