Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Building a Coalition to Reverse Indonesia’s Indirect Local Election Law

    Thanks to WikiDPR.org, I was able to find a list of all of the DPR members from the 2009-14 session who will also sit in the 2014-19 session, and also a list of their votes on the controversial new local election law.

    Put together with a master list of all 2014-19 DPR members, we can create this table.

    Party Not in DPR Did Not Vote Direct Elections Indirect Elections Walkout Total
    Demokrat 29 1 0 0 31 61
    Gerindra 61 0 0 12 0 73
    Golkar 49 0 3 39 0 91
    Hanura 12 0 4 0 0 16
    Nasdem 35 0 0 0 0 35
    PAN 27 2 0 20 0 49
    PDIP 54 0 55 0 0 109
    PKB 30 2 16 0 0 48
    PKS 7 1 0 31 0 39
    PPP 20 1 0 18 0 39
    TOTAL 324 7 78 120 31 560

    “Did not vote” includes people who held ministerial positions and people who were currently under investigation for corruption. “Not in DPR” refers to those who are just entering the DPR for the first time in the 2014-19 sitting, and hence were not available to vote on last week’s election law.

    Now, my hunch is that the best way to fix this law is not to appeal to either some arcane technicalities of Indonesian interbranch relations, or to appeal for the Constitutional Court to reverse it. It is to have another vote and pass a new law that reverses this one. Doing so, however, will require that the so-called “Red and White Coalition” (Koalisi Merah-Putih) fracture. I consider this likely to happen eventually, but I’m not at all sure when.

    Strategically, the best option for Jokowi’s implicit coalition of PDIP, PKB, Hanura, and Nasdem is to add the smallest possible party that will give it a secure legislative majority: a minimum winning coalition. Here are some scenarios, recognizing that some additions to Jokowi’s implicit coalition like Gerindra or PKS are impossible.

    Current Scenario
    Old PDIP, PKB, Hanura: 77 seats
    New PDIP, PKB, Hanura, Nasdem: 131 seats
    Total Coalition Seats: 208
    Percent: 37.1

    Add Golkar
    Total Potential Seats: 299
    Percent: 53.4

    Add PPP
    Total Potential Seats: 247
    Percent: 44.1

    Add Demokrat
    Total Potential Seats: 269
    Percent: 48

    Add PPP + Demokrat
    Total Potential Seats: 308
    Percent: 55

    The simplest strategy is obviously, then, to add Golkar. It helps that Aburizal Bakrie is not particularly popular right now, that Jokowi’s VP is a Golkar stalwart, and that Golkar was the only party that split (even if only a little bit) on the indirect local elections law. That said, fellow political scientist Dan Slater sees more evidence that Demokrat is the way Jokowi will go.

    The implicit logic here is that in a highly fractionalized legislature with a presidential system and lots of societal cleavages, an oversized coalition is likely to be more durable. Adding in several smaller parties keeps each one of them at bay, even if it does create a coalition that is larger than the bare minimum and increases the costs of logrolling and horse-trading. Minimum winning coalitions, after all, are only effective if they are secure.

    We probably can’t tell what’s going to happen until it’s all over, and things are probably in the works as I write. But I’m watching this very closely, as many Indonesians are.

  • Yudhoyono, Dems Put their Feet in the Ice Cream

    Late the other night, Indonesia’s legislature dealt a significant blow to a decade-long process of local reform by eliminating the direct election of governors and district heads. Make no mistake: blame for this lies squarely on the shoulders of outgoing president Yudhoyono and his lame-duck Democrat Party faction.

    The way to think about these reforms is that local governments will now be organized following a parliamentary rather than presidential system. Rather than separate elections for a district head and a district parliament, going forward the district head will be chosen by the district parliament, meaning a shift to indirect elections from direct elections. It should be noted that for most of Indonesia’s history, this is how district heads were chosen, but the 2004 reforms that implemented direct elections for local leaders was an important component of Indonesia’s democratic transition. These reforms also happen to be enormously popular: something like 80% of Indonesians support direct election of local executives, even if (as critics allege) they are costly, confusing, and often corrupt.

    Now, I may be an exception among Indonesians and Indonesia-watchers, but I think that there is nothing procedurally undemocratic about either (1) a lame-duck parliament screwing up politics well into the future or (2) indirect elections, either at the local or national level. (My Whiggish views on inter-branch relations in U.S. politics are consistent with this view.) But like everyone else I know, I consider the return to indirect elections an enormous setback for reform, both locally and nationally.

    The case at the local level is obvious: separate executive and legislative elections create more channels of vertical accountability. This works even if vertical accountability is very weak, as it probably is in most of Indonesia. Even if you simplistically believe that all local elections in Indonesia are no more than sites of managed competition among bosses, notables, and oligarchs, abolishing direct elections reduces that competition even further. Now, executives will be beholden to legislatures rather than to the electorate, and given what I believe to be unclear lines of policy accountability, this further reduces the executive’s incentive to win votes through policy. Again, even if you thought that that incentive was already weak, this weakens it much further.

    The case at the national level is more speculative, but it’s more than just the sum of the negative consequences at local levels. It goes like this: direct local elections allow a different kind of politician to rise to prominence in Indonesia than would be possible under indirect elections. Indirect elections reward partisans—and in Indonesia this means something more like politicos given the weakness of national parties. Direct elections don’t automatically empower outsiders or reformists, but they are the single institutional precondition under which a non-partisan or non-politico can reach power. Those outsiders are the future of Indonesian politics. And that, of course, is why direct local elections are so immensely popular among Indonesians. Abolish direct elections of local executives, and you’ve cut off one channel through which reformists can enter the political arena by appealing to popular demands for reform. That’s not just bad for the regions, that’s bad for Indonesia.

    ** For an explanation of the title of this post, see here.