“Building Effective Electoral Strategies in an Urban Constituency of Myanmar”

“Building Effective Electoral Strategies in an Urban Constituency of Myanmar”

CSEAS, Kyoto University
Yoshihiro Nakanishi


This joint research aims to explore effective electoral strategies in Myanmar with practitioners such as political party members, consultants and NGO workers, focusing on a constituency, South Okkalapa, of the urban area in Yangon. As many know, the general elections in 2015 became a historic event in the country because National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi made a landslide victory to form the majority in the new federal parliament despite the representatives of the military occupies 25% of its seats. It was widely reported in the world that The NLD government was formed in March 2016.
While this political transition, event if not a democratization, through free and fair elections fifty-five years after the last one drew attention from the world, there has been few researches on people’s voting behavior in Myanmar. It was observationally obvious that the popularity and respect to Aung San Suu Kyi led to the result with some help of the first-past-the-post system that tends to give higher proportion of seats to the winner than the rate of the vote. However, the statistical data and qualitative observations are not sufficiently collected, and Myanmar’s political parties including NLD are facing difficulties to examine their electoral strategies for coming elections. Therefore, researches on electoral strategies and campaigns are academically and practically needed to understand what is going on in the current political transition period of the country and to enhance the development of free and fair political competitions among stake holders.

Our team had chosen South Okkalapa Township of Yangon, which was developed in the late 1950s and has about 160 thousand population, as a research site. NLD won 80.87% of votes in the South Okkapala constituency in the 2015 general elections, while the ruling party then took only about 15%. To understand the background of this result, our team conducted two researches in the first phase. The first was to collect the voters list and grasp the similarities and differences among thirteen wards (yakkwe) in the T/S. The second was interviews with the elections candidates who ran the 2010 and 2015 elections. Through the surveys, we made two findings. The one is that the number of votes that went to NLD in 2015 were almost similar in all the wards. The other is that NLD and USDP applied different electoral strategies. On the one hand, NLD’s campaign mobilized party sympathizers, most of whom were ordinary people in the T/S and voluntarily joined the campaign. A NLD candidate told that the party’s formal campaign committee was not necessarily important for the win. On the other hand, USDP’s campaign relied on relatively well organized party organizations which has developed since the 1990s as well as conventional social readers. Roughly speaking, NLD defeated USDP not by organizational power but by spontaneous people’s power motivated mainly by Aung San Suu Kyi’s charismatic popularity.

Based on the first phase, the members of the team had discussed how to create the “third way” of the campaign strategy that are different from NLD and USDP, and we proposed the way for the candidates to build networks to people at the same street through the community-based organizations (CBOs) that has been increasing in the township especially after the 2011’s political transition. Then, we conducted survey on the organizational structure, activities and leadership of sunlaungathin (Food donation organization), which is formed to gather donations from people at the streets and wards to the close monasteries. The result of the survey suggests that the political party’s cooperating with CBOs like sunglaungathin are not currently realistic mainly for following three reasons. The one is that many of CBOs have religious (Buddhism) characters and tend to avoid commitment to politics. Some sunglaungathin leaders told us that they never invited the monks who were involved in right wing political movements like 969 and MaBaTa because it can create unnecessary conflicts among local people. Secondly, the leaders of CBOs have a variety of social backgrounds and they are not always politically influential over the people. Even though people respect the leaders, the respect is usually interpreted not as something political but as a part of his/her “good” personality. Thirdly, while CBOs are prevailing at the five and seventh ward today, there are still few CBOs in relatively richer wards because richer and middle class people are autonomous from local communities and do not have to rely on those organization for their donations and other public activities. Therefore, we conclude that it is difficult at the current situation for election candidates at this constituency to rely on CBS based campaigns.
Although we reached a negative conclusion about our idea for a new electoral strategy in an urban constituency of Myanmar this time, it is commonly perceived that Myanmar’s political development partly depends on how much political parties can properly bridge between people and state in more institutionalized ways rather than state-backed authoritarian ones or charisma-based mobilization ones. We will continuously work to explore newer and better electoral strategies in politics of Myanmar with multi-stakeholders.