Local elections and democratic backsliding: pragmatic politics in Southeast Asia

Democratic backsliding is commonly studied on a national scale, but local elections now define the lines of democratic strength or weakness in Southeast Asia. This research provides theoretical insight into how practical political tactics that are used in local elections, including opportunism-based alliances, patronage-based campaigning, and candidate volatility, can lead to the long-term undermining of democracy. The research is based on secondary sources such as academic literature, electoral reports, and media analysis of Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand to identify how local actors negotiate political space based on flexibility instead of ideological allegiance. According to the research, this kind of electoral pragmatism enables the normalization of antidemocratic tendencies at the grassroots to promote the tendency toward broader authoritarianism. It also points out the weaknesses in regulatory safeguards in local electoral systems as a weak spot. This research proposes a new emphasis on subnational politics in the study of democratic backsliding by synthesizing insights on the topic from political theory and regional studies. It ends with a brief conceptual framework to explain the way in which the processes of local-level electoral politics can strengthen or weaken democratic norms over a period of time.