Parties, Patronage and COVID-19 Vaccination Distribution in Indonesia

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as Indonesia mobilized to deliver vaccines to the population, an unexpected phenomenon occurred: political parties became directly involved in the vaccine delivery effort. In this article, we draw on online reports and interviews to demonstrate that these campaigns acted as an extension of the patronage politics that dominate the country's political arena. The involvement of political parties had little effect on the national vaccination effort, as parties delivered a relatively small number of vaccines and often targeted areas that already had high coverage. Instead, parties and politicians used these events to strengthen links with constituents and supporters. We identify three main pathways that allowed political parties to access the vaccines: lobbying by members of the national legislature's health commission;through local governments;and by direct executive government access to the national Ministry of Health. This "hijacking" of a national policy for clientelistic purposes provides insight into the presence of intra-party coordination of patronage goods but also demonstrates the personalization and fragmentation of patronage distribution highlighted in the existing literature. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the quality of public healthcare and other services in Indonesia.

One War, Many Battles: COVID-19 in Urban Southeast Asia

By any metric, COVID-19 has disrupted Southeast Asia immensely, affecting even those countries that have fared comparatively well. Master narratives of the course of the pandemic across the region have been inescapable: which countries sprang into action and which lost time in denial or dithering;which implemented testing and contact-tracing and which remain short on tests and strategies even now;where the death toll and economic costs have been devastating and where they have not been quite so terrible. The latest plot-lines in these unfolding dramas address when and from where vaccines are being secured, how effective authorities are in distributing them to their respective populations, and how they are preparing for and responding to new waves of infection.