The Street and the Ballot Box: 

Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts

Social movements and electoral politics are often seen as operating in different terrains – in extra-institutional and within institutional arenas – respectively. Despite recent scholarships in American politics that examine their interactions, movement activists are generally seen as “challengers” seeking to enter the institutionalized work of “polity members”, who have routinized access to the levers of power.

I start from the premise that to explain big outcomes such as regime change in electoral autocracies, we must establish a link between the two seemingly disparate bodies of literature – hence the title of the book. This study builds upon the literature in American politics that use movements to explain partisan politics. However, I take it one step further – rather than studying party politics as an outcome, I explain how a movement contributes to a cohesive opposition electoral coalition, that is crucial for regime change.

Most studies on movement-election interactions have focused on democratic countries, while authoritarian contexts have largely been neglected. Scholars from comparative politics have studied how “stolen” or fraudulent elections gave rise to mass mobilization and led to revolutionary outcomes in the Eastern Europe.

In The Street and the Ballot Box, I develop a new theory to explicate how a broad-based movement contributes to building a coherent opposition coalition. The theory highlights the factor necessary for regime change – a cohesive opposition alliance – that is being underpinned by a broad-based movement, which is a movement that champions widely shared grievances that resonate across society and can mobilize across social cleavages. To coalesce large segments of the population, such a broad-based movement is inherently nonviolent by nature. To be sure, a movement per se does not topple autocratic regimes; it is a crucial steppingstone to forge unity among antiregime forces, that builds the opposition institution necessary to bring down autocratic rulers.

The creation of a movement that coalesces cross-sectional antiregime groups and its subsequent transformation into an institutional coalition is brokered by political entrepreneurs with one foot in party politics and another foot in civil society activism. These brokers are called “movement-partisans” in US politics, who create reciprocal processes between movements and parties and sustain their alliances. In authoritarian polities where the electoral playing field is unlevel and the rules of the game rigged in favor of the ruling parties, the cross-mobilization of society through movement-party brokerage is an ingenious strategy by the opposition to address structural disadvantages. This is a normative implication of the theory on a broad-based movement.

I inductively build this theory drawing on the case of Malaysia, by process tracing of 20-years of sociopolitical changes and electoral data before the culmination of the 2018 downfall of the ruling coalition, UMNO. The Bersih or “Clean and Fair Elections” movement allowed existing opposition elites to mobilize civil society, forged alliances with other antiregime forces, and took advantage of a major corruption scandal implicating the prime minister and his family. The “clean elections” framing resonates strongly across society because aside from pervasive vote-buying Malaysia is one of the most serious offenders of gerrymandering. The Bersih movement that attracted at its peak as many as half a million participants in Kuala Lumpur, and with rallies held across 32 cities worldwide with participation from the Malaysian diasporas, became a platform that united all those who were against the kleptocratic regime.

The movement-electoral institution interactions are the “black box” that lie in between uncoordinated opposition elites and discontented masses, and regime change, in the figure below. Typical mobilizing structures, such as NGOs, clubs, churches, unions, professional associations, and informal networks, help movement entrepreneurs mobilize activists into collective actions. Yet, this study illustrates that when movements become a means rather than an end, it can function as a mobilizing structure that unifies antiregime elements and mobilizes them into collective actions.

X       --> ?           -->         Y

                           (Uncoordinated opposition elites & discontented masses)                             (Regime change)  

What qualifies as a broad-based movement? It is one that advocates for a cause shared across large swaths of society and identified by elites and nonelites alike. Movements caused by stolen elections in the “Color Revolutions” are some of the prime examples. Contemporary movements, such as Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, or the Occupy Movement, despite garnering supporters measured in the hundreds of thousands, still leave out sizeable out-groups. The Tea Party, Trump movement, and Alt-right movement are vocal movements that are far from being broad-based.

This study speaks to the literatures on social movement and electoral politics (in political science) and represents an attempt to broker a dialogue between two cognate – but largely disconnected – bodies of works.

Lynette H. Ong is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. She researches authoritarianism and contentious politics, with a focus on Asia.

This book is available for free access at Cambridge UP until February 23rd: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/street-and-the-ballot-box/984D9821A42E634531F41C1130A58738