Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Can Procedural and Substantive Democracy Move in Opposition Directions?

    It is possible for the electoral dimensions of democracy to become stronger at the same time that the substantive dimensions of democracy weaken or erode?

    Some background:

    1. Next Thursday, I’m participating in a Brown Bag discussion at Columbia with Joseph Liow, Duncan McCargo, and Ann Marie Murphy. Our collective task is to think about prospects for democratic backsliding and democratic progress in Southeast Asia. (Come on by!) My individual task is to do this in the context of Indonesia’s new Jokowi administration.

    2. Separately, I recently participated in a USAID-funded project on democratic backsliding. As part of that, I put together a short memo in which I tried to lay out a typology of varieties of democratic change. Borrowing the distinction between procedural versus substantive democracy, I produced this nine-fold typology of varieties of democratic change—assuming, of course, that this is change within a democracy rather than a discrete shift to authoritarianism.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-06 at 11.13.19 AM
    The typology is defined by possibilities of change. For example, if the latent probability that executive authority is allocated in competitive elections between political parties decreases (the procedural dimension), and rights and liberties are curtailed (a short-hand for the substantive dimension), then I want to call that “democratic degradation.” If rights remain the same but procedures corrode, I term that “authoritarian creep.”

    And as originally written, the typology had no term for 2 out of the 9 categories. Those are the combinations of “more procedure less substance” and “less procedure more substance.” At the time that I developed the typology, I hypothesized that those are not logically possible, what Colin Elman terms “logical compression.”

    But I am now reevaluating this in light of the new Jokowi administration. It strikes me that it’s entirely possible that Indonesia has become more procedurally democratic in the past year, but that we could nevertheless see further deterioration in the substantive dimensions of Indonesian democracy.

    But looking comparatively this would be rare, so my best guess is that it is possible, but not probable. As a hopelessly imperfect exercise, let’s just examine how frequently—in the cross-national context—we observe a decrease in civil liberties (as defined by Freedom House) alongside an increase in political rights (also defined by Freedom House). Here is a jittered scatterplot.
    PR vs CL
    Out of 6668 country-years around the world, we observe only 32 country-years (< 0.5%) where civil liberties decrease while political rights increase. But of course, if you don't share my evaluation that Indonesia's procedural democracy was strengthened over the past year, then you might consider deterioration in substantive democracy more likely (and in fact, 333 country-years around the world show civil liberties decreasing while political rights stay the same). But it's still relatively rare. But then again, it happened in Indonesia last year.

    In all, food for thought as we read the tea leaves of the new Jokowi administration, and as we conceptualize possible trajectories for Indonesian democracy over the coming years.

  • Is Indonesia an Unusual Muslim Country?

    I’m currently finishing up the first draft of a book manuscript on Islam and political economy in Indonesia. One of the arguments that I aim to make is that an intense study of the Indonesian case is broadly relevant for the study of Islam and political economy everywhere. But like many who work on Indonesia, I often find that scholars of Islam are skeptical that the Indonesian case has much relevance for them. Indonesia is often viewed as simply too different: not just at the far southeastern corner of the Muslim world, but characterized by a fundamentally different politics, economy, society, and history.

    I aim to challenge that view. But while readers some may be convinced by my appeal to history, many will not be. Skeptics of the relevance of Indonesia will look at the rest of the Muslim world, and say “it’s the only democracy,” or “it’s so large,” or “it’s so diverse.” These things are true, at least right now. But there are probably hundreds of other dimensions along which one might compare Muslim countries. Is Indonesia extreme along all of them? Hard to say without cherry-picking examples. So I’ve developed a more formal statistical test of the uniqueness of Indonesia vis-a-vis the rest of the Muslim world.

    To do this, I’ve used the handy QoG dataset from the Quality of Government Institute at Gothenburg. This contains hundreds of variables capturing everything from GDP to ethnolinguistic fractionalization to civil liberties to violence. I’ve taken their time-series-cross-section dataset, dropped all countries that are not majority or plurality Muslim, and then created a country average for each variable. Then, for each country, I’ve calculated what decile it falls in for each variable in the dataset from among all 52 Muslim majority and Muslim plurality countries. So, for example, if country A scores on the 95% percentile of all Muslim countries for variable X, it gets a score of 10 because it’s in the 10th decile. Repeat that for every ordinal, continuous, or dummy variable in the dataset, and the result is a series of decile scores for each Muslim country for hundreds of variables.

    The intuition here is that if a country is “abnormal” or “unusual” it will tend to score on the extremes—1st or 2nd, 9th or 10th deciles—for lots of variables. “Usual” countries will tend to score in the middle. Examine the distribution of scores for each of the 52 Muslim countries, and you can start to see what Muslim countries are normal and which ones are not.

    Here is what this looks like. Each gray line represents a kernel density plot for one country’s decile scores. Indonesia’s is the thick black line.
    Islam-deciles
    As you can see, Indonesia’s right in the middle of the pile. Across most dimensions in the data, it is not an extreme case, it is a typical case, scoring close to the median of all Muslim countries. I’ve also highlighted two countries that emerge from this analysis as unusual countries, tending to score at the extremes much more often than they score near the middle: Afghanistan and Malaysia. These results make sense too, for QoG tends to present their variables such that “good things” have higher values than “bad things.” (Although things like trade/GDP ratio aren’t necessarily “good,” of course.)

    So there’s my answer: across most indicators that we can observe, Indonesia is a typical Muslim country. This does not entail that Indonesian Islam is typical as well. But it does suggest that even if Indonesian Islam is atypical, such differences haven’t translated into broad differences in economy, society, and politics.