Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Coalitions and Ideology: Feature, Outcome, or Fundamental?

    My friend and colleague Dan Slater is a close watcher of Indonesian politics with a distinctive view of powersharing and coalition politics in Indonesia (see here and here). His work is what I read when I want to be skeptical of ideology as a constraint in Indonesian party politics.

    Over at New Mandala, we have a careful analysis by Tom Power of the ideological cleavages between the two coalitions contesting Indonesia’s presidential election.

    Does the current coalitional alignment signify a meaningful cleavage in Indonesian party politics (the type that I had suggested was possible over at the Monkey Cage several months ago, prior to the legislative elections)? Yes and no: the existence of the cleavage is consistent with at least three possible understandings of Indonesian party politics. We can think about the ideological differences across the coalitions as features, outcomes, or fundamentals of coalition politics.

    1. Ideological differences across coalitions are features if they are ephemeral results of the dynamics of powersharing. This does not mean that they don’t exist: These differences can be described by analysts, and they may be invoked by politicians now that the coalition has formed (see Jokowi’s statement that he’s a representative of the moderate, inclusive Muslims), but they are simply incidental to the politics of coalition formation. The implication is that such ideological cleavages should not be sticky over time. After the current election, they will disappear.
    2. Ideological differences are fundamentals if they are causes of the coalitional alignments. If, for example, the fact that PKS is an Islamist party prevents it from aligning with PDI-P because PDI-P is not Islamist, this would mean that ideological differences are fundamental to the coalitions that have formed. The prediction here is that ideological cleavages should endure over time. After elections end, they persist, and constrain what kinds of political agreements or coalitional alignments are possible. This does not rule out the possibility that coalitions could change in the future (for example, you can imagine both red-green and grand coalitions in the same country), but it does imply that these should be rare, and hard to sustain absent strong structural pressures.
    3. Ideological differences across coalitions are outcomes if the observed ideological cleavage is the product of fundamental party characteristics other than ideology that constrain coalition formation. The distinction between fundamental and outcome is subtle but important. If, to take a counterfactual example, durable and institutionalized parties (think PDI-P, Golkar) were unwilling to align with personalist parties (think PD, Gerindra, Hanura), and the two groups of parties happened to differ in ideology too, then any ideological cleavages would be an outcome but not a fundamental. The observable implications of cleavages-as-outcomes are almost identical to those of cleavages-as-fundamentals: they should persist over time. The key difference is in the process of changing coalitional alignments, which requires ideological flexibility if cleavages are fundamentals but not if they are outcomes.

    The balance of the evidence is consistent with the existing coalition cleavage as a feature, not a fundamental or an outcome, of Indonesian party politics. We have plenty of examples: Golkar is “willing to enter a coalition with anyone“, the Islamist PKS is “open to entering into a coalition with any party, nationalist or Islamist.” Again, this does not mean that the ideological differences across coalitions don’t exist, or that they are irrelevant or meaningless. But it does suggest that we ought not make too much of them, not yet.

  • The Simple Statistics of Indonesian Election Polling

    There have been some useful commentaries on Indonesia’s electoral results, and some interesting speculation as to why polling results appear to some to be misleading. The general issues are two: PDIP did worse than many expected, and Islamic parties as a whole did better. Tom Power, for example, argues that the polls were “wrong” about Islamic parties. Marcus Mietzner notes that some polling experiments generated misleading conclusions about support for PDIP when prompting people to remember that Jokowi would be the PDIP presidential candidate (the implication is that these experiments were unrealistic, which is true).

    Yet we should not expect that any one poll is exactly right. How much of a difference between a poll’s average and the actual vote percentage does there need to be for the poll to have been “misleading,” for a party to have done “better than expected” given “the polls”? Some simple statistical reasoning is clarifying here.

    Polls are polls, they are not censuses. That means that they have margins of error, and that any predicted percentage supporting any party or candidate has a margin of error too. These are rarely reported—the margin of error for the entire poll usually is, but that’s not the same.

    Fortunately, we can calculate these standard errors if we have the sample size and a desired level of statistical significance. I have done just this, using the sample size and results for the most recent Indikator poll and the most recent Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting poll. (Full disclosure: I know the principal of Indikator, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, and Saiful Mujani is a co-author of mine. See here.) We can compare the expected vote return and its 95% confidence interval to the results of the Kompas Quick Count as of April 10. Here is what we get.

    pollingquickcount

    The results help to clarify to some of the debates. Saiful Mujani did better than Indikator: the results for PDIP are within his poll’s 95% CI, something we certainly haven’t heard much commentary about. Moreover, among the Islamic parties, only PAN and PKS really did better than the polls had expected. It is tempting to focus on the results for PPP and PKB, but although these results higher than the point estimate from Saiful Mujani, they are still within that poll’s margin of error. They are only outside of the margin of error of the Indikator poll, which is interesting, but suggests that that poll just did not fare particularly well.

    The point of this exercise is simply that polling results are designed to present “toplines.” We care about those. But to make inferences from them, they alone just won’t do.

    Another interesting result for students of Islam in Indonesian politics is the total fraction of the vote going to Islamic and Islamist parties compared to previous years. (I consider Islamist parties to be parties whose platforms either now or at one time in the recent past called for implementing sharia law in Indonesia; those are the dark green. The light green are Islamic parties, rooted in Muslim social organizations but making no such call for sharia.)

    islam

    It is indeed true that Islamic and Islamist parties are not disappearing. Anyone who has argued that is wrong. But on the whole, these results aren’t particularly stark in any direction. If anything, it’s the Islamic parties that have done a bit better on the whole than the past. But nothing transformative, at least not based on legislative vote shares. Greg Fealy covers some of the implications, but it’s not clear to me that there’s anything about the overall vote for Islamic and Islamist parties that needs to be explained.