Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Islamist Parties in Indonesia’s 2019 Legislative Elections

    In an earlier post about Indonesia's 2019 elections, I examined the correlates of support for presidential candidate Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and VP candidate Ma'ruf Amin. The central message in that analysis was that non-Muslims and Javanese Muslims voted heavily for Jokowi, whereas non-Javanese Muslims were the main supporters of the opposing ticket of Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno.

    But this was not the only election that took place that day: Indonesians also voted for members of the People's Representative Council (DPR), Indonesia's legislature. Unlike Indonesia's presidential election, run on a first-past-the-post model, Indonesia's legislative districts are multimember districts. This gives more room for differentiation among the more than a dozen parties that contested these elections. Given the role of Islam in explaining presidential results, it is natural to ask whether this also explains the legislative voting patterns as well.

    To investigate this question, I use the same data sources as before to calculate support for Islamist parties—adding together PPP, PKS, and PBB)—as a fraction of all legislative votes cast in each administrative district. The figures below plot this against the Muslim population share for each district, and compare those results to vote shares going to the explicitly non-Islamist parties Golkar and PDI-P.

    plot of chunk islamist_share

    These results show, unsurprisingly, that Islamist parties are more popular in Muslim-majority districts than in non-Muslim-majority districts. But note that the vote share for Islamist parties is never particularly high. Also unsurprisingly, PDI-P, the Indonesian party that most closely approximates a secular nationalist party, does best in non-Muslim districts and tends to fare worse in Muslim-majority districts on average.

    If we break out the Islamists into individual parties, we see a similar result.
    plot of chunk islamist_share2

    Once again, these parties don't do particularly well (check out the y scale), but they do do better, as we might expect, in heavily Muslim regions.

    All of these results are based on district-level data. It would be even more revealing if we could take the results down to a lower level of aggregation, but unfortunately I do not yet have compiled demographic data at a lower level of analysis. But thanks to Nick and Seth (who provided the data for the first analysis) we do have vote returns at the level of the village (or, in urban areas, something like the ward). And we although we do not have demographic data, we can look at both presidential and legislative results together to provide a bit more insight on the role of Islam in the 2019 elections.

    One thing we can do is look at the aggregate vote share for Islamist parties at the village/ward level, and compare that to the presidential results. If Prabowo-Sandi earned more votes in villages where Islamist parties did well, then this is evidence—albeit indirect and circumstantial—that the effects of Islam on vote choice are more than just demographic in nature.

    And, in fact, this is what we find. Each tiny dot in the figure below is a village or a ward. And when we plot all 50,000+ of them, Prabowo-Sandi vote share versus Islamist party vote share, there is clearly a positive (if modest) correlation.
    plot of chunk islamist_share_village

    Now, officially speaking, the Islamist politics here ought to be more complicated. After all, PPP joined Jokowi's coalition rather than Prabowo's. But contemporary Indonesia's partisan alignments are famously fluid, and it would not be surprising if voters who supported Islamists in the legislature also supported Prabowo-Sandi. We can check this by once again breaking down the results by Islamist party.

    plot of chunk islamist_share3

    That there is a positive relationship between PPP legislative vote share and Prabowo-Sandi results tells you just how strong these partisan coalitions are. For those curious, it's also possible to show these results in a regression format (controlling for turnout and 5000+ kecamatan fixed effects which wipe out most interesting differences across Indonesia's regions).

    ## 
## ============================================================================================================
##                                                              Dependent variable:                            
##                                  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
##                                      islamist_share         ppp_share         pks_share        pbb_share    
##                                           (1)                  (2)               (3)              (4)       
## ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## ps_share                                0.158***            0.052***          0.097***          0.009***    
##                                         (0.006)              (0.004)           (0.004)          (0.001)     
##                                                                                                             
## leg_total                              0.00000***          -0.00000**        0.00000***        -0.00000*    
##                                        (0.00000)            (0.00000)         (0.00000)        (0.00000)    
##                                                                                                             
## ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Observations                             54,278              54,278            54,278            54,278     
## R2                                       0.692                0.598             0.645            0.560      
## Adjusted R2                              0.660                0.556             0.608            0.514      
## Residual Std. Error (df = 49135)         0.061                0.042             0.044            0.017      
## ============================================================================================================
## Note:                                                                          *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001
##                                     OLS with kecamatan fixed effects, standard errors clustered by kecamatan

    The last link in this story are two parties that occupy an interesting position in Indonesian politics. PKB and PAN are both historically linked to important Muslim mass organizations (Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, respectively), but neither of them is Islamist. PKB joined Jokowi's electoral coalition—NU's leader Ma'ruf Amin served as Jokowi's running mate—but PAN joined Prabowo's coalition. How did that translate into partisan coattails at the legislative level?

    plot of chunk islamic_share

    PAN did better in places where Prabowo-Sandi performed better. But the same is not true for PKB. Its performance is uncorrelated with Prabowo-Sandi's performance. This is even true in a statistical test:

    ## 
## ===========================================================================================================
##                                                             Dependent variable:                            
##                                  --------------------------------------------------------------------------
##                                         islamist_share              pan_share              pkb_share       
##                                              (1)                       (2)                    (3)          
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## ps_share                                   0.158***                  0.114***                0.001         
##                                            (0.006)                   (0.006)                (0.005)        
##                                                                                                            
## leg_total                                 0.00000***                 0.00000               -0.00000**      
##                                           (0.00000)                 (0.00000)              (0.00000)       
##                                                                                                            
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Observations                                54,278                    54,278                 54,278        
## R2                                          0.692                     0.657                  0.728         
## Adjusted R2                                 0.660                     0.621                  0.700         
## Residual Std. Error (df = 49135)            0.061                     0.063                  0.061         
## ===========================================================================================================
## Note:                                                                         *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001
##                                    OLS with kecamatan fixed effects, standard errors clustered by kecamatan

    With huge amounts of statistical power to detect a really small effect, we can confidently conclude that the coefficient on P-S in the third column is a precise zero.

    It's hard to know what exactly to conclude about ideology, identity, and partisan voting from this last set of results. But village-level demographic data will help to sort these findings out. Watch this space for more.

  • What Does it Mean to be “Western” in the Netherlands? [Updated]

    Some time ago I wrote about the curious case of Japanese colonial subjects in the Dutch East Indies. The interesting observation is that

    After concluding a Treaty of Trade and Navigation in 1896, the Netherlands and Japan recognised each other as most favoured nations, and subsequently the Tokyo government pressed the Dutch to accord its migrants in their colonies the same legal status as Europeans. In 1899, Japanese citizens in the Indies acquired European status…

    Today I learned two more interesting facts about the regulation of identity in the Netherlands today, and how the Netherlands government conceptualize what it means to be from the West.

    First, when the Netherlands government conceptualizes migrants as being from the West or not, it continues to follow the precedent set in the Indies back at the turn of the last century.

    Due to their socioeconomic and cultural position, people from Indonesia and Japan residing in the Netherlands are considered as having a ‘western’ migration background. These are mainly people born in the former Dutch East Indies and expatriates employed by Japanese companies with their families.

    Not only does the Netherlands government maintain the idea that Japanese are “not like” other non-Europeans, it also applies that standard to anyone from Indonesia. It is somehow meaningful that this principle of “the former colonial subject is Western, like us” does not apply to, say, Suriname, although I’ll leave it to a specialist on Netherlands politics to explain how that has come to be and what it means.

    Second, what it means to be a cultural minority in the Netherlands:

    Student from a cultural minority defined by the Dutch Ministry of Education as someone meeting one of the following criteria:

    • belongs to a Moluccan group;
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from Greece, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Cape Verde, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia or Turkey
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from Suriname, Aruba or the Netherlands Antilles;
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from another non-English speaking country outside Europe, except Indonesia
    • at least one parent or guardian was admitted as a foreigner under article 15 of the Aliens Act.

    Here we see a bunch of knotty problems in distinguishing among former colonial subjects. Someone from the Moluccas (Maluku) is from a cultural minority background, but not someone from elsewhere in what is today Indonesia, like someone from Java. Unless that Javanese person went to Suriname first after slavery was abolished there, in which case that person would be from a cultural minority background.

    In the Netherlands, as in elsewhere, we learn a lot about politics and society from the categories that we use to regulate identity.

    UPDATE

    Another day, another thing learned. There are plenty other ways that peoplehood and citizenship are regulated in the Netherlands (and, of course, elsewhere too, but the Netherlands example is the one that fascinates this Indonesianist). Take, for example, the requirements for obtaining a temporary residence permit to live in the Netherlands. Many migrants have to take a Basic Civic Integration Exam. But not all of them!

    You do not have to take the exam in one of the following situations:

    • You are under 18 or you have reached your AOW pension age. The AOW pension age differs per person.
    • You have a valid residence permit and you want to change the purpose of stay.
    • You have lived in the Netherlands for at least 8 years during the compulsory school age.
    • You have the nationality of an EU/EEA country, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland, United States of America, Vatican City.
    • You have the status of a long-term resident EC in another EU country.
    • You have the Turkish nationality or you are a family member of a Turkish national that has lawful stay in the Netherlands…
    • You have the Surinamese nationality and have at least finished primary school in the Dutch language in Surinam or the Netherlands…

    Whereas the examples above show that Indonesians are viewed as having a Western background rather than a non-Western one, when it comes to civic integration, Indonesians are treated like other non-Western migrants—but Surinamese who are educated in Dutch are not!

    There is a fascinating book to be written on the politics of citizenship in the Netherlands and Indonesia. The mutual co-constitution of Dutch and Indonesian ideas of citizenship, from the colonial period through today.