Elections in Southeast Asia occur in a wide spectrum of regimes, with varying degrees of political freedoms. The one-party states of Viet Nam and Lao PDR hold national elections with some degree of (intra-party) competition. The electoral autocracies in Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia – some more hegemonic, some more competitive – call to the polls with varying degrees of contestation. Elections in the Philippines have a history of more than 100 years, while Myanmar is just emerging from some decades of dictatorship. Indonesia and Timor-Leste seem to be on a remarkable and fast trajectory towards liberal democracy, while Thailand – after what now seems as an interim period of electoral democracy – has slid back into dictatorship once more. Finally, Brunei is one of only five states globally that does not provide for any representative national election to the legislature at all.
The meaning of elections varies considerably in such a diverse group of countries, not least due to the fact that some elections provide more choices than others. But are there any common trends discernible among Southeast Asian countries?
The expert survey on ‘Perceptions of Electoral Integrity’
The Electoral Integrity Project based at Harvard and Sydney Universities has just released a new report and dataset for The Year in Elections 2014 that can help answer that question.
Expert assessments evaluate the state of the world’s elections each year. The third release of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) data-set covers 127 national parliamentary and presidential contests held from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2014 in 107 countries worldwide. More elections will be evaluated as they are held in future years.
Evidence is gathered from a global survey of 1,429 domestic and international election experts (with a response rate of 29%). Immediately after each contest, the quality of each election is evaluated based on 49 indicators. Responses are clustered into eleven stages occurring throughout the electoral cycle and then summed to construct an overall 100-point expert Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) index and ranking.
Electoral integrity in Southeast Asia
Six Southeast Asian contests were evaluated in the PEI survey in from 2012 to 2014. The striking result is that Southeast Asia performs worse on overall electoral integrity than any other region in the world. The average PEI Index for Southeast Asia is 56 out of 100 (compared to a global average of 64). This means the region ranks below Western and Central Africa and the Middle East – other places rife with flawed or failed elections. Southeast Asia also scored lowest among all world regions on the sub-indices on electoral procedures (score of 59 compared to global mean of 73),voter registration (Southeast Asia: 46; global mean: 62), media coverage (Southeast Asia: 53; global mean: 60), results (Southeast Asia: 53; global mean: 72), and electoral authorities (Southeast Asia: 55; global mean: 69). Table 1 shows overall levels of electoral integrity of Southeast Asian countries compared to other regions. See here for a global comparison of all elections worldwide.
Table 1: Electoral Integrity by region (2012-2014)
Source: Electoral Integrity Project. 2015. The expert survey of Perceptions of Electoral Integrity, Release 3 (PEI_3.0)
There could of course be several sources of error in these devastating results. With only five countries and six elections in the analysis so far, the stock of data on Southeast Asian elections is not overwhelming. Yet, in a small region like Southeast Asia, the number of observations will necessarily remain lower. The numbers are similar to the other problematic regions (Western & Central Africa, and the Middle East). Furthermore, the regional response rate is in fact above average. The invitation of 232 experts yielded a response rate of 38% – much higher than the global mean of 29%.
It is a possibility that the responding experts are systematically different from experts on other world regions and therefore give skewed answers on the survey. But what gives confidence in the results is the fact that the experts on Southeast Asia did not differ significantly from the global pool of experts in terms of age, gender, familiarity with elections in the country, political views from left to right, or being a domestic or international expert. More importantly, their views on three vignettes – questions about how serious they would rate three hypothetical scenarios of electoral violations – did not differ significantly from the global pool of experts. This essentially means that all the experts use the same yardstick to evaluate electoral integrity.
Finally, it must be noted that this evaluation does not yet include the potentially problematic elections in Myanmar, Viet Nam, or Lao PDR. If anything, the region’s score might be expected to deteriorate even further when these elections are included in future releases of the data.
Read the rest of the article here: http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2015/02/19/southeast-asian-elec...