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Indonesia's High-Stakes Handover
Abstract
The man who has spent the past three decades doing more than anyone to deny Indonesians the right to elect their leaders has now been elected Indonesia's leader. Riding the coattails and benefiting from the brazen interventions of Joko Widodo, the wildly popular outgoing president, Prabowo Subianto has completed his quarter-century-long political rehabilitation from Indonesia's most notorious human-rights abuser to the world's third-largest democracy's commander-in-chief. The murky circumstances of Prabowo's electoral landslide, combined with the likely prospect that he will rule effectively unopposed, seem certain to accelerate recent processes of democratic erosion in the world's largest Muslim-majority country.
Polarization is increasing worldwide. When broken down by region, V-Dem data suggest
that every region except Oceania has seen polarization levels rise since 2005. Africa has had the smallest increase during this period, although it has long had high levels of polarization. Rising polarization in Europe is being driven by deepening political divisions in Eastern and Central Europe, Southern Europe, and the Balkans. In the Western Hemisphere, the largest democracies—Brazil, Mexico, and the United States—are all experiencing extreme levels of polarization. East Asia’s polarization levels have traditionally been low, though increasing political tensions in places like South Korea and Taiwan are driving up the region’s score. And in South Asia, India’s polarization has skyrocketed since 2014.
To better understand the various paths by which polarized societies might overcome or
reduce their political divisions, this working paper examines perniciously polarized countries that have successfully depolarized, at least for a time. Through a quantitative analysis of the V-Dem data set, this study identifies 105 episodes from 1900 to 2020 where countries were able to reduce polarization from pernicious levels for at least five years. These 105 episodes represent roughly half of the total episodes of pernicious polarization during the time period, thus indicating a fairly robust capacity of countries to depolarize. If considered in terms of country experiences rather than episodes (because many countries have experienced multiple episodes in a cycle of polarization and depolarization), then the data indicate that two-thirds of the 178 countries for which V-Dem provides polarization data have experienced one or more episodes of pernicious polarization, but only thirty-five countries (20 percent) have failed to experience any depolarization to below-pernicious levels.
Polarization does not necessarily pit left against right, rich against poor, secular against religious, or ethnicity against ethnicity. Rather than polarizing along deep social or ideological cleavages, today’s democracies often polarize over the perceived abuse of power by popularly elected chief executives. We argue that such conflicts are built into the definition and design of democracy, which requires both vertical accountability (i.e., inclusivity) and horizontal accountability (i.e., constraints) and divides sovereignty into separate institutions. We illustrate our institutional theory of polarization through a comparative analysis of polarizing crises in five Asian democracies since 2000. What mattered most for these crises’ severity and eventual resolution was not the depth of social cleavages, but how the leading elite opponents of polarizing figures managed their removal from office.
Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely than expected. The result has been what I call party cartelization, Indonesian-style. This differs significantly from canonical cases of party cartelization in Europe. Yet it exhibits the same troubling outcome for democratic accountability: the stunted development of a clearly identifiable party opposition. Since the advent of direct presidential elections in 2004, Indonesian democratic competition has unsurprisingly assumed somewhat more of a government vs. opposition cast. But this shift has arisen more from contingent failures of elite bargaining than from any decisive change in the power-sharing game. So long as Indonesia's presidents consider it strategically advantageous to share power with any party that declares its support, opposition will remain difficult to identify and vulnerable to being extinguished entirely in the world's largest emerging democracy.
Indonesia Riots: Six Dead After Protesters Clash with Troops over Election Result
- Kate Lamb
Kate Lamb, "Indonesia Riots: Six Dead After Protesters Clash with Troops over
Election Result," Guardian, 22 May 2019.
- Alifia Sekar
Alifia Sekar, "Threats, Assault Against Critics Mar 2024 Election: Amnesty Indonesia," Jakarta Post, 25 February 2024.
Prabowo's forces behaved when attempting to save his father-in-law's dictatorship, or perhaps to pave the way for a coup to replace him as military dictator, see Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia
- Geoffrey Robinson
For those either unfamiliar or in need of a refresher on just how badly Prabowo's
forces behaved when attempting to save his father-in-law's dictatorship, or perhaps to
pave the way for a coup to replace him as military dictator, see Robert W. Hefner, Civil
Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000), and Geoffrey Robinson, "Rawan Is as Rawan Does: The Origins of Disorder in
New Order Aceh," Indonesia 66 (October 1998): 126-56.
Counter-Polarisation and Political Expediency
- Greg Fealy
Greg Fealy et al., "Counter-Polarisation and Political Expediency," New Mandala,
1 July 2022.
Indonesia's Appointed Leaders and the Future of Regional Elections
- Ian Wilson
Ian Wilson, "Indonesia's Appointed Leaders and the Future of Regional Elections," Fulcrum, 16 August 2023.