Part 1

• Consolidating Power: Elite Alliances and Institutional Reform in Laos and Vietnam Andrea Haefner Griffith University

  Mainland Southeast Asia is undergoing a period of marked political reconfiguration in which leadership change, institutional reform, and the growing entanglement of political and economic elites are reshaping how power is organised and exercised. In Laos and Vietnam, recent Party Congresses in early 2026 have reinforced centralised authority while advancing administrative restructuring framed in terms of efficiency and modernisation. These developments are best understood not simply as technocratic reform, but as part of a broader pattern of elite consolidation in which political control is stabilised through tightly managed succession, internal bargaining, and the selective incorporation of new actors.

  In Vietnam, leadership transitions following the death of Nguyễn Phú Trọng and the elevation of Tô Lâm point to a strengthening of the party’s security-oriented leadership core. In Laos, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party’s most recent Congress reflects similarly calibrated transitions without disrupting established patronage structures. In both contexts, institutional restructuring, including the reduction and merger of ministries, has streamlined formal governance arrangements while reinforcing central oversight.

  At the same time, the relationship between political authority and economic power is becoming increasingly intertwined. Business actors benefit from privileged access to state-led development agendas, while political elites are deeply embedded in economic networks linked to infrastructure, natural resources, and finance. These overlapping interests contribute to forms of policy influence that are often opaque and difficult to contest. The narrowing of civil society space, driven by tighter regulation and declining external support, further limits avenues for accountability. Taken together, these dynamics point to a political economy characterised by elite accommodation, where regime stability and economic control are mutually reinforcing priorities.

• Executive Aggrandizement, Dynastic Politics and Elite Collusion in Indonesia, 2014-2025 Carmen Wintergerst Heidelberg University

  Indonesia has long been regarded as Southeast Asia’s most consequential democratic success story since reformasi. However, the decade spanning Joko Widodo’s presidency (2014–2024) and the subsequent rise of Prabowo Subianto, secured in part through a controversial constitutional ruling that placed Widodo’s son on the ticket, reveals an increasingly elite-dominated political order defined by collusion and dynastic succession. This paper examines how these processes unfolded in Indonesia and what they reveal about the relationship between executive power, oligarchic networks, and democratic erosion in third-wave democracies.
  The paper identifies three interconnected dynamics. First is the progressive capture of horizontal accountability institutions, most notably the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the Constitutional Court, through legislative revision and strategic judicial appointments. This insulates political and business elites from oversight. Second is the normalization of dynastic politics as a vehicle for elite continuity. This is exemplified by the 2023 Constitutional Court ruling and its role in engineering a political succession that fused presidential incumbency with family ambition. Third, it examines the consolidation of a promiscuous elite coalition under Prabowo that has absorbed former rivals, incorporated business interests, and foreclosed meaningful programmatic competition. This has deepened what the panel describes as elite accommodation at the expense of democratic accountability.
  Empirically, the paper draws on process tracing of key episodes between 2014 to 2025. It combines an analysis of legislative and judicial changes with an examination of coalitiondynamics and patronage networks, arguing that Indonesia’s erosion is not the end product of authoritarian intent. Rather, it is the cumulative outcome of elite responses to structural incentives. These responses have, in aggregate, hollowed out the institutional foundations of reformasi. Thus, the Indonesian case highlights the broader concern of how dynastic rule, elite collusion, and business power reinforce each other, reshaping political systems in the process.

• From Opposition to Accommodation: Thaksin’s Return and the Reconsolidation of Elite Politics in Thailand Napon Jatusripitak ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

  The coalition formed in 2023 between Pheu Thai and parties linked to Thailand’s royalist-military establishment is widely read as an elite pact to block the reformist Move Forward Party from power and secure the return of Thaksin Shinawatra from exile. This article argues, however, that the arrangement reflects a pattern with historical roots beyond the immediate context of the 2023 general election. Drawing on cases of political dynasties and factions co-opted into military-aligned parties and coalitions after the 1991, 2006, and 2014 coups, it shows that Thaksin’s pact with his former adversaries follows a familiar logic: political elites with established electoral networks and support bases have systematically been brought into power-sharing configurations that preserve the dominance of unelected actors within the framework of electoral politics. In exchange for patronage and protection, these elites form pragmatic, often ideologically incoherent alliances in support of actors who cannot themselves win elections yet retain decisive control over the institutional and coercive levers governing political competition, access to office, and the exercise of power. What distinguishes the 2023 arrangement is the reach of this co-optation—it now extends to parties whose mass bases are constituted precisely by the ideological divides that the pact effectively overrides.

• Compounding Elite Capture and Democratic Fragility in the Philippines: A Postcolonial Analysis of Dynastic Power Johan Dzulkifli University Institute of Lisboa - ISCTE Margaret Jane Palabrica Go University of Westminster

  This paper examines how elite dynastic rule shapes democratic governance in the Philippines. Despite being widely regarded as Southeast Asia’s oldest democracy following the prescribed path of liberal democratisation, political authority remains concentrated among interrelated political families and business elites, producing an electoral political system largely confined within elite networks. The paper argues that these outcomes are historically constituted through colonial path dependencies and are (re)produced through what it conceptualises as compounding elite capture, showing the cumulative and intergenerational deepening of elite dominance through preservation, persistence, expansion, and adaptation. Together, these processes allow elites to maintain power while absorbing reform efforts and political challengers, producing a condition of democratic masquerade in which formal democratic institutions persist while meaningful redistribution of power is systematically constrained. Situating Philippine democratic fragility within the historic critical juncture of the 1898 Philippine revolution, when the peasant-led Magdiwang faction lost Katipunan leadership to the elite-led Magdalo faction, the paper shows how the transition from Spain to the United States preserved and institutionalised the Spanish era principalia. American colonial governance consolidated elite dominance through electoral, property, and bureaucratic structures, laying the foundations for enduring dynastic and political-economic power. By tracing colonial path dependencies to contemporary patterns of elite accommodation, exemplified by the election of President Marcos Jr. and the anticipated presidential bid of Vice-president Sara Duterte in 2028, the Philippine case reflects broader Southeast Asian dynamics in which dynastic succession and elite bargaining with civil society are mutually reinforcing. Rather than a failed democratic transition, the paper shows the limits of teleological accounts of democratisation constituted by modernisation and neoliberal peace theories, contributing to comparative debates on the critical historic accounts of elite power and democratic erosion in the region.

Part 2

• The Political Economy of New Carbon Market in Indonesia Rizal Shidiq Leiden University

  On October 29, 2021, by Presidential Decree no. 98/2021, Indonesia formally marked its intention to put prices on carbon (nilai ekonomi karbon, carbon pricing) as a part of the country’s strategy and commitment to reduce global greenhouse emission and reach net zero emissions by 2060. Elevating carbon pricing into a Presidential Decree is a real breakthrough in the political economy of climate change in Indonesia – the world’s ninth-largest carbon dioxide emitter. Yet this is also an uncharted territory. Four years down the line, the progress remains very limited, partly due to the lack of technical capacity to administer complex carbon tax and trade transactions, partly due to the political economy constraints. In this study, I focus on the political economy of carbon market, especially voluntary carbon offsets markets, as a mechanism of carbon pricing as outlined in the Decree. The ultimate aim of this research agenda is to qualitatively and quantitatively identify and estimate the political economy constraints and potentials for developing efficient carbon market to reduce Indonesia’s carbon emissions. As a starting point, my research questions are: (1) Who are the major private-sector interest groups (the potentially gaining groups) most substantially affected by carbon market development in Indonesia? And (2) What are their degrees of political connectedness to the government as the carbon market regulator?

• Transparency without Transformation: Beneficial Ownership Transparency Reform and Its Relevance with Oligarchic Power in Indonesia Miranti Martin University of New South Wales

  Scholars in critical political economy have long argued that governance reforms in Indonesia have reconfigured rather than dismantled oligarchic power. Building on the oligarchic framework developed by Hadiz and Robison (2013), this research investigates Indonesia’s Beneficial Ownership Transparency (BOT) program as a case study of reform without transformation. While BOT has been widely promoted as a tool to combat corruption and illicit financial flows, its implementation in Indonesia has produced limited outcomes in detecting and disrupting corruption-related financial flows. This study argues that these limitations are not primarily technical or administrative, but political, rooted in enduring patterns of elite collusion between political, bureaucratic, and business actors.

  The study conceptualizes BOT as a reform initiative embedded within Indonesia’s oligarchic and political dynasty regime, where access to state authority remains central to wealth accumulation and political survival. In such a context, transparency reforms threaten elite interests only superficially and are instead absorbed into existing power arrangements. This research combines oligarchic theory with Network Governance Theory, aiming to explain how this absorption occurs in practice. While the former explains the dominance of political and business elites, the latter offers an analytical lens to trace how oligarchic power operates through fragmented institutional networks.

  Adopting a qualitative case-study approach focused on corruption-related money laundering within the financial services sector, this research integrates document analysis and semi-structured interviews to examine the ways in which governance networks interact, diffuse responsibility, limit enforcement, and prioritize symbolic compliance. These networks operate as mechanisms that advance elite interests while simultaneously dilute accountability.

  This paper contributes to comparative debates on elite collusion, the political power of business, and democratic erosion in Southeast Asia. The study showcases how transparency reform can serve as an instrument of legitimacy management within oligarchic systems, preserving the appearance of reform while leaving underlying power relations intact.

• The Political Economy of Campaign Spending: Evidence from Indonesia’s 2024 Local Elections Ward Berenschot KITLV

  This article analyses the character and amounts of campaign spending across Indonesia. Using a unique survey of 478 politicians participating in the 2024 district head elections, we explore the character of campaign spending as well as the variation in expenditures across indonesia. The first part explores the drivers of campaign spending, finding that campaign costs are high due to the absence of committed party cadre, the obligation of candidates to pay ‘political dowry’ to parties and the ubiquitous and normalised practice of vote buying. In the second part of this article we analyse variation in campaign expenditures. While campaign costs are high in big cities and districts with natural resource extraction, we find that costs are relatively low in eastern Indonesia and rural Java. We explore whether socio-economic conditions, candidate incumbency, competitiveness and geography can explain this variation, and we conclude that a combination campaign costs are highest in regions with large state-dependent economic sectors such as mining, real estate and plantations, as such sectors provide opportunities for recovering this money. We also find indications that political competitiveness and economic inequality foster higher campaign costs. We conclude that the high costs of election campaigns are driven by a combination of economic conditions and permissiveness towards illegal forms campaign spending.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Carbon Market
• Carbon Pricing
• Indonesia
• Political Economy
• colonial legacies
• colonial path dependencies
• compounding elite capture
• democratisation
• elite collusion
• elite dynasties
• executive aggrandizement
• historic critical junctures
• modernisation
• neoliberal peace
• political dynasties