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Contemporary Indonesian Political Parties: Problems and Challenges of Intra-party Democracy
Abstract
Political parties are important actors in a democratic system. Political parties create democracy, and modern democracy is unthinkable without political parties.
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This article investigates how the Indonesian party system has created parties that increasingly rely on charisma for support and votes. Initially associated with divinely bestowed qualities, the concept of charisma has evolved to emphasize popularity and recognizability instead. In Indonesia, this tendency has combined with direct elections to distract parties from their ideal functions of developing platforms and programmes. Instead, parties have sought to pick and choose candidates that are popular to front their campaign. This has contributed to the formation of dysfunctional parties that are opportunistic, corrupt, and rent-seeking. As Indonesian parties continue their struggle to prove themselves by relying on the ephemeral attraction of personal charisma, the resultant incapacity to develop solid organization will continue to be a crippling trap for them.
Political parties in Indonesia and in other parts of Southeast Asia have become vitally dependent on the financial support of individuals or conglomerates with large private fortunes. A remarkable new development is that some of the billionaires who have long sponsored political parties have decided to out themselves as political leaders, and thus to adopt the style of oligarchs. I define an oligarchy as a society featuring systematic conflation of political and economic power within the same individuals or within small, elite groups of such individuals in a manner that is visible, tolerated and hence legitimated. The gradual shift from clandestine money politics to open oligarchy is a significant challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conflicts of interest between the demands of public office and their private interests would seem difficult to avoid for politicians who also run large business empires and own great estates. On the other hand, for billionaire sponsors of political parties to come forward and stand for public office personally also means that their hitherto clandestine influence is becoming more transparent, and their conduct and decisions more subject to public scrutiny and accountability. This article describes how both direct and indirect ways of conducting money politics operate and coexist within different types of political parties in Indonesia today, what the significance of these differences is and what is changing; with special reference to the 2014 parliamentary elections in Indonesia.
Winters examines the impact of oligarchic power on Indonesia's political economy. Defining oligarchs materially, he argues that extreme inequality in wealth among citizens necessarily leads to extreme political inequalities. Central to this approach is the changing politics of wealth defense by oligarchs spanning the Sukarno era, the New Order, and the electoral—democratic period since 1998. He emphasizes that the power of oligarchs in Indonesia is especially dominant and distorting because the country's legal infrastructure is debilitated, and because organization and mobilization among other actors in civil society is weak. Particular attention is paid to oligarchic influence in Indonesia's media.
The book examines two of the most prominent developments in contemporary democratic politics, party change and political personalization, and the relationship between them. It presents a broad-brush, cross-national comparison of these phenomena that covers around fifty years in twenty-six countries through the use of more than twenty indicators. It demonstrates that, behind a general trend of decline of political parties, there is much variance among countries. In some, party decline is moderate or even small, which may point to adaptation to the changing environments these parties operate in. In others, parties sharply decline. Most cases fall between these two poles. A clear general trend of personalization in politics is identified, but there are large differences among countries in its magnitude and manifestations. Surprisingly, the online world seems to supply parties with an opportunity to revive. When parties decline, personalization increases. Yet these are far from being perfect zero-sum relationships, which leaves room for the possibility that other political actors may step in when parties decline and that, in some cases, personalization may not hurt parties; it may even strengthen them. Personalization is a big challenge to parties. But parties were, are, and will remain a solution to the problem of collective action, of channeling personal energies to the benefit of the group. Thus they can cope with personalization and even use it to their advantage.
Despite an ever-increasing number of arrests of elite politicians by Indonesia's anticorruption commission, the country's levels of political corruption remain stubbornly high. This article argues that the main reason for this apparent paradox is Indonesia's dysfunctional party and campaign financing system. None of the three elements upon which this system was built (membership dues, donations, and state subsidies) has worked to finance politics in an effective manner. This systemic failure is far from accidental: it is caused and perpetuated by an elite that prefers illicit fund-raising to the limitations that a more orderly funding mechanism would impose. As a result, political corruption continues unabated, oligarchs have penetrated party politics, and state budgets are misappropriated for political purposes. Indonesia's new president, Joko Widodo, has promised to reform the political finance regime, but the power of deeply entrenched interests groups means that any change will be painfully slow.
This article elaborates on and defends the ideas presented in our Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets, in the context of the debate in the present issue. We argue that developments in post-Suharto Indonesia are best analyzed within a structural political economy approach and understood in relation to political conflicts that precede and follow democratic and market transitions, which preserve or reshape the social order. In the process, the article spells out the basic features of the oligarchy thesis and its continuing relevance to understandings of resilience and change in Indonesian politics.
Earlier attempts to justify intra-party democracy have failed. Either they have been inconsistent with democratic premises, or those premises have been flawed in the first place. This article develops a viable defence for internally democratic parties based on the deliberative theory of democracy. Parties should be internally democratic in order to provide a vertical linkage between different deliberating spheres and a horizontal linkage between competing issues. In addition, intra-party democracy makes policy agenda-setting accountable to the public and provides a second-order principle from which to justify exceptions from internally democratic practices when deemed necessary. The article finally considers some of the institutional practices parties could adopt in order to approximate this deliberative ideal.
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