As my contribution to a recent conference on the State of Indonesian Democracy, held here at Cornell and hosted by the Southeast Asia Program, I wrote an essay that interprets contemporary Indonesian democracy using the tools and frameworks of comparative political institutions. You can read a first public draft of that manuscript, entitled “Cleavages, Institutions, and Democracy in Indonesia: Consensual Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective,” here. The abstract is below.
Indonesian democracy is characterized by large governing coalitions and a dominant presidency, coupled with weak parties with few programmatic differences. This model of democracy—usefully summarized as consensual presidentialism—is the product of a presidential form of government and proportional representation with high district magnitudes. The core features of Indonesian party politics and electoral competition can be explained by applying the comparative literature on electoral institutions to Indonesia’s social structure and political cleavages. By treating Indonesia like a normal country in which politicians respond to electoral incentives given existing rules and social structure, we gain a better insight into the roots of Indonesia’s democratic decline and the pathways towards reform.
My thinking on these issues has evolved over many years of thinking about comparative politics and Indonesian politics alongside one another. My take is that recent Indonesianist scholarship—which I admire, read, cite, and largely endorse—has been searching for an explanation for why Indonesia’s democratic practices are so different from the practices in liberal democracies, like the United States and Australia. I think that focusing on what we know about electoral institutions can clarify certain features of Indonesian democracy, such as the programmatic weaknesses of political parties and the prevalence of oversized governing coalitions across presidential administrations. In my view, these are not inherently pathological features of Indonesian politics. Rather, they are what you would expect if, as I write, “all we knew about Indonesia was that it is a presidential democracy whose legislature is elected under proportional representation with an average district magnitude of about 7.”
Interesting (at least to me), my use of the term consensual presidentialism is inspired by the work of Arend Lijphart, who is almost certainly the most well-known empirical democratic theorist from the Netherlands, Indonesia’s former colonizer. His Patterns of Democracy is a source of endless insight and inspiration, and guided my thinking about Indonesia only after I started thinking about democracy elsewhere.
Tom Pepinsky 