Chapter Eight: Conclusions and Analysis
Victory without defeat, war without army
--Javanese saying
At the end of November 2001, Indonesian Minister of Justice Yusril Ihza Mahendra claimed that his ministry had 300 new parties registered, 300 more than the 48 that contested the elections in 1999![1] The logic seems to be, as the chair of the new Partai Demokrat made clear later, “in order to have a position, one must have a party.”[2]
Indonesians generally bemoan the number of parties that have sprung up since Suharto’s fall permitted the political opening. They bemoan too the quality of the parties which have arisen. They are seen as personalistic, undisciplined, and self-interested. The sheer number of parties, while often linked to polarization, need not necessarily be so.[3] Spain, a democracy considered now to be fully consolidated after a long period of authoritarian rule, saw more than 150 parties compete in its first post-authoritarian elections. By that standard, Indonesia’s 48 parties in 1999 seem tame by comparison.[4]
The post-authoritarian political opening seems custom-designed to create a great number of parties, and, unsurprisingly, this is often the case. The old system is gone, and the new system seems entirely up for grabs. The democratic rules of the game seem to promise that political power is within each person’s or group’s reach. Numerous parties arise as a result. There is little logic to inter-party consolidation before the first election because strengths of support have not yet been tested. Subsequently, experience teaches, party numbers, at least giant party numbers like Indonesia’s, do fall. This phenomenon will be helped along by expected changes in the country’s laws on parties and elections.
However many there are, parties as a species are necessary to the functioning of a democracy. As the well-known saying by E. E. Schattschneider has it, “democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” This may seem difficult to believe given the perceived decline in parties in advanced industrial democracies over the last thirty years. Peter Mair, though, says that even in the advanced democracies, parties are not dying, they are merely changing.[5] We can see that these changes would result from changes in demographics, technology, and the structure of the workforce, among other factors. According to Scott Mainwaring, writing on parties in “third-wave democracies,” parties are often the “only actors with access to elected positions in democratic politics;” therefore, parties are “crucial.”[6]
Parties, which are necessary for, at the very least conducive to, democratic governance serve numerous functions in the political system. Party labels provide information to voters to simplify choice among parties at election time; this information could include signals to recollect major party figures, party history, party ideological orientation, and a party’s general policy line. Without parties to provide this function, the informational needs of citizens to find out everything on their own about candidates for public office might render voting the preserve of a narrow elite. Party symbols can also provide an affective link between citizens and governing individuals or ideologies, giving voters something around which to rally and a feeling of active connection with those in government. Parties also aggregate interests that might otherwise be too inchoate to serve as a reasonable guide for public policy. Parties often serve as generators of policy themselves; by the logic of the marketplace of ideas, more sources of ideas would be positive for the political system. The existence of parties encourages other groups to organize as parties as well in order to have input into the political system; thus, parties as a species can be self-perpetuating. In addition, parties provide political education, mobilize citizens for participation in the political system, and facilitate the legislature’s operation. [7]
Two important concepts related to parties that underpin democratic theory are accountability and legitimacy. Parties enable voters to hold officeholders responsible for governmental choices. Imagine the situation in which each citizen had to look up the legislative record of his or her representatives, plus that of challengers, at each election—and at each level of office for which a vote was being cast. Again, the information costs of participation would likely be too high to all but a narrow circle of individuals to have meaningful, rational input into the political system. Parties put forth programs, at the least loose packages of policies or governing concepts, to which they can later be held accountable when the term of office is done. Parties allow voters to hold legislative and executive officeholders responsible for their actions while in office as well. That the parties seek to continue winning office in the future enables voters to make governing officials responsive, even when an election is not imminent.
Legitimacy is the other concept that helps parties to underpin democratic rule. Internationally, elections are the sine qua non of being a modern democratic state.[8] In order for elections to be considered free and fair, parties have to be allowed to organize and compete freely. Parties and elections are the badge of democratic modernity and are the most widely accepted (even if often violated) means of government formation.
Having established that parties are necessary for modern democracy to function, this study also subscribes to the ideas first put forth by Mainwaring and Scully in their volume on Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America and later by Mainwaring working alone in his study, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil, that the institutionalization of the party system is the proper way to examine parties and their impact on the political systems in more recent democracies. [9] Mainwaring and Scully offer an important critique of previous party system theory. These theories were developed often using Western European (and sometimes American) parties and party systems as a basis. In these advanced industrial democracies, the theories were most often developed and tested. The authors make an important point, though, that in newer democracies in which the sequencing of democratization, industrialization, and technological development is different, parties will develop differently, and party systems will operate differently.
Indonesia is one of these more recent democratizers, and its successive party systems serve as the focus of this study. Like many former colonies, Indonesia began its independent history attempting to operate a democratic system on the Western parliamentary model. Challenges issued by national and territorial consolidation, revolution, Communism, and the military served to kill the first democratic experiment and allow the rise of almost forty years of authoritarian rule under Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and then Suharto’s New Order. When Suharto was pushed from power in 1998, Indonesia embarked again on a course of democratization, that is a broadening of participation in the political system to a greater extent than had been the case previously.[10] Whether this democratization ends as a consolidated democracy, I will argue, the party system has much to tell us.
Before Mainwaring and Scully, party system theory, which focused on advanced democracies, often modeled the experience of those countries as typical of the process of party formation in democracies generally. These theories often left party system scholars working in developing areas befuddled, as often there was no labor party to accompany mass democratization, no Greens emphasizing quality-of-life issues, and no Christian Democrats, legacies of previous conflicts between Church and state. Giovanni Sartori presented a theory of party systems which highlighted the number of parties and the ideological distance in the party system as the most telling indicators of party systems and their impacts on politics. For Mainwaring and Scully, and I agree, these criteria are less meaningful when analyzing politics outside of Europe. In the newer democracies, many systems have many parties; on its own, this criterion does not guarantee that party systems will operate similarly. In addition, with the demise of Communism, polarization has often been drastically reduced. Why, then, in some party systems does party competition still seem like a death match?
Mainwaring and Scully’s answer to the problem is that the number of parties and the degree of polarization provide only a starting point in exploring party systems. Working on his own, Mainwaring argues that Sartori’s criteria offer only a dichotomous choice when evaluating party systems. One either has a party system or one does not. Systems that change too rapidly are described by Sartori as “non-systems.” [11] But, these supposed “non-systems” occur far too often in newer democracies to be simply “non”-versions of their European counterparts. Therefore, Mainwaring finds, something important was missing from party system theory, especially as regarded the analysis of party systems in third-wave democracies.[12]
Mainwaring and Scully look to the degree of institutionalization of the party system to fill the void in understanding party systems in newer democracies. To the authors, it is the degree of institutionalization that separates the operation of politics in newer democracies from their West European counterparts. Both systems might be heavily populated by parties, but the difference in their operation can be as stark as night and day. Institutionalized party systems, such as those in the advanced industrial democracies and some of the newer democracies, provide a stability to politics which makes the system operate with greater predictability. Institutionalized systems also indicate more moderate, rule-based competition. In institutionalized systems, parties can fulfill their democratic functions as described above. They enable voters to hold government accountable. Party competition through elections is considered the legitimate means of forming a government. To Mainwaring, “[i]nstitutionalized party systems structure the political process to a high degree. In fluid [relatively uninstitutionalized] systems, parties are important actors in some ways, but they do not have the same structuring effect.”[13] So, it is the structuring provided by institutionalized party systems that Mainwaring and Scully identify as the most informative difference among party systems.
In order to discern the level of institutionalization in a given system, Mainwaring and Scully suggest four criteria. The first is stability in inter-party competition. This criterion is important in evaluating institutionalization because it suggests stability over time in the number of parties in the system, their relative strengths, and their relationships with the electorate (stability does not mean lack of change, only change that is not wild and unpredictable). The second criterion deals with the parties’ roots in society. Institutionalized systems have parties with strong roots in the population. This is related to stability in inter-party competition above. If parties have strong roots in society, swings in support from election to election will be kept to a minimum because parties have stable support bases on which to call. This can help to moderate competition and to offer predictability in electoral outcomes; both of these factors can contribute to ease in governing. The third criterion is the legitimacy of the parties and elections in determining the right to rule. If party competition through elections is viewed as the only legitimate means of forming a government, behavior will be structured on that basis. This can have the effect of moderating competition among the parties because the rules of competition are themselves perceived as important. It can also have the effect of preventing the rise to power of anti-system politicians (civilian or military) because alternative political and party systems are considered beyond the pale. In many developing countries, democracy’s legitimacy has been eroded precisely because party competition through elections was seen as divisive, damaging, and ineffective in solving a country’s problems. The fourth criterion examines the parties as organizations. In order to provide structure to the system, the parties must develop some solidity as organizations. Only with this can it be guaranteed that the party will still be around come the next election and that the party will develop the organizational capacities to fulfill the functions demanded of parties in a democratic system.
The four criteria offered by Mainwaring and Scully have the effect of enabling accurate and detailed description of an individual party system as well as evaluation of the degree of institutionalization in the system. The authors also suggest the effects of lack of institutionalization of the party system on politics and governance. Institutionalized systems operate much as we are used to in the West. The same parties exist from one election to the next and have specific roots in the population; therefore, swings in support are not so dramatic as to be destabilizing. Party organizations are developed and valued in and of themselves; personalistic parties, while still existing in some cases, do not dominate politics. Professionalism is relatively higher in institutionalized systems. Parties have the ability to develop and offer concrete policy options in the highly complex business of modern government.
On the other hand, inchoate party systems do not provide an underlying structuration to the operation of politics the way that institutionalized party systems do. Parties come and go from one election to the next. Parties’ social roots are weak, leading to instability as voters float from one party to another, or one individual to another, from one election to the next. Parties in relatively uninstitutionalized systems are often weak as organizations, displaying perhaps personalistic characteristics and lack of internal discipline and professionalization. Weak parties make governance difficult in a number of ways. Parties’ rapid rises and falls make it difficult to hold politicians accountable because of a lack of connection between a party and specific policies enacted. Without social roots, parties are often ill attuned to constituents’ interests, developing policies and governing in a way that is divorced from the popular will. Weak party organizations, especially lack of discipline, make developing and passing a legislative program a severe challenge, resulting potentially in gridlock and, thus, a perception that democratic government is ineffective in offering solutions to the problems besetting the nation. In weakly institutionalized systems, legitimacy is also often called into question, raising the possibility of anti-system figures shaking or even overturning the system. Lack of legitimacy often becomes a vicious circle. Because parties are not seen to be legitimate, everything they do is viewed as reflective of their particular self-interest; this is set against and in opposition to the national interest. In this climate, it becomes harder to develop social support for policies that would address national issues/problems. Without this feedback of support and ability to develop solutions, the legitimacy of parties and democracy is further eroded. Without a belief in the legitimacy of the democratic system and the parties’ right to participate in that system, every day for the party system could be the last, undermining the degree to which parties can plan and act with a lengthy time horizon that facilitates accountability to the public will.
Why Party Systems Develop as They Do
Working later on his single-case study of Brazil, Mainwaring was able to spell out in more depth why party systems develop in the ways that they do. He lists structural, institutional, and historical factors. Particularly, he highlights the importance of state actors and political elites in structuring the party system from above. This is different from the experience in the West where party growth can be seen to have been more organic. Instead, in third-wave democracies, Mainwaring argues, and this was particularly brought home by his Brazilian case, whole party systems have been overturned by the imposition of military rule. In some cases, specific parties have been favored and others proscribed. These elite/state interventions have the effect of changing the party system in important ways. We shall see that in the Indonesian cases under consideration, socio-economic factors, institutional factors, historical factors, state/elite interventions, and political cultural factors have all been important in determining the degree of institutionalization observed in the party system. International factors, an area not explored in detail by Mainwaring, can also be seen to have played a major role in shaping the types of parties that were perceived to be legitimate and the type of party system considered acceptable.
As one can see from the above discussion, without assuming that a transition from authoritarian rule will become necessarily a transition to democracy, in a climate in which at least some democratization has occurred, examination of the degree of institutionalization of the party system has a lot to tell us about the ways in which politics operates. The party system institutionalization framework enables us to describe the party system in great detail and to isolate factors important to its operation. The framework also allows us to identify why the party system has developed as it has and what effects this is likely to have on governance.
This study takes as its focus the cases of several Indonesian party systems, but the bulk of consideration is given to the contemporary party system, which has been developing since Suharto’s fall in 1998. Neither Mainwaring working alone, nor Mainwaring and Scully working together suggest the party system institutionalization framework as particularly appropriate for examining cases in the immediate transition from authoritarian rule. This is a shame because Mainwaring hints several times at the importance of the party system at the time of transition as setting the stage for the evolving system. According to Mainwaring, “democracy is likely to have shortcomings if a moderately institutionalized party system does not emerge after democratic government has been in place for some time.”[14] Further, examining Brazil’s transition from authoritarian rule, Mainwaring observes,”[f]rom the perspective of party building, the first seven or eight years of democracy could hardly have been worse.”[15]
If the party system could hardly have been worse, then it certainly could have been better. By examining the development of the parties from their “founding moment” at the time of the transition from authoritarian rule, one can learn a great deal about the type of the system that is evolving, the degree to which it is institutionalized, why it is developing as it is, and what effects this has on governance. Munck and Leff argue for the importance of the transition in setting important patterns for later politics in their essay, “Modes of Transition and Democratization: South American and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective.” To these authors, “the very process of transition from authoritarian rule, independently of the conditions that generated it, helps determine not only the prospects for democratic consolidation but also the success of the transition to democracy in the first place.”[16] Specifically looking at patterns of inter-party competition, Pridham and Lewis instruct observers to look at the evolving nature of inter-party competition to assess newly democratic systems.[17] Logic tells us that the new political system will not be created ex nihilo the day that the transition is declared over. Parties, patterns of interaction, norms, and the legitimacy of the new system are all being developed now, at the time of the transition from authoritarian rule. Without considering at all the idea of whether Indonesia is a democracy, examining the degree of institutionalization of Indonesia’s current party system enables us to analyze “what Indonesia is,” how its party system is structured, why it is structured as it is, and what effects this structuration has on politics.
Further, there is a normative implication for those interested in assuring that a transition from authoritarian rule becomes a consolidation of democracy (in Indonesia’s case, such as those among the country’s intellectuals and students, as well as international democratization advocates).[18] Mainwaring offers that while high degrees of party system institutionalization cannot guarantee democracy, party system institutionalization is an important piece of the democratic consolidation puzzle. Other scholars would agree with the focus on parties. Linz and Stepan point to the parties as an important element of a country’s political society, by which they mean, “that arena in which the polity specifically arranges itself to contest the legitimate right to exercise control over public power and the state apparatus.”[19] Therefore, the state of the parties in a transition from authoritarian rule has much to say about whether the consolidation will occur at all. Remedying weaknesses in party system institutionalization offers itself as an important area in which improvements might need to be made to ensure democratic consolidation in some cases. All too frequently, without any attention, weakly institutionalized party systems have simply limped to their own demise, unmourned by tired and often relieved populations.
Most classical comparative work on party systems was conducted in Western Europe. More recent generations have focused on Latin America and the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The inclusion of the Indonesian cases into this mix is important. Asian cases are often slighted by comparativists (one could also say in their turn Asianists slight comparative theory); this represents a rather gaping hole in the literature which this study aims to fill, even if it can do so only slightly. The study draws a number of conclusions which attempt to contribute to the dialogue on party system institutionalization, parties in transitions from authoritarian rule, and parties in the consolidation of democracy.
In addition, Indonesia is an important country from almost any perspective one chooses to consider it. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world. Assuming that the country is attempting to become a democracy, it would represent the third most populous democracy, after only India and the United States. Indonesia is also important from the Southeast Asian perspective. The third wave of democratization seemed to make little headway in Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Thailand, and East Timor representing the only cases of democratization since the 1980s. The majority of the region, seven of eleven countries, is composed of authoritarian regimes which range from the unapologetic to the rather better disguised. [20] Indonesia’s population is about two-fifths of Southeast Asia’s. The country’s breadth is larger than the continental United States. Thus, Indonesia looms large in the region’s consciousness. One cannot say “as Indonesia goes, so goes the region.” This does not mean, however, that the example of Indonesian democracy is without impact in the rest of Southeast Asia. After the accession to the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid, new foreign minister Alwi Shihab said it is “our dream, to uphold democracy and see other countries go through the democratic process as we did.”[21] Given the turbulence of Indonesia’s transition, reactions ranged from titters to cringes in the less democratic parts of the region.
Developing a framework to understand the relationship between Indonesia’s parties, the weaknesses in her politics, and prospects for democratic consolidation is vitally important to Indonesian democracy activists and their international allies as well. The euphoria of the transition has long since worn off. Intellectuals, students, and even the-man-in-the-street have begun to bemoan the country’s parties as self-interested, unresponsive, unaccountable, and ineffective. This study aims to contribute to an understanding of why Indonesia’s parties and party system have developed as they have, what effects this constellation poses for governance, and to suggest party development, rather than party bashing, as an important area of concern for those interested in the consolidation of democracy. At a recent discussion among Indonesian intellectuals, I armed a friend with a question asking how Indonesian intellectuals could contribute to improving Indonesia’s political parties. My friend reported back that my question was avoided by the speaker and ignored by the audience. How can the parties be improved and chances for the consolidation of democracy along with them? This study offers a number of ideas.
Indonesia’s Party Systems
Indonesia’s independent political history can be divided into four separate party systems. The first party system was that which evolved from the time of Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 until democracy was overthrown in 1959. The system was changing throughout the period of consideration, with new constitutions, new laws on elections, and successive regional rebellions; however, the early period can be seen as a unified whole as “the rise of the parties.” Parties multiplied, competition intensified, and governments rose and fell based upon the parties’ configurations in parliament.
The second period was the party system as it existed under Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. The party system was simplified (the number of parties was reduced), certain parties were prohibited, such as the Muslim Masyumi and the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), and others were advantaged such as the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The cut and thrust of politics moved away from inter-party competition during Guided Democracy, though, as a troika composed of President Sukarno himself, the military, and the Indonesian Communist Party rose to the fore. The parties as a whole were disdained. This was the first iteration of the parties’ fall.
The third party system can be observed in Suharto’s New Order. This, too, can be seen as part of the parties’ fall, as parties were completely marginalized and governance reoriented to be focused on Suharto himself, the military, and the bureaucracy. The number of parties was further reduced. Eventually, parties were merged into only two blocs, one representing nationalism and minority parties, the other representing Islam. The primary party in the system, Golkar, was legally not recognized as a party at all, but rather as an agglomeration of apolitical “functional groups” (groups of women, youth, and veterans, for example). However, there is no mistaking that Golkar was political. It captured on average 67% of the vote in six New Order elections. The nominal opposition parties were kept weak and dependent upon the regime and given no chance to assume power.
The fourth party system is the one that has arisen since Suharto’s fall in 1998. It is a multi-party system (one could say a hyper-party system), with hundreds of parties formed since 1998, 48 parties contesting the 1999 elections, and 21 achieving some representation in parliament.
The first party system, from 1945 to 1958 was characterized by the rise of a multi-party system. While Sukarno was leery of parties as divisive, instead favoring a national movement along the lines of the Indian National Congress, the overwhelming push was toward the creation of political parties. Parties grew representing the country’s political streams, or aliran: nationalism, traditionalist Islam, modernist Islam, [22] socialism and Communism, and Christian and minority interests.
From 1945 to 1955, the system was run on the basis of a multi-party, non-elected parliament. Only in 1955 were elections finally held; the legislature thus selected sat until abolished by Sukarno in 1960. Calculating volatility in the system by the share of seats parties held in the legislature at various intervals, one finds it was a rather high 22. This means that from iteration to iteration of the legislature, party composition changed roughly 22% each time. Interestingly, though, between the only two national-level votes held during the period, that for the parliament in September 1955 and the Constituent Assembly in December 1955, volatility in the vote was a very low 2.6.
Although the party system during the parliamentary democracy years would come to be derided as chaotic because of the sheer number of parties, the effective number of parties was far smaller. Only sixteen parties obtained more than one seat in parliament and four parties alone took 77% of the seats and 78% of the vote. Party system scholars calculate the effective number of parties to factor in vote (or seat) share to determine the dispersion of the party system. As chaotic as it looked after the parliamentary elections of 1955, the effective number of parties (based on the vote) was only 6.3. Following the Constituent Assembly elections of December 1955, the effective number of parties was only 6.1.[23]
Competition over the course of the parliamentary democracy years grew increasingly polarized. While the system muddled along with a weak commitment to Islam, the advent of the Constituent Assembly, which worked to create a new constitution from 1956 to 1959, brought fundamental disagreements about the nature of the state back into play. Outside the Constituent Assembly, national elections in 1955 and Java provincial elections in 1957 showed the Communists rapidly gaining in support. Governments rose and fell in rapid succession. The country’s problems went unaddressed and grew worse. More and more, it seemed as if the centralizing, Sukarnoist, Java-based, Communist, professional military coalition was set against the federal, Muslim, Outer-Islands based,[24] non-Communist, regional military commanders and parties. This severe conflict came to a head over a rebellion launched in Sumatra by rebellious colonels in 1958 (and joined by top leaders of two of the nation’s important political parties). A war of suppression strengthened the centralizing coalition and dealt a death blow to parliamentary democracy by allowing Sukarno to paint his enemies as disloyal to the nation.
In the first period, Indonesia’s parties were doubtless young—because they were new. However, the major parties did draw upon fundamental ideological and socio-religious differences in the population. While party support did fluctuate during the first period, as evidenced by the Communists’ rapid gains, there was some stability to the parties’ roots. Secularists/nominal Muslims (including minority religion adherents) gravitated toward nationalist parties, most typified by the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), and Communist parties, PKI being the strongest of the lot. Within the secular/nominal Muslim community, the division between nationalist and Communist was programmatic. Pious Muslims were split on religious grounds. Traditional, predominantly rural and Java-based Muslims, supported the Partai Nahdlatul Ulama (Rise of the Islamic Scholars’ Party) while modernist, predominantly urban and Outer-Island Muslims supported Masyumi.[25] These four parties alone finished with almost 80% of the votes and seats in the wake of the 1955 election. While this rootedness would seem to be a positive characteristic from the point of view of Mainwaring and Scully’s institutionalization framework, in fact, rootedness along the lines of what are perceived to be sharp, mutually exclusive communal groups was polarizing and destabilizing in the Indonesian context. In fact, by the end of the parliamentary democracy years, the situation came to seem to be seen as a war by other means.
Sharp polarization was one feature in the decline in the legitimacy of the first party system. President Sukarno denigrated the parties as “a disease” and vowed to bury the parties, “bury them, bury them, bury them,” in his famous formulation. In his 1965 autobiography, the President described the situation as follows:
Political parties grew like weeds with shallow roots and interests top-heavy with petty selfishness and vote-catching. Internal strife grew. We faced disaster, endless conflicts, and hair-raising confusion. Indonesians previously pulling together now pulled apart. They were sectioned into religious and geographical boxes, just what I’d sweated all my life to get them out of. Each tried outdoing the other. Constant argument without results, mutual undermining, vying for position, slander, abuse, lethal criticism were the fruits. Every voice demanded to be heard.[26]
The situation did not start out that way. Like other newly independent states, Indonesia was proud of its accomplishment in defeating Dutch colonialism and looked forward to joining the ranks of modern, democratic nations. The vote in 1955 was organized on a shoe-string, but it was overwhelmingly free and fair. Voter turnout in a nation of Indonesia’s breadth and at Indonesia’s level of development was an amazing 92%. However, the inability of the elections to produce a strong government began the parties’ downward slide, as they were delegitimized in the eyes of Sukarno, the military, and the general public. The parties were seen as corrupt and self-serving. They would bicker endlessly over what were perceived to be small points while the rakyat (the people) saw standards of living decline from earlier periods. Coalition governments fell before making any headway in accomplishing their joint programs. Groups like the Communists were, despite strong popular support, effectively locked out of government. Regional rebellions were causes of the parties’ delegitimation and also a symptom of their failure. The swing to the left in domestic politics and Indonesia’s international relationships also caused doubt in Western ideas about government, including multi-party, parliamentary democracy.
Party organizations during the first democratic system were, as one might expect, weak. The tradition of non-elected parliaments did not accustom party leaders to the task of organizing parties or to the tasks of consulting, mobilizing, or educating voters. From 1953, when the legislative framework for the 1955 elections was passed, the parties busily attempted to build their national organizations. Funding was irregular, however. Several parties colonized the bureaucracy to generate funds and perquisites for supporters. Parties were derided as personalistic vehicles for prominent politicians.
The Second Party System, 1959-1965
As is clear from the preceding discussion, the seeds of the second party system were sown in the first. Sukarno’s Guided Democracy was a specific reaction against the perceived failures of the parliamentary democracy system in general and the parties in particular. Western fifty-percent-plus-one democracy was derided as culturally inappropriate and incapable of generating true leadership in a country as diverse and large as Indonesia. Sukarno delivered his first overt attack on the parties in 1956. By 1959, he had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, rendered impotent the elected legislature, and issued a decree reinstating the strong-president Constitution of 1945. The parties fell to the wayside, but they could not be entirely eliminated because Sukarno needed the parties in order to offset the incredible strength of the armed forces. Of the parties, the support of Sukarno’s PNI[27] could be taken for granted. Thus, most important was the Communist Party, the popular support and mobilizational capacities of which seemed to be growing on a daily basis. With the military and the Communists, Sukarno sought to crush the old system “beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of the Revolution.” [28]
Standard democratic representative institutions were cast aside in favor of new, appointed bodies like the National Council and the Supreme Advisory Council. Even where the parties remained in parliament, their position and numbers were much reduced (the Indonesian term for this is deparpolisasi—de-political-party-icization). Parties occupied only 45% of the seats in the overwhelmingly nominated Gotong Royong (Mutual Assistance) Parliament formed in 1960. Functional groups and the military had risen to take much of the parties’ place in parliament, itself a body that was much reduced in power. While the parties could count some functional group supporters as coming from party subsidiary organizations (as could the military), it was the legitimacy of the parties’ role that had been most strenuously undermined. As Hindley observed, “[b]oth Sukarno and the army leadership have been eager to remove from the political parties any ability, even right, to control major policy decisions.”[29] Beyond that, even in the appointed parliament, parties were forced to share billing with functional groups, with the military forming the most important functional group, as agents of representation. Party officials turned up in Sukarno’s cabinets; however, this was only in their individual capacities.
Sukarno’s system was highly unstable, however. Politics at the center was a complex interplay of the powers of Sukarno, the military, and the Communists. This situation was fluid and heavily polarized between a predominantly anti-Communist military and a pro-Communist PKI. Muslim parties, part of the primary axis of competition in the parliamentary years, had de facto little choice as to which side to choose. No longer an independent power center with the banning by Sukarno of Masyumi, pious Muslims (both traditionalist[30] and modernist) generally supported the military in its all-out competition with the Communists. The pro- and anti-Communist visions of the Indonesian future could not be reconciled. Rumors of military coups and forcible Communist power grabs swirled on a daily basis. Finally, in 1965, with the spring tightly coiled, a murky coup brought the Guided Democracy system to an end.
It is meaningless to speak of volatility in the vote during the Guided Democracy period. A national vote was not held. Parties in their incarnations in the legislature ceased to play an important role. Besides their mobilizational functions and their role in offsetting the power of the military, the parties, with the exception of the Communists, were little needed. The system was built on anti-party attitudes and can be described as a consciously anti-party governing system. As reinforced by Sukarno, only the Communists were seen to be “revolutionary” enough to play an active role in the political system. Without influence and access to power, party organizations, again with the exception of the Communists, withered. In at least one area, the position of party subsidiary organizations, the parties withered on purpose. At military instigation, a process of removing political party subsidiary organizations from party control was begun. This would be completed in the New Order. Further, under Guided Democracy, there was little need to talk about party discipline as there was nothing about which discipline needed to be exercised (perhaps the parties as a whole might have shown more unity in standing up to the imposition of Guided Democracy).
The Communists were another story. Long the strongest party organizationally in the Indonesian party system, the Communists continued their attention to ideology, training, funding, and discipline during the Guided Democracy years. Particularly concerning to their anti-Communist foes, the Communists attempted to develop an armed capacity as well.[31] In the mosaic of Indonesia’s political parties, the PKI was unique. However, with the coup in 1965, the Communist party was about to be put out of the political organization business, permanently.
The Third Party System, 1966-1998
On the heels of Guided Democracy, Suharto set out to build a new, more stable, more development-focused regime. As Guided Democracy was consciously the “un-parliamentary democracy,” so too was the New Order the conscious opposite of the Old Order which preceded it. In contrast to the hopes of the parties that the overthrow of Sukarno and Guided Democracy would represent a return to the good old days of parliamentary democracy, Suharto and his fellow generals were hatching an entirely new system. In fact, the New Order was against the Old Order of all that had come before, both Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and the parliamentary democracy system.
Still seen as the cause of the chaos of the parliamentary democracy years and presenting a challenge to the imposition of an entirely new regime of military design, the parties came to be tightly controlled. In an orgy of violence in 1965-66, the Communist PKI was banned. In addition, up to 500,000 PKI and suspected PKI members were slaughtered by the military and anti-Communist allies. Tens of thousands more were jailed, internally exiled, or deprived of their political rights as a result of their political beliefs (or for their participation in a Communist-inspired coup, if one believes the New Order version of events).
Beyond the PKI, strong control was exerted over the rest of the parties as well. Candidates for elections had to be vetted at all levels by military-dominated committees; freedoms associated with organization, association, the press, and speech were curtailed. Potentially strong parties like Masyumi were denied the right to re-form in the New Order and their formerly prominent leaders denied to right to lead or contest on behalf of Partai Muslim Indonesia, the party designed as the notional Masyumi successor. Elections were held in 1971 with a reduced number of parties and the anti-party Golkar strongly favored by military and government support. In one fell swoop, Golkar emerged from these controlled elections as the dominant party in the political system, with almost 63% of the vote.[32] As the regime grew more secure, by 1973, the party system was further simplified as parties were forced to merge into two emasculated, nominal opposition bloc-parties. While the military and Golkar were more important than the free interplay of parties in determining the true disposition of power in New Order politics, the sheer duration of the New Order enabled patterns of party behavior to establish themselves thoroughly. Further, the anti-party attitudes of the Suharto regime were well inculcated into the population. I find that, even when a system is not democratic, the nature of the party system and the parties themselves can have an impact on party systems in subsequent periods.
Inter-party competition during the New Order was highly stable. Golkar’s vote ranged from 62.8% to 74.5%. Volatility averaged a low 6.6. This suggests stability in the system, but should not be compared to volatility figures in more competitive systems. In fact, the nominal opposition was neither designed nor permitted to “win” New Order elections. Opposition was controlled (not allowed to criticize the government, the president, or the government’s program), the press was shackled through a licensing system, election results were manufactured (bureaucratic and military organs engineered support for the regime), and Golkar emerged perpetually triumphant from the pesta demokrasi (festival of democracy). In fact, over the course of six New Order elections in Indonesia’s then-27 provinces, Golkar won was the plurality winner of every province every time, with only three exceptions, Aceh in 1977 and 1982 and Jakarta in 1977.
Even where elections were not sufficient to do the job, the parties’ roles were circumscribed by nomination to elected bodies at all levels (again military and functional group representation served to off-set the parties’ position). The 1992 MPR, the upper house of parliament, for example, was composed of 60% nominated representatives and only 40% of representatives chosen through the elections. The DPR, or lower house, was 20% appointed in that year. Lower-level legislative bodies were regularly 20% appointed as well. Through these mechanisms, the regime kept a firm grip on both the legislature and the executive (it is the upper house, the MPR, which selects Indonesia’s president).
During the New Order, Golkar had certain obvious strengths. The party was favored by the military and the bureaucracy. In fact, members of the civil service were compelled to support Golkar and to encourage others to do so. A one-time Golkar official let slip publicly that bureaucrats were held responsible for ensuring certain levels of Golkar support in their areas. The military’s territorial command structure placed it throughout Indonesia from the highest to the lower levels. From this vantage, the military was able to influence, cajole, buy off, and even coerce support for Golkar as well. Golkar also had access to the funds of the state to support its election efforts and regular operations. It took years for Golkar to solidify as an organization, however. With control over the state, the party “as an organization” was little needed. Golkar, as a joint organization of hundreds of functional groups, too, had a complex structure that, while easy to control, was difficult to permeate with value as an organization. Oftentimes, the important decisions of Golkar were reached by the president himself, operating with his kitchen cabinet of top advisors.
The two nominal opposition parties had none of Golkar ‘s strengths and quite different weaknesses. Because of the forced merger of parties which resulted in the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP—for Islamic parties) and Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI—for nationalist and Christian parties), internal rifts constantly kept parts of the organizations competing, if not outright warring, with each other. Without access to the power and privileges of office, too, the parties were incapable of recruiting highly qualified human resources or attracting financial support. Financing came overwhelmingly from the government, including funds distributed from Suharto’s presidential assistance funds.[33] This had the effect of keeping the parties dependent on the government and on Suharto personally. If certain configurations of party leaderships promised to threaten the regime, the tap could be turned off. The parties were also subject to regular interference in their internal affairs by the regime, further undermining their already weak independence. Government-sponsored leadership coups were regular affairs. The parties were not allowed to organize below the kabupaten (regency, roughly analogous to the county) level nor to engage the population outside of designated campaign periods, limiting their territorial reach and their connection with the population.
In the end, it was not the parties which overthrew Suharto’s regime. In fact, in early 1998 as protests began throughout the nation, it was the nominally opposition Partai Persatuan Pembangunan that was the first to nominate Suharto once again for the presidency! Instead of the parties, pushing the limits were student groups, in many cases supported by academics and academic administrators. The Asian Economic Crisis dented the regime’s performance legitimacy, its claim to a right to rule by virtue of the sustained economic growth Indonesia had experienced since the late 1960s. The crisis enabled students to spin both the political and economic systems as the cause of the nation’s troubles. Student demands included: that Suharto step down, that a new, clean government be appointed, that the political laws on parties and elections be reviewed (with a view to crafting a more democratic system, one more respectful of human rights), that the military remove itself from politics, and that collusion, corruption, and nepotism (KKN, in the Indonesian acronym) be removed from government and society.[34]
In May 1998, Suharto was compelled to resign in the face of student and protests and prominent defections from his regime. Official academics, former stalwart ministers, and even the head of the legislature (and head of Golkar) were calling for the president’s resignation. The military committed itself to a constitutional transfer of power. That meant supporting Suharto’s vice president B.J. Habibie as president. Within a week of assuming the presidency, Habibie promised that new, democratic elections would be held in one year’s time. The promise of elections split the reform movement between those pressing for reformasi total (total reform) and those willing to work through constitutional channels.
With Habibie’s promise of elections, parties began to form almost on a daily basis. It is these parties, the parties of the reformasi era, that form the primary focus of this study. Examining the level of institutionalization that can be observed in the four years since Suharto’s resignation seems like a laughable task. The process of institutionalization implies a process that is sanctified by time. This study argues, in contrast, that the founding moment of the new democratic regime has a great deal to teach about the patterns of competition, rules, organizations, and values that will underpin the new party system. Therefore, to ignore the evolving system of competition simply because it is in the process of evolving blinds us to potentially important information about why parties form as they do, why politics operates as it does, and whether democracy will prove viable in Indonesia.
Inter-party competition is, of course, still a work-in-progress in Indonesia. A detailed study of the criterion does show, however, that the system is in some ways more stable than it appears at first glance. Four years since the political opening have left Indonesians embittered with “democracy.” The parties, in particular, have been singled out for uniform derision. Why is this so?
From May 1998 until the time of the June 1999 national elections, perhaps hundreds of new political parties formed.[35] Of these, only 48 were judged to meet the criteria set down in the election law to permit participation in the elections. Unfortunately, these are the only elections we have in the current period, so examining volatility through a succession of elections is not yet an option.
Forty-eight parties seemed to remind many of the “chaotic” democracy of the 1950s. In fact, the new parties seemed to echo the parties of the 1950s directly. Parties could generally be grouped into the same aliran, or stream, categories as the parties of the 1950s. Nationalist and Christian parties formed, so did Islamic parties, both traditionalist and modernist. The party seen to be the legacy of the Partai Nasional Indonesia was the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia—Perjuangan (PDI-P), led by Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri (PDI-P scored 33% in the 1999 elections). The direct descendent of the Partai Nahdlatul Ulama was the Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB) formed by Abdurrahman Wahid, the Nahdlatul Ulama head (PKB scored 12.6% in the 1999 elections). Filling the Masyumi slot in the political system was the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN) (PAN scored 7.1% in the 1999 elections). PAN did attempt in the early part of the transition to present itself as a new type of “post-stream” political party. However, the stream logic, the need to find supporters from some defined group in the population, pushed the party from 1999 more strongly into the Muslim camp. Party head Amien Rais was the former head of Muhammadiyah, the nation’s largest modernist Muslim organization. Another candidate specifically seeking to be the new Masyumi was the Crescent Star Party, Partai Bulan Bintang (echoing Masyumi’s crescent moon and star symbol). PBB, while distinguishing itself from the rest of the field, did not score highly enough to assume the Masyumi mantle. In contrast to Masyumi’s more than 20% of the vote in 1955, PBB scored just under 2%.
In addition to the nationalist, traditionalist and modernist Islamic parties, two important types of parties were largely missing from the new system, however. Because of Indonesia’s historic battle to ensure a unitary state, regional parties were not permitted to form as they had been during the 1950s (the electoral law required parties to be spread across more than one of the big islands). This meant that regional and minority parties could not participate. Also missing were strong parties from the Communist, socialist, and workers’ party stream, the strongest of the pack, the PKI, having been decimated at the beginning of the New Order. Communism as an ideology was outlawed under Suharto’s rule (and continues to be to this day). The People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik—PRD) is a genuine party of the left, however, its 78,000 votes in 1999 (out of 105 million) speak volumes to the degree to which Marxism has been discredited over the New Order years. Also hurting the PRD was the fact that its top leadership sat in jail through the 1999 elections, only freed by Abdurrahman Wahid in December 1999. Several workers’ parties did form, only one of which, the Partai Buruh Nasional, appears genuinely to have been formed to advance workers’ interests. Cynics observe that the three other workers’ parties were formed solely for the purpose of confusing workers and channeling their activism in ways controlled by New Order civilian and military figures.
Further, two anomalous types of parties, legacies of the Suharto years, remain strong in the new system of inter-party competition. Golkar, the state party of the Suharto years, remained a major force (finishing second in the 1999 vote, with 22%), however, this time, with the exception of the advantages that accrued from its control of much of the state bureaucracy during the 1998-1999 period, the party did have to content itself to being one of many political parties, a significant difference in the party’s role and function in the party system. The Partai Persatuan Pembangunan was also a legacy of the Suharto years (PPP scored 10.6% in the 1999 elections). Many expected that the party would disappear in 1998-1999 as new parties building from the ideals (and even the organizations) of PPP component parties were formed. The PPP, however, had a number of advantages that enabled it to survive its predicted demise. The party had been the most dynamic party of the latter part of the New Order. It also had a nationwide (if not deep) network of party supporters, as well as twenty to twenty-five percent of the electorate that was accustomed to choosing PPP come election time.
Of the 48 political parties, 21 achieved some representation in parliament. The overwhelming bulk of representation, however, went to the top six parties, PDI-P, Golkar, PKB, PPP, PAN, and PBB. Between them, these six parties earned 88% of the 1999 vote and 92% of the seats up for election, a result even more concentrated than that of 1955.[36] The effective number of parties in the system, weighting the number of parties with the share of the vote received, is just 5.1 (this can be compared to 6.3 in 1955). Calculating the effective number of parties in terms of seats in the parliament gives a figure of just 4.7. This is a party system that is far more concentrated than the ‘hundreds” of parties formed, 48 parties contesting the elections, or 21 parties in parliament might suggest. Of course, first elections are often funny, and results may shift in the future.
Clearly, the 1955 vote would have been a poor predictor of the vote in 1999. Between the two elections, volatility (calculated by stream, or party family) was 32.5. The main cause of this shift is the demise of the Communist stream (20% in 1955 and only .4% in 1999) and the addition of Golkar to the system, thus strengthening the nationalist part of the equation (the nationalist vote rose from 27% in 1955 to 55% in 1999). Islamic parties dropped just slightly from 44% in 1955 to 38% in 1999.[37]
Ideological distance in the new system is difficult to determine. Many parties were deliberately vague in their policy pronouncements in 1999; this was in part to cast a wide net for potential supporters but also to avoid bringing down a military backlash by making “radical” demands. Even a simple reform-status quo dichotomy breaks down under analysis. One could say that of the large parties, PDI-P, PAN, and PKB were pro-reform, while Golkar, PPP, and PBB were pro-status quo. However, PDI-P relations with the military, the presence of former New Order figures in the party, and Megawati’s record in office all suggest that the party has a strongly conservative bent (or at least circumstances have bent it that way). PBB, too, could be seen as status quo for its support of Habibie’s presidential candidacy in 1999.[38] However, the party is strongly reformist in its support for constitutional changes. Golkar, too, the quintessential status quo party offered numerous reforms to the system in 1999. Clearly, the situation is far too opaque to present an easy reform-status quo dichotomy.
Ideological conflict in the system, despite a confused left-right spectrum, seems firmly ensconced. During the elections, a number of symbolic issues were up for grabs, indeed setting reformists against those favoring the status quo (though it was difficult to identify who was who). Perpetual attempts by Islamic parties, particularly PPP, PBB, and Partai Keadilan (PK—the Justice Party, number seven in the election returns) to support the introduction of the Jakarta Charter into the Constitution (the words would oblige the state to ensure the observance of Islamic law by Muslims) are polarizing. While moderate Islamic parties like PKB and PAN can see state support of Islam without the need for recognizing Indonesia as an Islamic state, the Jakarta Charter (and the imposition of syariah law more generally) sets parties like PPP, PK, and PBB in firm opposition to nationalist parties like PDI-P and to a lesser extent Golkar.
Constant threats of mob violence over the course of the transition have also made competition feel as if it is out of control. Megawati’s supporters threatened to riot (and this threat was repeated by members of the PDI-P’s top leadership) if she were denied the presidency in the October 1999. Dueling demonstrations plagued Abdurrahman Wahid’s administration for months on end prior to the President’s impeachment, creating a sense of utter chaos in the country, paralyzing the government, and shaking the already shaky economy. Anti-Wahid demonstrators charged the president with being corrupt and ineffective. Pro-Wahid demonstrators promised millions on the streets to protect the President and his office. Further, terror attacks, bombings, attacks on political party figures and democracy activists have all suggested that the nature of inter-party competition is not yet confined to an orderly process within the country’s institutions. However, as Chadda observes, different kinds of violence have different impacts on the democratization process.[39] Violence by blackguard forces attempting to forestall reform is, I would argue, less damaging over the long term than violence that would erupt between the new parties; this latter type of violence, while it has occurred and is severely troubling, has been more restrained.
At the same time, Indonesia has done perhaps better than many expected looking forward in 1998. Elections were held in 1999 that were for the most part entirely peaceful, in fact less deadly than the “controlled” elections of the Suharto years. The party-dominated General Elections Commission (KPU) was widely considered to have performed poorly during and after the elections. It was revamped in 2001 and replaced by a smaller board, composed entirely of non-partisan intellectuals and activists. President Habibie handed over power peacefully to his successor Abdurrahman Wahid, as the latter begrudgingly did to his successor Megawati Sukarnoputri. The impeachment process was prolonged and destabilizing, but it did finally succeed in eliminating a president who had come to be considered a joke and an obstacle to national development.[40]
No firm conclusion can yet be drawn as to the nature of inter-party competition. Deborah Norden critiques classical party system theory’s emphasis on the number of parties and ideological polarization and says that what is important to examine in newer democracies is the nature of inter-party competition, whether that competition is collusive, combative, or moderate. [41] Moderate competition, according to Norden, is the most promising for democracy, as it prevents the rise of extra-system movements attendant to collusive competition (because significant interests may be unrepresented) and the chaos of combative competition (in which defeating one’s rival is more important than the survival of democracy itself).
Indonesia’s system shows a confusing mix of collusive, combative, and moderate features. In the legislature, party leaders seem to collude to shepherd the business of parliament without transparency. Party relations are also combative, as the painful presidential impeachment process showed. But, party competition is also moderate. The rules of the system, while still in a process of development, are generally followed. The election was free and fair, the MPR vote which put Wahid in office followed parliamentary procedure, Wahid’s impeachment was by the book as well.[42] Perhaps it is the case, as O’Donnell and Schmitter observed likening transitions to a multi-layer chess game: “with people challenging the rules on every move, pushing and shoving to get to the board, shouting out advice and threats from the sidelines, trying to cheat whenever they can—but, nevertheless, becoming progressively mesmerized by the drama they are participating in or watching and gradually becoming committed to playing more decorously and loyally to the rules they themselves have elaborated.”[43]
The party system is changing. Polling which preceded the 1999 election showed that by the end of 1998, alignments were already quite close to those that would emerge after the elections.[44] Further, vote results broken down by province at the national and provincial level suggest that, for the top seven parties at least,[45] straight party line voting was quite strong. For the top seven parties, in all of Indonesia’s then-27 provinces, the average difference between province-level votes for the national- and provincial-level parliaments was only .195%, less than one fifth of one percent. Despite the consistency shown in pre-election polls and the strong tendency of Indonesians to cast a party-line vote, it would be naïve to assume that the party system did not still have important changes to undergo in the coming years. Disaffection with many of the parties has become quite high. Will this translate into dramatic shifts in support or lower election turnout in future? No one can say for sure.
Clearly, though, all indicators now suggest that there will be a party like the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia—Perjuangan for nationalists. PDI-P should expect to see perhaps a lessening of support in follow-on elections in 2004, as anecdotal evidence suggests that the party received a large number of sympathy reformist votes in 1999 that may not reappear. Like PDI-P, there will be a Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (despite name changes and party splits) for traditionalist Muslims. There will be a Partai Amanat Nasional for modernist Muslims. Golkar appears strong; however, as the trial of party leader Akbar Tandjung shows, the party is not immune from challenge. PPP also fills its role as the primary Islamic party, pushing issues like the Jakarta Charter and the institution of Islamic law, issues that the other large Muslim parties do not aggressively market (PPP’s splinter party PPP-Reformasi does not plan to challenge PPP in this regard, setting itself closer to PAN and PKB on these issues). Despite plans to tighten the number of parties allowed to compete in 2004 and subsequent elections, the core parties of the system are already easily seen.
It is clear from the discussion above that several of Indonesia’s parties are rooted in important traditional schisms in the population. This is important. For Mainwaring and Scully, without these roots in the population, party support cannot be counted on to be stable from one election to the next. Pridham and Lewis agree, calling party rootedness in the population the “ultimate test” in evaluating new democracies.[46]
In the contemporary party system, PDI-P represents nationalists, PKB traditionalist Muslims, and PAN modernist Muslims. Golkar and PPP seem anomalous in this regard; however, the support that these parties received in 1999 suggests some rooting in the population. Both parties scored better outside of Java. While scoring in the low tens in Jakarta, East Java, Central Java, and Yogyakarta, Golkar scored 30%, 40%, even 60% in the provinces of Eastern Indonesia. Golkar appears to have been less discredited in Eastern Indonesia (where the economic crisis was less deep), and the party has long served as a voice for pluralism at the center. This holds the party in good stead in terms of maintaining this important support base in the future. Like Golkar, PPP also did well off-Java, earning fully half its seats in Sumatra and the Outer Islands. PPP was the plurality winner in strongly Muslim Aceh with 29% of the vote and took 20% of the vote in Muslim West Sumatra.
Mainwaring suggests that one should “not assume that social cleavages structure party systems, but rather examine the extent to which they do.”[47] Dwight King attempted to do just that by testing scientifically the proposition that Indonesia’s parties today are the direct descendents of those that existed in the 1950s.[48] His conclusions offer strong support for the idea that Indonesia’s parties are, in effect, older than they appear to be. Comparing election results at the kabupaten (regency) level in 1955 with those of 1999, King wanted to know if “voters with certain characteristics (preferences, attitudes, religious beliefs, and practices) supported certain parties in each election, revealing or articulating socio-cultural divisions in the electorate.”[49] King found high levels of correlation between areas of PDI-P support in 1999 with PNI (correlation coefficient .59) and PKI (.38) support in 1955 (PKI was the other major secular party in 1955). King also discovered unsurprising correlations of support between the Partai Nahdlatul Ulama in 1955 with the Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa in 1999 (.84). In 1999, PAN (.53) and PBB (.39), too, enjoyed support in areas that had previously supported Masyumi in 1955. Similarly, though, Masyumi support was correlated with support for Golkar in 1999 (.26) and PPP (.42),[50] likely because all four parties to an extent serve to represent Outer Island interests at the center.[51]
Despite King’s impressive results, the issue is far from settled. As suggested above, PDI-P’s level of support may not have reached a natural level, as, in 1999, the party may have received a number of sympathy/pro-reform votes that it will not see again. Support levels for other parties can be expected to fluctuate as well. It is understood that PPP plans to campaign in 2004 on the issue of Islamizing Indonesia further. This stance could cause some loosening of support from the other Muslim-based parties, like PKB and PAN, and perhaps PBB as well. What about supporters of the smaller parties in 1999? Will their parties be allowed to contest? Will small party voters—all twelve million of them—stay with their parties or cast their votes more strategically among the projected top parties in the future? What about the new parties formed in 2001/2002, including splits from PPP, PDI-P, PBB, and PKB? What level of support will they drain away from the major parties? All these represent unknowns.
At the time of a transition from authoritarian rule, support for parties, elections, and democracy is often high among the population. Over time, though, the challenges of governance often weaken support for democratic government. In many cases, weakened legitimacy leads to popular acceptance of a military coup or popular enthusiasm for an anti-system politician. That is why legitimacy figures prominently among Mainwaring and Scully’s criteria of institutionalization. It is only when the system of parties and elections is accepted as legitimate that the system can be said to be secured.
In Indonesia, a post-election poll conducted by the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) showed support for the idea that Indonesia should become a democracy at 84%.[52] Satisfaction with the 1999 elections was also high, the IFES post-election poll showing that 90% of respondents said the elections were administered very well or fairly well, with only 4% saying the elections had been administered fairly poorly.[53] Turnout in the 1999 elections was high, too, at over 90%. This is typical of first democratic elections and is also typical of Indonesian elections (turnout across six New Order elections averaged 92%). Respondents in public opinion polls reported strongly that voting was considered a duty; therefore, high levels of participation might be anticipated for the future. Turnout levels of 90% are considerably higher than turnout in some long-established democracies such as the United States (turnout average 52% over the period 1961 to 1999 in lower house elections) and France (75%), for example.[54] The results are also higher than results in other new democracies like the Czech Republic (83%), Poland (51%), and Lithuania (50%).[55]
Trust in parties is low in comparison to trust expressed for other institutions or groups. The Voice of the People poll, conducted immediately after the elections in June 1999, rated parties last among those trusted as capable or strongly capable in leading the country through change.[56] Parties ranked behind students (87% ranking as capable or strongly capable), citizen groups (77%), the media (77%), the president (at that time, Habibie—75%), and the parliament (72%). With a level of trust of 62.8%, Indonesia’s parties are more trusted than parties in other countries experiencing transitions from authoritarian rule. Linz and Stepan point out that “45 years of party state rule in Eastern Europe and more than 70 years in the Soviet Union have given the word party a negative connotation.”[57] In Indonesia, too, long years of authoritarian rule under integralist and corporatist ideologies successfully inculcated the idea that parties are divisive and at variance with the promotion of the national interest. Despite an overall high level of support, it is the relative ranking of parties that should catch our eye. Of major institutions and groups, parties were the least trusted. Since the 1999 elections, the parties’ esteem has certainly not risen. In the IFES pre-election poll, asked whether parties make things better, worse, or do not have much effect, Indonesians answered as follows: make things better 34%, make things worse 28%, do not have much effect 9%, do not know/no response 28%.[58] Already in 1998-1999, the answer was ambiguous.
The failure of Indonesia’s new governments to solve the fundamental problems plaguing the country (such as economic difficulties and regional challenges) and the ways the parties have conducted themselves since the elections (particularly with regard to the impeachment of Abdurrahman Wahid) have led to the development of a deep sense of unease among many Indonesians. It is particularly the parties that bear the brunt of popular dissatisfaction. On an almost daily basis, the parties are lambasted in the national press. The country is said to be undergoing a “moral crisis.” The parties are seen to be machinating, self-interested, corrupt, immature, polarizing, bankrupt, and ineffective. Student organizations, prominent in Suharto’s fall, have remained aloof from the parties, preferring to remain a pure, moral force for reform.
While national polls are not available to demonstrate the depth of dissatisfaction with the parties in the population as a whole, a recent urban poll suggests strong levels of dissatisfaction with the parties. The LP3ES/CESDA survey, released in February 2002, asked respondents which party put the people’s interests first. [59] While no overall breakdown was given on the responses to this question, the responses as broken down by party affiliation are worrying. Among those affiliated with PDI-P, 44% said no party puts the people’s interest first. Among those affiliated with Golkar, 62% said no party puts the people’s first and so on down the line: PPP 67%, PKB 37%, PAN 57%, PBB 31%, PK 35%. Those that chose the party to which they were affiliated as most representing the people’s interest were relatively few: PDI-P 39%, Golkar 11%, PPP 17%, PKB 48%, PAN 22%, PBB 38%, and PK 35%.
Absent any dramatic improvement in the parties’ behavior, we might expect this dissatisfaction at some point to be converted into a loss of legitimacy by the parties. But, as Przeworski makes clear, legitimacy is a relative concept. “What matters for the stability of any regime is not the legitimacy of this particular system of domination but the presence or absence of acceptable alternatives.”[60] The legitimacy of the parties may be declining in an overall sense, but the parties are strongly embedded in the current system of government, and there are currently no legitimate alternatives.
The Parties as Organizations
“So far not one of the political parties has been able to establish an institution.”[61] That was the verdict of political scientist and lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Indonesia Adrinof Chaniago. Using Mainwaring and Scully’s institutionalization framework, one finds this statement supported. The parties as organizations are weak. Funding is irregular. Party overlap with supporting organizations is in some cases sufficient to raise concerns about party autonomy. Personalistic parties are rife. Major parties have been ripped by factions, leading to splits in at least five of the top six parties. On the plus side, parties control processes of candidate selection, thus assuring a degree of party discipline. Also, party switching has been infrequent. Party organizations in the localities are weak, relying often on informal, extra-party processes, and inactive outside of the election cycle. With the exception of perhaps the two largest parties, no parties are truly national in scope. These organizational criteria matter because in order for parties to provide stability to the political system over the long term, the parties as organizations must be “infused with value.” [62]
To look at the parties’ organizations in more detail, among the larger parties, funding sources are irregular. Businesses tended to spread money among those parties expected to be the largest in 1999. Thus, there is no guarantee that money will be there for some parties in subsequent elections, nor that money will arrive sufficiently regularly to ensure stable party operations. Smaller parties relied on their leaders, friends, businesses, and loans for their funds, leaving the finances of many extremely precarious. Golkar was in the best position as a result of the party’s long overlap with the state which guaranteed it access to funds for the 1999 elections. Other parties now have taken a role in government, and accountability is greater, thus reducing Golkar’s total monopoly of this source of finance in subsequent elections. Further, Golkar Chairman Akbar Tandjung is on trial for misappropriating government funds intended for poor relief to party coffers. Gillespie points out that improvised funding was extremely common in Spain’s first elections after authoritarian rule, as was borrowing, a phenomenon we discovered to be prevalent in Indonesia, especially among the smaller parties.[63] Spain’s experience suggests turbulent financing in the first years is not a permanent barrier to institutionalization. Equal state support for party building in the early period also guaranteed at least some flush to party funding. Since 2001, that funding has been made contingent on vote performance, resulting in large sums being transferred to the largest parties and miserly sums to the smallest. The Interior Minister Hari Sabarno mentioned in 2002 that state financing of the parties may be discontinued in future budgets, in order to encourage the parties to be more autonomous.
As part of examining whether the parties themselves are “infused with value,” one must look to see if parties are overly dependent on sponsoring organizations. Excessive dependence on sponsoring organizations, like unions and religious groups, means that party autonomy is reduced. Party scholars have found that relations with sponsoring organizations can help parties to build roots rapidly (particularly important in a situation of a transfer from authoritarian rule during which time autonomous political organization was likely not possible). But, these same relations can act to keep parties weak and dependent on the sponsoring organizations if the latter exert too much control over party operations.
Golkar’s overlap with the state is a primary concern here, though not the one that would have been immediately identified by party system scholars. Particularly in the off-Java areas, Golkar’s monopoly of government seemed to play a vital role in the party’s performance. The other New Order legacy parties, PDI-P and PPP, can be seen to be quite independent of sponsoring organizations; this is a result of the fact that links to social organizations were cut during the Suharto years. The finding is also positive for institutionalization. Partai Amanat Nasional relies heavily on the nation’s second largest Muslim group, Muhammadiyah, for support, and there is evidence that the party relied overwhelmingly on Muhammadiyah structures to build the party at lower levels. Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa is perhaps the greatest concern as far as overlap. Growing out of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU—the nation’s largest Muslim organization), the overlap in leadership between PKB and NU in 1998 to 1999 was substantial. When Abdurrahman Wahid, the NU head, became president, however, new NU chief Hasyim Muzadi worked hard to separate the two organizations’ leadership structures cleanly. This is a positive development for PKB’s autonomy. If the party becomes too divorced from NU, however, one would have to question the degree to which it could maintain its roots. This shows the inter-relationship and non-supporting nature of some of the criteria for institutionalization, at least in the Indonesian case.
That Indonesia’s parties are personalistic is among the most common complaints against them. Personalistic parties challenge institutionalization because they rarely survive their charismatic founders, threatening the degree to which these types of parties can serve as durable players in the political system. Because there is no objective way of measuring the degree to which a party is personalistic, I offered a placement of Indonesia’s political parties along a spectrum, which stretched from a hypothetically perfectly personalistic party to a hypothetically perfectly organization- or ideology-based party. Major parties like PDI-P, PAN, and PKB veered toward the personalistic side of the spectrum. PPP, PBB, and Golkar can be seen as organization- or ideology-based parties. Of the rest of the 48 parties from 1999, fully more than half could be characterized as personalistic to one degree or another.
Factions are prevalent in situations of transition from authoritarian rule. Parties are often built quickly, masking severe differences of opinion or ambition within. This was certainly the case in Indonesia. Factions are detrimental to institutionalization because they hamper the party’s ability to act as a unified whole. They also threaten party splits which might cause parties to rise and fall in the system, increasing volatility and thus instability in inter-party competition.
PDI-P is heavily factionalized, with groups representing Megawati’s husband, the party’s executive board, newcomers to the party (arrivistes formerly associated with the New Order regime), and the old-time democrats (old members of the Suharto-era PDI). While the newcomer/old-timer split appears to endure, other factions appear more shifting, and thus less challenging to institutionalization over the long term. One splinter party, Partai Indonesia Tanah Air (PITA), was formed by Dimyati Hartono out of PDI-P in early 2002. This departure did not pinch a significant share of the party, and, thus, does not appear to present a serious challenge to PDI-P. Other splinter parties have formed from PKB, PBB, and PPP. Like PITA, though, they present little threat to the parent organizations. Factionalization within PAN was extremely serious, leading to a split in early 2001. The liberals who exited the party, opposed to the party’s Muslim tilt and patently opportunistic anti-Abdurrahman Wahid maneuvers, did not form a splinter party, however. While some might argue the PAN-liberal split was detrimental to the party in the long run (particularly those who favored the party’s attempt to be post-stream), the rupture has left PAN more internally cohesive and unified (and firmly ensconced in the modernist Muslim stream). Golkar, too, has seen its share of factions. The longest-term faction of consequence seems to be that between the party center and disgruntled party leaders from Eastern Indonesia. Less affected by the disdain with which the party is held in Java, Eastern Indonesian Golkar representatives have been decidedly more aggressive in asserting Golkar’s power in the political system. Fearing a violent backlash which could see Golkar banned from the political system, Golkar head Akbar Tandjung has been more circumspect.
Factions and splits paint a picture of Indonesia’s parties as weak and divided. The parties seem much stronger, however, when the phenomenon of party switching is examined. Unlike rampant party switching in Brazil and Russia (two dramatically uninstitutionalized party systems), the phenomenon of party switching is seldom seen in Indonesia. The proportional representation (PR)/party list system explains much. It is parties that place candidates for election and party symbols which are chosen by voters, not candidate names; this enforces discipline on party members as their position is seen to stem from the party center rather than from their constituents. The fact that the parties do not have the ability to “recall” wayward members of parliament, as they did during the New Order, also explains why a smattering (about four cases) of party switching, mostly party leaving, has been seen. Voting, another way of examining party unity, is relatively unrevealing in the Indonesian context. Votes in the national legislature are rarely held (business is conducted more often by consensus among party faction leaders). When votes have been held, they have been closed; thus, party discipline cannot be calculated with accuracy. There have been several failures of the parties in the regions to adhere to the national party line, resulting in losses of important state posts; this happened a number of times to PDI-P, most glaringly in Medan and Jakarta.
Some parties have taken steps to professionalize their organizations. For the most part, though, the conduct of party business is based on informal and extra-party mechanisms (especially as one leaves Jakarta). Participation in party training programs run by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) suggests interest in professionalization by some parties. Interviews with IRI and NDI staffers, as well as training program records, show that some parties have been more actively engaged in professionalization than others; among the avid professionalizers are PKB, PK, and PBB (three Muslim parties). PPP also attended the party training programs in force. However, PPP members are less often cited in interviews with NDI and IRI members as eager professionalizers. More often, especially in the regions, PPP activists are cited as exceedingly suspicious of the motivations of these international do-gooders. For a variety of reasons, Golkar and PDI-P have been less eager to participate in the internationally sponsored party training programs. Some speculate that the parties do not wish to be seen to accept too much assistance from the United States. As with PPP in the regions, some in Golkar and PDI-P were known to suspect NDI and IRI as perhaps fronts for the CIA. Golkar is known to conduct its own training programs. The training situation inside PDI-P remains unclear.
A look into the parties’ embrace of the internet was also intended to analyze the parties’ intentions to become “modern” political parties. PBB, PK, PPP, and the smaller party Partai Demokrasi Kasih Bangsa all run sophisticated websites. The Partai Keadilan, a party associated particularly with young college-educated Muslims, in particular, has embraced the internet at all levels (from the national to party branches) as a means of communication among and organization of party members. Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa long ran an excellent website. It is suspected that the site’s disappearance has to do with the split between party secretary-general Matori Abdul Djalil and Abdurrahman Wahid in 2001. Golkar and PDI-P both maintained a web presence during the 1999 elections; however neither party has endeavored to keep a site going since.
Lastly, the parties’ territorial comprehensiveness must be considered in evaluating the parties as organizations. In a country of Indonesia’s diversity and archipelagic nature, with a history of forty years of authoritarian rule, it would be most surprising if, within the one year between the downfall of Suharto and the 1999 elections, parties had been able to establish nation-wide organizations. Needless to say, Indonesia’s parties do not surprise. Despite claiming party sizes, as reported in the Almanak Parpol Indonesia, that showed many parties in most of Indonesia’s then-27 provinces, the parties generally show patterns of regional concentration and attention.[64]
An analysis which took each party’s national performance as a benchmark and sought the dispersion of each party’s results around that benchmark found that no party performed even broadly similarly across Indonesia’s then 27 provinces (broadly similar performance was defined as a band which stretched from one half to two times each party’s national share of the vote). No party of the 48 contesting in 1999 scored 27 provinces within the band. The highest was the military-backed Partai Keadilan dan Persatuan with 24. The largest parties generally fared well at staying within their bands (their bands were larger). Golkar and PPP both had 20 provinces within the band. PDI-P had 22. Less successful were the smaller parties and those that were more regionally concentrated: PBB (17), PK (13), and PKB (5). PKB’s regional character can, of course, be seen. In 21 provinces it was below the band, and in just one (East Java) was it above it. PKB was heavily concentrated on Java, PBB on Sumatra. Analysis shows that aside from Golkar and PDI-P, no party can be seen to be truly national in organization and levels of support.
It was in Scott Mainwaring’s book-length treatment of party system institutionalization focusing on the case of the Brazil that he was able to depart from the earlier work he had done with Scully which concentrated on describing party system institutionalization and noting its important effects on governance. In the single-case study of Brazil, Mainwaring was able to devote sustained attention to answering the crucial question of why party systems develop as they do. Mainwaring draws attention to structural factors and institutional factors which shape the party system. In a critical contribution to thinking on the subject, Mainwaring calls attention to the actions of state actors and political elites in shaping parties and party systems.[65] I concur with Mainwaring’s analysis but have unpacked my causes slightly for clarity. I chose to focus on socio-economic factors, historical factors, state/elite manipulation, international factors, political cultural factors, and institutional factors.
The level of economic development has long been seen to influence the shape of the party system. In Europe, industrialization and demands for greater political inclusion spawned labor parties, for example. In some countries, large agricultural populations have created peasant parties with a rural focus. Reaching a certain level of economic development was also long seen as one of the prerequisites of democratic government; this view, while not wholly discredited, has been weakened.[66]
Indonesia’s level of human development is ranked 102nd out of 162 countries in the 2001 United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report.[67] Indonesia is ranked just below Vietnam and just above Tajikistan, to give a sense of the country’s statistical neighborhood. Adult literacy is 86% (youth literacy is higher, 98%), life expectancy about 66 years. The per capita GDP in 2000 in PPP[68] US dollar terms was $2,587 (prior to the Asian Economic Crisis, it had attained a higher level, $3,383). The share of the population in poverty (1984-1999) was 27%. The country has urbanized significantly over the past 25 years. Urban population was 19% of the total in 1975 and 40% in 1999.
While level of development may not be a prerequisite for democracy, in Indonesia’s case, it does seem to impact the nature of the population’s involvement with the party system; here, though, we will find other factors working as well. The IFES polls showed Indonesians little interested in politics, despite the earth-shaking events unfolding around them in 1998-1999. Traditional authority patterns also continue to be prevalent, especially in the rural/remote areas. These traditional authority patterns have been harnessed into the operation of almost every political party.
Indonesia’s workforce is not heavily industrial. What large industry that does exist is controlled by the state.[69] Big business in private hands is largely controlled by cronies of the former Suharto regime. The limited number of industrial workers goes some way in explaining the complete wash-out of labor-affiliated parties in 1999; here, too, though, other factors are seen to be significant, as will be discussed below. Most Indonesians are small farmers (they may work their own land or someone else’s). Small traders are prevalent in the towns. In 1999, no parties exclusively took up the mantle of the farmer or the small trader but many positioned themselves as supportive of “the people’s economy.” The people’s economy was, on the one hand, a reaction to the crony economy of the Suharto years. On the other hand, the slogan was cynical vote-gathering pap with little connection to actual or intended party policies. As generally phrased, emphasis on the people’s economy was seen to favor agriculture, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s), and cooperatives (for farmers and fishermen, etc.).
Economic factors do seem likely to play a role especially in the legitimacy, and hence, longevity, of the new party system. Successive polls have showed that economic recovery is the primary interest of Indonesians. The government’s inability, and, importantly, the parties’ inattention, to solving these economic problems bodes ill for the legitimacy of party government—and hence democracy itself (as it contributed to the delegitimation of parliamentary democracy and Suharto’s New Order). As Choi observed, Indonesia’s new system was “Born with a Defect.”[70] Rapid growth during the Suharto years had buttressed authoritarian rule and legitimated the regime in the eyes of the population. The economic crisis had the reverse effect, stealing Suharto’s legitimacy and enabling opponents to portray the political and economic systems of the New Order as at fault in the country’s economic prostration. As is the case with many countries in transition, however, the combined political, economic, and regional challenges have often appeared to overwhelm the capacity of Indonesia’s government. Przeworski and his colleagues found the maintenance of economic growth crucial to the maintenance of democracy. “Democracies can survive even in the poorest nations if they manage to generate development, if they reduce inequality, if the international climate is propitious, and if they have parliamentary institutions.”[71] Indonesia’s economy is now growing again, however, the perception is that the economy is still weak and that party leaders are to blame.
Social factors seem to influence the specific nature of the parties more obviously than purely economic factors do. Indonesia’s 209 million people are extremely heterogeneous, with 669 languages spoken across the 13,000 islands which make up the archipelago.[72] At least fifteen of the regional languages have more than one million speakers, just to suggest the sheer size of some of the country’s minority ethnic groups. In Indonesia, there are five officially recognized religions, though Islam predominates, with more than 80 to 90% of Indonesians recognized as adherents. The Muslim community is extremely heterogeneous, however. Muslims can be divided into two broad groups, nominal Muslims and pious Muslims. Of the pious Muslims, there are two types: traditionalists and modernists. In addition to the officially recognized religions, animism and syncretism (beliefs which combine Islam with pre-Islamic, often Hindu, beliefs) are common. Often in democratic theory, extreme pluralism such as is found in Indonesia is seen to operate as a hindrance to democracy. Chadda, observing the case of India, observes instead that “India is a democratic state not in spite of but because of its multi-ethnic, multinational society.”[73]
Indonesia’s parties can indeed be traced to specific social groups, though the situation is not as neat and clean as it was during the 1950s. During the formative period of Indonesian democracy, nominal Muslims could be directly associated with secular parties like Partai Nasional Indonesia and the Communist Party (the difference between these two parties was between conservatives and radicals). Muslims in urban areas and off-Java (this tends to include West Java in Indonesian voting behavior) favored Masyumi. Traditional, predominantly Javanese Muslims favored the Partai Nahdlatul Ulama.
Today, the same broad patterns can be seen, but the situation is murkier. While observation of PDI-P supporters would suggest most of these are nominal Muslims and members of minority religious communities such as Christians and Hindus (this latter observation is supported by opinion poll evidence), recent research by William Liddle and Saiful Mujani found that, with the Islamic resurgence in Indonesia since the 1980s, our pocket definitions of abangan (nominal) and santri (pious[74]) Muslims may no longer hold water.[75] As the result of opinion polling, Liddle asked, “where are the abangan,” [76] because few Indonesian Muslims could be found associating themselves with what are taken to be standard abangan beliefs and practices. Despite the “missing” abangan, Liddle and Mujani’s survey found that fully 20% of the Indonesian population can be classified as either nominal Muslim or secularist. This is of more interest to us here, since our concern is voting behavior rather than Indonesia’s social composition per se. As far as voting behavior is concerned, secularists and nominal Muslims are both highly likely to vote for secular-nationalist political parties.
In addition to the seemingly missing abangan, Golkar, too, is anomalous, a new feature of the political system since the 1950s. Golkar draws support from modernist Muslims (like the Muslim parties) and members of minority faiths (like the nationalist PDI-P), especially outside of Java; the Java off-Java tension is a product of ethnicity but also of history.
Socio-economic factors are intertwined with historical developments in affecting the development of the Indonesian party system. As mentioned above, the left/labor is a non-factor in Indonesia’s contemporary party system. This in part arises from Indonesia’s level of economic development and the composition of its workforce. But, we must remember that Indonesia’s weak industrial labor force did not hamper the growth of a significant Communist Party, numerically the largest in the non-Communist world, in the 1950s and 1960s. No, the weakness of the left today should instead be attributed to the long authoritarian rule of Suharto in which the left was consciously discredited (Komunistofobia), the Communists eliminated, and the unions manipulated and emasculated. The regime also carried out murders of labor activists, making labor organizing a risky and unrewarding proposition.
Stepping back in time, in Indonesia, as with many colonies, the first articulation of political organizations often dealt with the country’s colonial position. Budi Utomo, the country’s first modern organization formed in 1908, was formed among Dutch-educated Indonesians. It agitated with the Dutch government for more modern educations for indigenous Indonesians. As parties began to organize in the 1910s and 1920s, nationalism, the goal of which was independence for all the territories of the former Netherlands East Indies, was a primary focus. Sukarno was a leading light of the early independence movement. His Indonesian National Party, launched in 1927, would serve as the inspirational model for subsequent nationalist parties. Sukarnoist rhetoric is still prevalent in the PDI-P today, perhaps surprisingly so, given the vast changes the world has undergone since Sukarno’s day. Sukarno’s nationalism called for submission of alternative values—an Islamic state, a Communist workers’ paradise—until the broader nationalist enterprise had been achieved. While parties existed along the nationalist, Islamic, and Communist poles for a long time after independence, in effect it was nationalism that had the upper hand. Even after independence, nationalism, the goal of which could only vaguely be defined as a strong, secular,[77] unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia playing an important and independent role on the world stage, continued to remain a force. To today, this nationalist ethos can be seen as the animating spirit behind the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia—Perjuangan.
On a wider scale, Indonesians’ lack of interest in politics can in part be seen to stem from education levels and the overall level of economic development. Throughout independent Indonesia’s political development, with brief exceptions, citizens have been subjects of politics rather than objects or creators. Still, it would be incorrect to assume that was the whole cause. Over thirty years of the New Order, Indonesians were specifically trained to be uninterested in politics. Indonesians were “the floating mass,” disengaged from politics, only entering the political realm once in five years to cast a vote. Even when voting, most Indonesians, most of the time, plumped for Golkar. Interest in politics was neither fostered nor encouraged, as political participation certainly would not be efficacious (it could also be dangerous). Absent interest in politics and issue orientation, Indonesians have overwhelmingly created parties that are personalistic, traditional, patron-client oriented, and communal.
The long Suharto years also allowed the anti-party attitudes first enunciated by Sukarno to be driven home to the population without possibility of rejoinder. Sukarno’s integralist and Suharto’s corporatist ideologies painted diverse views and diverse parties as damaging to the national interest (the two leaders would have defined the latter differently but would each have agreed that there was only one national interest). Suharto’s durable control, muzzled media, tame opposition political parties, government propaganda, and ideological training programs have all contributed to inculcating rather thoroughly the idea that parties are bad. This is particularly so among Indonesia’s intellectuals, many of whom desire democracy desperately but who lament the division and contestation that are democracy’s handmaidens. That there should be just one national interest also fits in with constructed political cultural notions of harmony, as will be discussed below.
History has also left broad differences in the political orientations of Java and the Outer Islands. We saw earlier that Java-Outer Island conflict in the form of the Sumatra- and Sulawesi-based PRRI-Permesta[78] rebellion helped to bring an end to the first party system in 1958. The rebellion also reflected strong divisions between Java and the Outer Islands over economic policy, centralization, and Communism. That the rebellion brought in prominent leaders of two of the “out” political parties in Jakarta politics, Masyumi and the Socialists, was a concrete manifestation of political differences between the two parts of the country in the party system. The rebels favored a more federal flavor, sought to see Hatta (a Sumatran seen to be guardian of regional interests) reinstated as vice president, and were anti-Communist.[79] Of the party leaders involved in the rebellion, they saw themselves as saving democracy as well. The rising Java-based power-holders, Sukarno and the military, were tired of the chaos and ineffectiveness of democracy and sought to impose strong central control on the regions.[80] Rather than be swept aside along with the rest of the parties, PKI, the Communist Party, threw its lot in with the Sukarno and the new regime. The military, on the whole, was strongly anti-Communist, and throughout the Guided Democracy period, the two would wage war by other means until one or the other was eliminated.
The issue of regional rebellions raises the idea, proposed by Maya Chadda in her study of democracy in South Asia, that the differing tasks which states need to perform in many newly independent countries may be different from those with long-established borders. According to Chadda, when state consolidation is pursued simultaneously with democratization, economic development, and regime stabilization, different institutional outcomes can be expected.[81] One area in which we might see differing outcomes would be in the party system. We saw in the Indonesian case where the first modern organizations were created on an island-by-island basis. It was only later that a national orientation was developed. Also, regional rebellions provided the death knell to the parties and the opportunity for Sukarno.
Fifty years have changed inter-regional relations but not un-done the fundamental conflict of interest between the center and the regions. Suharto was able to keep control of the far-flung archipelago by delivering economic development as well as by the use of cajolery, cooptation, and force. When his authoritarian hand was removed in 1998, democracy offered the prospect to many regions of greater control over their own affairs. Indonesia’s status as a unitary state was not seriously challenged in the recent transition to democracy. It is taken as an article of faith among Indonesians that federalism is an attempt by outsiders to keep the country weak, even to split it apart; this, too, stems from Indonesia’s historical experience with Dutch colonialism. In 1999, to preclude separatism, Amien Rais of PAN raised the possibility of looking at federalism once again; this was a bold and revolutionary suggestion in the Indonesian context. At the same time, the government of B.J. Habibie was crafting a regional autonomy law which hoped to salve regional wounds by delegating to the regions more political control and, importantly, more control over local natural resources. Thus it was hoped to bring greater balance to central-regional relations than had ever existed before.
Along a similar timetable with the crafting of the regional autonomy law, Habibie’s government passed new laws on parties and elections. These represented the other side of the central-regional coin. While the regions would be granted more control under the regional autonomy regime, the laws on parties and elections precluded the rise of political parties representing regional or exclusive minority nationality interests. The party law (Law 2, 1999) required parties to be present in at least nine of Indonesia’s then-27 provinces. Since no single group is represented on more than one big island and since no one island had more than eight provinces at the time, regional or single island-based parties were an impossibility. In addition, the unitary state and the proportional representation election system[82] in effect both contrived to centralize the parties’ orientations.
This does not mean that the parties do not reflect Java, non-Java differences. Despite the parties’ centralization and focus on the all-important prize of national leadership, this is not the case. New parties seen to be reformist were strongest on Java, particularly PDI-P, PKB, and PAN; by correlation, Golkar, seen as the party of the status quo, was weakest on Java, discredited by its long years of authoritarian rule and the impoverization of Java as a result of the Asian Economic Crisis. While in Aceh Golkar and the military were completely discredited, in many other non-Java parts of Indonesia, Golkar was welcomed. Local elites had become entwined in the Golkar/Suharto power structure. Development benefits had permeated even some of the most isolated of islands, and the economic crisis had not deeply affected Outer Island incomes (in some areas, incomes were up due to higher rupiah values for the country’s export commodities). Golkar’s nationalism was also seen as more Indonesia-wide than the Java-centric variant that dominated PDI-P. For all these reasons, Golkar was more popular in the Outer Islands than it had been on Java. PPP, the other major party of the ancien regime (even if it had been the nominal opposition) also scored well in the Outer Islands, as mentioned above.
The way the New Order regime fell mattered for the types of parties which formed, but perhaps not the degree seen in other transitions from authoritarian rule. Amien Rais and other top leaders of PAN were influential in the protests which brought down Suharto. Amien himself was called the “Father of Reform.” Votes did not follow the “Bapak Reformasi” in 1999, however (PAN scored just 7%). Parties formed around other individuals seen to have stood firm in the face of Suharto’s authoritarianism: PDI-P around Megawati Sukarnoputri and PKB for Abdurrahman Wahid/Gus Dur. Neither Megawati nor Abdurrahman were actively involved in the protests that brought Suharto down, though they certainly contributed to the political and intellectual environment which discredited the regime’s authoritarianism.
Rather than forming around institutions or individuals prominent in Suharto’s fall, parties instead formed along the traditional aliran, or streams, of politics. Student organizations, prime actors in Suharto’s fall, were almost completely absent from the new realm of party politics (individual students did become active in the new parties, but student organizations generally attempted to remain aloof from the partisan fray).
The way the regime fell did matter for Golkar. Rather than being swept aside in a revolution, by chopping off the head of the regime (Suharto himself, his family, and favorite cronies), Golkar soft-liners were able to preserve a role in the political system for themselves, to protect their interests well, and to keep Golkar alive. While still the party of many of the country’s retrograde forces, Akbar Tandjung, Marzuki Darusman, and others were instrumental in pushing the party along a more reformist path in the context of a measured and constitutional change of regime.[83]
Numerous other commonalities are also apparent from Indonesia’s history. As scholars have observed in cases of transition from authoritarian rule elsewhere, commonalities from previous iterations of democracy are important as people try to implant democracy once again, the return of Chile’s pre-authoritarian parties is often cited as an example. But, the nature of party competition under authoritarian systems matters, too. This is a vital lesson to draw attention to from the Indonesian cases considered here. The language of politics, acceptable patterns of elite political behavior, and methods of popular mobilization all draw heavily on models from the authoritarian past. Party militias, mob politics, and severe corruption all have a root in the habits of the past. As a prominent Golkar politician once observed: the New Order is the only form of politics most Indonesians have known for the past thirty years. Since Indonesia’s transition has amounted more to a revolt than a revolution, it is only natural that the commonalities in practices, language, and even personalities would be great.
The relative strength of civil society and autonomous political organizations in the West likely obscured the important factor of political elite and state actor manipulation in the shaping of party systems. This was probably aided by a preoccupation among classical party theory with describing and analyzing the number of parties in a system and the degree of ideological polarization. These two factors likely led Western thinkers to miss the important role played by elites and the state in creating the party system. Working on Brazil, Mainwaring was struck by the important role these actors played. In Indonesia, their effects are likewise clear.
Sukarno and his military allies consciously set out to replace the parties in the late 1950s. Sukarno manipulated cultural ideas to craft his version of an indigenous, culturally appropriate Indonesian Guided Democracy. Of the military, it could even be argued that the armed forces were complicit in de-institutionalizing the parties by consciously weakening them (such as by removing their subsidiary organizations). Sukarno’s Guided Democracy simplified the party system by reducing the number of parties allowed to compete and banning certain parties, including the country’s second largest, Masyumi. This was vitally important. Masyumi represented one of the crucial poles of political competition in the parliamentary democracy period. Without Masyumi, there was little stopping Sukarno’s further anti-party maneuvers. Sukarno sidelined the parties as a whole by introducing new modes of representation through notionally apolitical functional groups, reducing the power of the legislature, and instituting new consultative bodies which were intended to replace the old party-dominated regime.
Often painted as polar opposites, Suharto and Sukarno shared a dislike of political party competition. Suharto, too, engaged in “party engineering,” eliminating the powerful Communist Party. As when Sukarno had banned Masyumi earlier, when Suharto banned Communism, one of the major poles of both the parliamentary democracy and Guided Democracy party systems was abolished.
Suharto promoted Golkar, a relatively flavorless military front organization, as the electoral vehicle of the new regime; this transformed its role entirely. Suharto himself, the military, and the bureaucracy were oriented to the five-yearly task of ensuring Golkar election victories; this included funneling massive state funds to ensure Golkar’s success. Suharto forced simplification of the party system for the elections of 1971 and again in 1973 with the forced merger of the parties. Money was used as a lever to control these purposefully weak opposition parties.
Elites also choose which issues and cleavages become polarized. This is important in a hyper-heterogeneous system such as Indonesia’s. The situation surrounding the impeachment of Abdurrahman Wahid illustrates elite choices which served to polarize Indonesia’s system of inter-party competition from 2000-2001. Particularly acute were the traditionalist-modernist Muslim tensions that were used by political leaders to marshal support for their respective sides in the battle.
Wahid was a mercurial individual, used to the rough and tumble world of Suharto-era politics, also a jokester. From 1984-1999, he ran the multi-million member Nahdlatul Ulama organization and thus was an experienced CEO, of sorts. Wahid assumed the presidency on the back of a large coalition—his coalition government included all those parties which had brought him to power, the military, and the losing party in the presidential contest, Megawati Sukarnoputri’s PDI-P. Temperamentally, though, Wahid preferred to operate alone. He did not enjoy the constraints of cabinet government. He mocked the legislature and fell asleep during important meetings. When Wahid began flagrantly to disregard the input of other coalition partners, a clash was inevitable. While the clash could have been predicted given the differing Constitutional interpretations of the president and his opponents, the destabilizing months of political turmoil (from August 2000 to July 2001) represent conscious choices on the part of both Wahid and his opponents. Political brinksmanship in this case could have led to civil war or a military coup. It had a lingering effect in polarizing relations among two of the nation’s largest religious groups, relations that had been healed only a year earlier with Amien’s support of Wahid’s election to the presidency.[84]
When Wahid was associated with several scandals (no one ever said the then-president had profited personally), the legislature had its chance to “correct” the president. Wahid was aloof, however. He saw the legislature’s demands as a violation of the Constitution. He resisted the “constitutional coup d’etat” because he was the president in a presidential—not a parliamentary—system. The legislature did not have the right, according to Wahid, to force any action on him. Amien Rais, Speaker of the upper house, the MPR, chose to up the level of rhetoric. His criticisms of Wahid caused instability and neatly split Wahid supporters from opponents along religious lines; everyone wondered what would happen next. Amien Rais had made Wahid president. Was he now the king-unmaker as well?
Over several months, the situation became increasingly tense. Opponents of the president, predominantly modernist Muslims but also factions of Megawati Sukarnoputri’s PDI-P (Megawati would become president if Wahid were impeached), began to demand with ever more vitriol Wahid’s impeachment. Wahid, too, upped the ante by calling out “millions” of members of the Nahdlatul Ulama to protect his position and to demonstrate his support. Was the legislature ready for a war, he seemed to be asking. On Wahid’s side, ready-to-die squads faced off against presidential opponents in months of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations which caused instability and uncertainty, both in the country’s politics and in the economy.
The impeachment process was slow. It required several successive memoranda and presidential responses before impeachment could be pursued. Throughout the affair, players made choices to escalate rather than to compromise. At times Akbar Tandjung of Golkar seemed to act as if compromise was possible. Megawati herself, with perhaps the most to gain, retained a reserved stance until the last months turned her into an implacable foe of Wahid (the two had once been extremely close). Amien and Abdurrahman, leaders of the modernist and traditionalist Muslims, long at odds in Indonesia, attempted to turn all their millions of supporters against one another.
And, after the great build-up, in the end, there was nothing. The showdown between the forces caused the currency to weaken and the nation to brace itself, but in the end, nothing happened. Abdurrahman Wahid attempted to dissolve the assembly that would impeach him. He tried to declare a form of emergency rule and issued calls for Golkar to be banned and new elections to be held. But, no one listened. The military refused to enforce the president’s order. The assembly met and impeached the president. The expected mass clash did not occur. It is not entirely clear that this was because of elite strategy, however. Since his impeachment, Wahid has expressed extreme disappointment that in the end, Nahdlatul Ulama, which he no longer controlled, did not send out millions to defend him in the presidential palace.
Elite choices leave a lasting legacy. Traditionalist Muslims feel as if their standard-bearer was wrongfully (and unconstitutionally) turned out of office. Modernists tend to look down on traditionalists. The ignominious exit of the arch-traditionalist[85] was perceived as a great victory for constitutional processes and for getting the country back on track. Inter-group competition in 2004 can be expected to be flammable. If PPP pursues the issue of an Islamic state, as is expected, this widens the fire.
Elite choices on the part of top military officials have contributed to structuring the party system. During the Guided Democracy period, party subsidiary organizations were removed in a conscious attempt to weaken the parties and diminish their links with the population. During the New Order, Suharto’s anti-party maneuvers were conducted hand in glove with other top military leaders. The reduction in the number of parties was masterminded by the military, as was the merger of the parties into two relatively powerless blocs. Internal party coups against uppity party leaders were often charged to military officers. Military attempts to weaken the parties have been seen in other countries as well. Munck and Bosworth describe the Chilean case: “it was the military rulers’ explicit policy to weaken the strong links between parties and segments of society that had existed in the pre-1973 period, through the elimination of an entire level of militants at the hands of security forces and the suppression of industrial and rural unions.”[86] Chadda, too, highlights the role of the military in weakening the parties in Pakistan. “The military’s frequent and arbitrary interventions prevented the development of institutions that could have routinized political uncertainty. In the absence of institutions and rules, civilian regimes performed poorly. Conflicts among the civilian elites gave the armed forces justification to intervene, and these interventions prevented the establishment of democracy.”[87] In these cases and the Indonesian case, the military set itself as the anti-party, with a claim to represent the true national interest and to put an end to the chaos caused by inter-party competition. Faced with often the best trained, best financed, most gun-toting organization in the country, parties have often paled in comparison.
Military actions in the past raise the important issue of the need for a benevolent (at least not harmful) military role in the present. Kusnanto Angoro, a military observer from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, says that it is only with the “good graces” of the military that democracy will have a chance to succeed in Indonesia. [88] The situation is the same with the political parties. On the one hand, military men have been active in the organization of different political parties, some of which were perceived designed to control radical opposition. On the other hand, the transition has been blessed by the fact that the country’s multiple challenges did not present a tempting target for top military men. Like Indonesia’s other politicians, top military officials have no single answer to the country’s problems, and, thus, so far, have refrained from setting the institution of the military in direct opposition to the new system of inter-party competition.
Mainwaring did not single out international factors for special mention in his consideration of influences on the shape and operation of the party system in Brazil. Likewise, O’Donnell and Schmitter emphasized the transition form authoritarian rule as internally driven. “It seems to us fruitless to search for some international factor or context which can reliably compel authoritarian rulers to experiment with liberalization, much less which can predictably cause their regimes to collapse.”[89] Our Indonesian cases show that as alternative ideals of political organization and sources of pressure on authoritarian regimes, international factors and international actors can have a deep impact on the most fundamental features of the political system. International factors are both important and deep; they are numerous and different enough to merit treatment separate from other historical or structural considerations.
International conceptions of the ideal form of government have long been influential in Indonesia, for practical as well as normative reasons. Upon declaring independence in 1945, Indonesia’s strong-presidential Constitution was modified in effect to remove the collaborationist Sukarno from the regime’s most prominent position. Instead, Indonesia became a parliamentary democracy with a prime minister, Syahrir, who had been actively involved in opposing Japanese rule from underground. It was hoped, at the time, that this regime legerdemain would earn Indonesia allies in the West, particularly in the United States. Pragmatic Indonesian leaders realized that the country could never achieve independence through sheer force of arms. Rather, military and diplomatic pressure would be necessary. It was here that the United States came in. Indonesia sought consciously to craft the face of a regime which would be acceptable, which would be supportable, in Washington. With the U.S.’ massive outlay of funds for European recovery as leverage, Indonesia hoped the U.S. could pressure the Netherlands to relent in its reconquest. This particular and specific need shaped institutional forms in Indonesia. If Sukarno had had his druthers, perhaps the country would have had one single national movement like the Congress in India from the beginning of its political history. With Syahrir at the helm and a parliamentary system in place, multiple political parties were the natural participants.
In addition, in the post-war period, democracy was the regime-type of choice of most newly independent countries. Indonesia earned its independence relatively early, after India and Pakistan but before the waves of independence elsewhere in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, to be a modern nation meant being a democracy. That ideal had certain implications for the country’s party system. In a democracy thus conceived, multiple parties would have to be allowed to compete freely.
The operation of a multi-party system was sloppy in Indonesia. Sukarno grew frustrated, so, too, did the military. Inter-party suspicion dogged party relations as the parties shopped seemingly mutually exclusive visions to the population. The Indonesian people were enthusiastic about democracy at first. Tales of observers at the first elections in 1955 tell of lines of people lined up in their finest clothes to cast their votes. Over time, though, as the economy did not deliver on promises of prosperity, the citizenry grew frustrated with democracy. They were, thus, receptive to Sukarno’s suggestions that the Western-inspired party system had to go, that the country needed a democracy with leadership.
International factors were weighing heavily on Sukarno’s mind as he moved away from the Western democratic system. Sukarno’s own politics were radicalizing. He saw himself as one of the great leaders of what was coming to be called the Third World. In 1956, Sukarno visited both the Soviet Union and China where he was awed by the revolutionary discipline of the people and the massive development strides that had been made in just a single generation, especially in China. Sukarno sought to harness Indonesia’s power in similar ways. In the mid-1950s and 1960s, the Communist systems of the Soviet Union and China appeared to be the most progressive, modern regimes on the planet. The regimes were replete with an ideology that specified that they were in fact the most progressive regimes on the planet and the ones truest to the interests of the people. Western democracy became bourgeois democracy, serving the needs not of the people at large but of capitalism and colonialism. Idealists and populists, seemingly everyone with a revolutionary heart (like Sukarno) was drawn to Communism. In his “Let Us Bury the Parties” speech of 1956, Sukarno specifically referenced the example he had witnessed in China as a reason “to transform the party system entirely.”[90]
The demise of Communism in Indonesia vastly predated its demise in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the thirty years from 1965, Suharto inculcated the population with the idea that the Communists had attempted to seize power by force (the myth of Gestapu) and that nefarious Communists still hid under rocks in the country, in the form of shadowy “formless organizations.”[91] Most organizations perceived to be subversive were classified as proto-Communist. There is a negative international influence on the nature of the party system during the Suharto years. Because of the Cold War, Indonesia was much needed as an ally by the United States. From the U.S. perspective, a non-Communist Indonesia was already doing enough for the cause of the free world. Therefore, the U.S. wasted no effort in encouraging democratization or human rights in Indonesia. The U.S. has been dogged by charges that it provided names of individuals of Communist affiliation to military-directed death squads. Later, even President Carter, who attempted to move human rights to the forefront of his foreign policy agenda, left Indonesia alone, even effectively acquiescing to the then-recent invasion and incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia. It was only after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War as won, that the United States could begin to take up the cause of human rights with Indonesia. The 1991 Dili massacre, coming as it did on the cusp of the Cold War’s end, caused a re-think on Indonesian relations. Did the U.S. need to sell arms to a regime so repressive of its own people? The Clinton administration pursued the issue of labor rights to a degree highly annoying to the Suharto regime.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) played a key role in destroying the Suharto regime. In fact, the Fund’s polices seemed to many to have been designed in Washington to bring the dictator down. The Fund’s demands in return for loans to bail out the faltering economy were drastic. Designed to free up the economy, the reforms were untenable for Suharto as they forced him to abandon important sources of patronage and key allies. Suharto made agreements with the IMF and then attempted to squirm free. This happened several times over the course of late 1997-early 1998. At the signing of one IMF agreement, Fund head Michel Camdessus stood over Suharto with his arms folded, looking like a cross and impatient parent. Indonesians were aghast. Suharto, they said had lost his right to rule.
When Indonesia emerged from Suharto’s authoritarian grip in the late 1990s, international Communism was dead. Where it lived, it ceased to be an exportable model, nor was it considered a progressive world force. In fact, Communist countries like China appeared to many to be running away from the economic prescriptions of Communism, if not its political structures. It was as if Indonesia had come full circle. Independence from authoritarian rule, as with colonialism earlier, meant the return of democracy. Democracy was the only legitimate global governing system on offer. It was also the only system seen by Indonesians to be able to overcome the problems they had diagnosed in the Suharto regime: the collusion, corruption, and nepotism, the concentration of wealth, the lack of accountability caused by not having to face genuine elections, the impunity from having a monopoly on authority.
In Indonesian eyes, too, the democratic system is often conflated with the wealth that exists in the West.[92] In addition to being the only legitimate system globally, democracy is often associated with the wealth of the advanced democratic countries. Being a democratic country, being a wealthy country, meant the return of the political parties.
The international community, through international organizations like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as well as international non-governmental organizations like the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), and the Asia Foundation, has continued to influence Indonesia’s domestic political development during the transition through aid and technical advice on the creation of the election laws, the creation of public information advertising designed to inculcate new, democratic norms in society, training programs, and public opinion polling.[93] NDI and IRI, in particular, have engaged in capacity building programs with Indonesia’s political parties (on a voluntary basis), as discussed earlier. These represent important international influences on the nature of the party system. Not only is democracy conceived as the global ideal. International organizations and international non-governmental organizations fund and support the adoption of democratic forms, including laws that pertain to inter-party competition and free elections.
Institutional Factors
Institutional factors have played a supportive role in much of the discussion above. Here, they occupy center stage. Institutions represent the outcome of political conflicts and themselves shape the arena in which political conflict occurs. Institutions in Indonesia can be shown to be highly influential in determining the number of parties and their place in the political system.
Indonesia’s successive Constitutions have outlined the political arena. The 1945 Constitution, in operation through the war of independence and reinstated in 1959 by Sukarno gives priority to the president and less emphasis to the role of the legislature and the political parties. In fact, parties were not specifically envisioned in the original document. As amended over the years, the 1945 Constitution accepted military and functional group representation, thus lessening the position of the parties in the political system.
Political laws as discussed above also shape the number of parties and the nature of inter-party competition. Laws adopted during the 1950s period of parliamentary democracy allowed relatively free formation of parties. Parties responded and were formed nationally, regionally, some even based on small local personal cliques. Laws on parties were tightened under Sukarno and tightened again under Suharto. The New Order system was referred to as a “2 party-1 Golkar” system. Those were the only allowed participants in the electoral system. In fact, the nominal opposition presence was key to whatever legitimacy attached to New Order elections.
Political laws in the contemporary party system have re-opened the window of political party competition, but it is not open as widely as it was in the 1950s. Party laws attempted to craft parties that were national in orientation and spread across more than one ethnic group or big island (this is also in keeping with Indonesia’s status as a unitary state). The proportional representation electoral system strengthened party centers by making them the sole nominating agents of candidates for office. This has had the effect of ensuring almost a complete absence of party switching. A threshold was set at 2% of the seats in the House for parties to be allowed to compete in follow-on elections; when implemented,[94] this will have the effect of slimming the party system. Of the 48 parties which contested in 1999, only 6 earned more than 2%. It is unclear how this will operate in practice, though. Will parties be able to re-name themselves and compete again? This is as yet unknown.
In ways large and small, Golkar’s special institutional position mattered in determining the nature of the contemporary party system. Long intertwined with the state, with strong state support in some areas, Golkar had access to facilities, funds, and qualified personnel far beyond the capacity of any other party, and this across the full breadth of Indonesia. Had the institutional arrangements been different, we do not know how Golkar would have fared in 1999. Surely, Akbar Tandjung, the Golkar party head saw Golkar’s position as important. While putting forward a number of reformist-sounding proposals, Akbar scrambled behind the scenes to ensure continued Golkar advantage through 1999.
The unitary system has also mattered for the nature of inter-party competition and the orientation of the country’s political parties. Centralization since the 1950s rendered local government impotent on its own and powerless in relation to the center. These sound the same, but the two ideas had quite different effects. That local, regency, or provincial-level government grew increasingly impotent meant that attaining office at the local level did not guarantee access to real decision-making power or control over significant resources. This caused the parties to orient toward the center. Centralization also made Indonesia in effect a one-level game. In the country, capturing the national government was the only prize of value; therefore, competition was strident, especially in a climate of seemingly mutually exclusive ideologies. The situation in federal systems is generally markedly different. Brazil, a federal system, has multiple-level prizes for electoral contestants. This is different than the unitary state, but it is not clear that it is superior. Brazil’s parties are notoriously uninstitutionalized. Individuals at state and local levels run campaign virtually independently of the national-level parties, generating their own campaign funds and thus beholden to few outside interests. In Brazil, this leaves national parties weak and discipline virtually non-existent.
That the regions have historically been powerless in regards to the center meant that important regional differences and grievances went unanswered. An electoral system in the 1950s which was perceived to under-represent Outer Islanders fueled resentment against the central government and, importantly, insulated that government from correction by the public. The result was regional rebellion which threatened to split Indonesia into at least two pieces, if not more, in the 1950s.
Scholars make much of the importance of the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems. Presidentialism has been shown to be less stable than parliamentarism. In fact, of 31 advanced democracies, only four are presidential. [95] Despite this, the presidential form of government is often adopted by new, third-wave democracies. Shugart and Carey’s analysis found that the presidential-parliamentary hybrid system is even more unstable than pure presidentialism.[96] Indonesia, of course, operates a hybrid system in which the president rises out of the legislature.[97]
The indictment against presidential systems is long. Only a few problems can be summarized here. In contrast to parliamentary systems which have the ability to throw up new governments when the old one loses support in parliament, presidential systems are seen to be inflexible. As the impeachment of Wahid showed, impeachments can last a long time and be extremely destabilizing, as the country is left rudderless while a president faces the battle for his life and the legislature does not pass laws. Instability can lead to delegitimation for the presidential system, the parties, even democracy itself. On a more practical level, without support in the parliament, even if the president does not find himself impeached, he will find it difficult to pass his proposed laws; like an unstable impeachment, this, too, can undermine democratic legitimacy. In addition, because the presidency is the big prize in the political system, it is highly contested. Further, because the presidency is a position occupied by a single individual, depending on the nature of the electoral rules, connection with a particular party may or may not be present; this, of course, has implications for thinking about party system institutionalization. Presidential systems often raise non-party (Yeltsin) or decidedly anti-party (Chavez) persons to the top post. As Linz and Stepan point out in talking about the presidency in Russia, “presidents like to be above party.”[98]
This has certainly been the case in Indonesia. Both Sukarno and Suharto specifically saw themselves as above the partisan fray. Though he had founded a political party in his youth and was throughout his life associated with the Partai Nasional Indonesia, Sukarno refused to be harnessed to just one political party. He saw it as the president’s role to bring all the different strains in the country together. Suharto, too, portrayed himself as the non-political general who was going to get Indonesia down to the business of development. Politics was out; economics was in. Though Suharto served as Chair of the Founders’ Board (Dewan Pembina) of Golkar and was thus able to control the most important positions in the most important party in Indonesia, he could portray this as a non-partisan position. Golkar was, after all, just an association of non-political functional groups.
Like Sukarno and Suharto, Gus Dur, too, attempted to be above party. He shopped for the presidency both with and without a party. In October 1999, he eventually came to power by virtue of a multi-party coalition, his own party was persuaded to join only at the eleventh hour. As the situation with his impeachment became more desperate in 2000 and 2001, Gus Dur came to rely more and more on his party, the PKB. When the president was impeached, the PKB was not in attendance in the parliament.[99] The party had walked out in protest at the unconstitutional maneuvers of the House.
Megawati has proved unwilling to be seen as partisan in the negative sense. In fact, she is always conscious to portray herself as the mother of the nation. Some have likened her to a queen rather than a president. Under pressure to resign as head of her party, however, Megawati has vehemently refused. She deserves to go down in history as Indonesia’s first partisan president.
From the relatively concrete world of institutions, we move to consider the impact of political cultural values in the shaping of the party system. Values are a more nebulous concept. Can the people of a nation be said all to subscribe to one single set of values? If they do, where do these values come from? Are they immutable or do they change? Assuming there is something that can be identified as a country’s political culture, how is it that values are operationalized in the political system?
Diamond defines political culture as a “people’s predominant beliefs, attitudes, values, ideals, sentiments, and evaluations about the political system of its country, and the role of the self in that system.”[100] Some theorists of democracy have identified culture as a prerequisite for the functioning of the democratic system of government. Values positive for democracy would similarly seem to support the stable functioning of the party system. For democracy to function, Diamond identifies the importance of a culture that is moderate. This will foster obedience to the rules of the democratic game and allow winners and losers both to accept the results of electoral competition as providing the mandate to rule. This would support democracy and would also support stable inter-party competition. In addition, tolerance is identified as a key democratic value. Democracy does not guarantee unanimity, and in fact rarely finds it. Within the realm of the real, acceptance of the diverse views in the population would, though, feed into moderation and lower levels of polarization. The electoral contest would not be seen as a one-time game. The victory of one set of views would not guarantee the extinction of others. Other values that have been put forth by scholars as supportive of democratization and institutionalization of the party system are: cooperation, trust, consensus, willingness to compromise, pragmatism, secularism, and personal political efficacy. On the other side, values that are seen to inhibit democracy and stable inter-party competition are patriarchy, hierarchy, elitism, group chauvinism, xenophobia, and extremism. In addition, there are the beliefs antithetical to the democracy-supporting values: unwillingness to cooperate or compromise, lack of trust and consensus, rigid ideology, and perceptions of powerlessness.
But, where does culture come from? Culture is in many ways created, shaped by human hands for human purposes. It can also be seen to be a product of history, of religion, of institutions, and of socialization. Institutions are often overlooked in the degree to which they can shape mindsets and not just behavior. According to Diamond, “institutions heavily shape choices and behavior, and . . . the ‘habitual’ practice of those choices and behaviors may eventually become embedded in intrinsic cultural values and norms.”[101]
One must be careful not to over-determine with culture. Unmeasurable and largely subject to interpretation, culture is often used as an explanatory variable of last resort. A simplistic view of the dangers of the cultural argument would be that “those people do that because they are those people (who are like that).” In a concrete example, excessive deference to authority was often taken as a reason why democracy could not root itself properly in Asian soil. Democratization over the last ten to fifteen years in South Korea and Taiwan has undermined this proposition, if the case of Japan on its own was not convincing enough. Culture is also constantly in a process of creation, making it difficult to pin down at any one point in time.
Attempting to avoid over-determination with the cultural variable and recognizing that culture changes over time, it is clear that certain values in a population can be supportive of stable inter-party competition while others can be destructive. In Indonesia’s case, political cultural values are often plainly heard in the dialogue of politics, enabling us to chart the influence of certain values in politics (at least when they are being manipulated). In some cases, culture operates with as much effect but with more subtlety.
Indonesia’s culture seems to present innumerable challenges for the study of culture’s effects on politics. First, which culture is one referring to when one speaks of Indonesian political culture? From the matrilineal Minangkabau, to the courtly and refined Javanese, to the just-recently hunter-gatherer populations of some parts of Eastern Indonesia, one finds an enormous variety of values and beliefs which could be seen to affect politics. Indonesia’s heterogeneity can be seen as a barrier to the creation of a single national culture. Still, fifty years of independent history and unity (for all its tumult) have led to the creation of something that can be identified as a national political culture. It is in some respects crafted and in others a product of the nation’s history, religious traditions, and a “balance of orientations” among the nation’s various ethnicities.[102]
The idea that democracy is incompatible with Islam, the religion of most Indonesians, has been explored by numerous scholars and generally found wanting.[103] Like others, Muslims seek to control their own destiny. Democracy is, in fact, often seen as the ideal type of regime. Indonesia’s population is 80 to 90% Muslim, thus raising concerns that, were democracy and Islam in some fundamental sense seen to be incompatible, then democracy might find it difficult to take root in countries with large Muslim populations. Indonesians Islam has shown itself, with noisy exceptions on the fringes, to be wildly supportive of democracy. This is seen in the development of an Islamic lineage for the idea of democracy in the concept of shura, or consultation. Muslims were active party formers in 1999.
Recognizing that Islam is not a barrier to democracy per se, one must observe the effects of the religion in the operation of the party system. Parties have formed along religious lines. Secular parties have also arisen. There is a serious tension between those like the PPP who would seek to implement Islamic law in Indonesia and the major secular parties, which prefer a pluralist approach to the state. Thus far, at the national level, moderation and pluralism have triumphed, but the conflict does promise to continue. Will the stand of some Islamic parties, seeking to exercise their beliefs that all good Muslims should live under Islamic law, push the system into greater conflict. This is highly likely. Different interpretations within the Islamic faith have also shaped the contours of political party conflict: the modernist-traditionalist split has been explored in detail.
Beyond Islam, much of Indonesia’s political culture is shaped by the dominant Javanese political culture. The Javanese are the most populous of Indonesia’s ethnic groups. Historically, they have also dominated the country’s politics and economics since the departure of the Dutch. The Javanese political culture, like many other local cultures in Indonesia, is extremely hierarchical, elitist, and infused with spirituality. Hierarchical and elitist values inhibit democracy. They also challenge the party system by shaping the parties in certain ways and driving the nature of popular participation in party politics into specific channels. Indonesia’s parties are personalistic and oriented on a “follow the leader” basis. “The masses,” are needed for political support but not for political input. This leader-follower orientation has specific effects on the party system. Parties are not interest-based associations of autonomous individuals. Instead they are often charismatically-driven elitist vehicles that pay lip-service to Sukarno-era revolutionary and egalitarian ideals.
In addition, in Javanese culture, leaders are thought to be imbued with a mystical right to rule. Power is seen as an indivisible concept. That a leader would possess a mystical right to rule stems from Indian-influenced Javanese royal cosmology, dominant long before the coming of Islam. That this power would not be divisible seems to present a challenge to democracy. Sukarno and Suharto were both individuals seen to possess this mystical authority (as Javanese kings had before them). In the transition from authoritarian rule, Megawati was painted by many as the new ratu adil, the just king (or queen, in this case). The indivisibility of power and the faith in the institution of the just king seem to challenge democracy because, if it is anything, authority in a democracy is divided. In a multi-party system like Indonesia’s, coalitions are a necessity; these imply the sharing out of power. Were these types of views behind Wahid’s inability to share power, which resulted in tumult in the country and heightened inter-party tension? We cannot know for sure.
Indonesia’s political culture is influenced by more than just inert values lying inchoate out in the population. The political culture has been crafted by political actors seeking to pursue their interests in the political system. Sukarno took advantage of popular frustration with democracy’s ineffectiveness to craft an artificial but resonant indigenous alternative based on the nation as a traditional village, with Suharto himself at the apex operating as the national village head. Decisions were supposed to be based, as in Indonesia’s villages, on consultation and consensus. As Sukarno described the system, the leader: “incorporates a spoonful of so-and-so’s opinions with a dash of such-and-such, always taking care to incorporate a soupcon of the opposition. Then he cooks it and serves his final summation with ‘OK, now my dear brothers, it is like this and I hope you agree . . ..‘“[104] Sukarno painted Indonesia’s parties as divisive of a natural unity and harmony in the population.
The military, too, has engaged in its share of cultural crafting. Arising from the experience of the revolution, the military was seen as the guardian of the nation. Through the tumultuous early years of parliamentary democracy, the military consciously portrayed itself as the only group with its eyes on the national interest. In 1952, claiming to be acting in service to the nation, military men launched a half-coup attempting to pressure Sukarno to clean out the parliament (it was not successful). The mini-coup was complete with a crowd of military-sponsored demonstrators pressuring Sukarno and supporting the military’s position. This October 1952 incident is one example of the military’s consciously setting out to undermine the parties and democracy. In the late 1950s, Nasution, chief of the armed forces, crafted the doctrine of the Middle Way by which the military would neither wholly dominate nor be dominated by civilians. This was later morphed into the doctrine of the military’s dual function, which was propagandized and made manifest in the country’s political institutions. Nasution also played a role in suggesting that Sukarno reinstate the 1945 Constitution in the late 1950s to get the country over the impasse of the Constituent Assembly and the ineffectiveness of parliamentary government. With this change, the parties’ role was durably altered. The parties’ role declined from the 1960s; the military’s rose.
Sukarno’s and the military’s manipulation of culture was followed up by Suharto who portrayed Indonesia as too diverse and too unwieldy to allow the uncontrolled expression of political views. While Sukarno emphasized revolution, Suharto planned to deliver development. Suharto turned Sukarno’s Pancasila into a fully-fledged national ideology intended to harmonize politics by stipulating a set of utterly inviolate principles to which all would adhere. Suharto’s one-time Minister and State Secretary Moerdiono described the situation as the creation of the “Pancasila Democracy political culture.”[105] According to Moerdiono, Pancasila democracy was consciously socialized in the population and built into the institutions of state.[106] Suharto banned the Communist party and put state institutions behind an official doctrine of Commu-phobia. Suharto worked hard to craft culture. In turn, culture played an important role in assuring the perpetuation of the Suharto regime and thus its manipulated party system for more than thirty years.
In the contemporary party system, cultural norms have rapidly changed to embrace the ideals of democracy. In the Paso Communique, before the 1999 elections, Amien Rais, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and Abdurrahman Wahid presented themselves as being of different political views but unified on one goal, the carrying out of a successful national election. The party leaders pledged themselves in Paso to adhere to the new democratic rules of competition. This represents an attempt to craft new norms, to help Indonesians internalize the new values of fair play and agreeing to disagree.[107]
Despite Paso, unease which can be seen to stem from cultural causes has plagued the party system. Indonesians embrace concepts of the need for national unity and harmony. Multiple political parties in a high stakes game cannot deliver unanimity. Battling over the future of the old regime, the role of the military, and the place of Islam, disagreements have been bound to occur. While Indonesians have embraced the values of democracy in theory, its concrete manifestations in disagreements, polarization, and conflict are generally disdained. This creates important effects for the party system. The parties’ legitimacy can be said to be declining; popular attitudes toward conflict and harmony have played a role in that decline.
Pancasila indoctrination can be seen to have affected the contemporary party system. Most parties adopted Pancasila as their azas, or party basis. This was an important change brought about by the long authoritarian years. Culture had in effect been transformed with a large segment of the population. Suharto’s Islamofobia took hold in the national consciousness. Of the top five parties, all but the PPP have chosen a Pancasila basis. PPP chose Islam.
It would be a mistake to see Indonesia’s culture as a permanent barrier to the institutionalization of the party system or to the consolidation of democracy. Values such as elitism and hierarchy certainly infuse the system, arising from cultural roots and also manipulated by long authoritarian rule. I interviewed Nurdin Purnomo, the head of the Partai Bhinekka Tunggal Ika, once.[108] He told me of his trips around the country to drum up support for his new party in the run-up to the 1999 elections. I asked him what he had learned from the people, what their desires were, what they hoped to see happen in Indonesia. He had no answer. I surmised at the time it was because it had never occurred to him to ask. That is a concrete effect of cultural attitudes on the nature of Indonesia’s political parties.
To begin to develop answers, Figure 8.1 below sums up findings on Indonesia’s contemporary party system, using Mainwaring and Scully’s criteria of party system institutionalization.
Figure 8.1 Institutionalization of Indonesia’s Contemporary Party System
Criteria to Determine Institutionalization |
Findings |
|
I. Stability in inter-party competition |
Continuity with earlier periods but not stability |
|
Volatility of electoral competition |
Still in flux. Levels of party family support altered since 1950s. Polls show opinion going into election relatively stable. |
|
Nature of competition |
Feels polarized. Communal. |
|
Number of parties |
5.1 vote, 4.7 seats |
|
Ideological distance |
Little difference between parties except on communally aggravating issues. |
|
Developing patterns of conflict and cooperation |
Competition is in ways collusive, in ways combative, in ways moderate. |
|
II. Parties with stable roots in society |
Parties have roots. Communal roots are problematic. |
|
Age of parties |
Parties older than they appear. Significant legacies from previous party systems. |
|
Consistency of voting across geographic area and socio-economic group |
Pattern of religious choice of party relatively clear. Support for PDI-P consistent through income, educational categories. |
|
Consistency of voting over time |
King finds strong correlations between vote 1955 and 1999 in support for large parties. |
Consistency of party preference |
Party preferences going into election clear and accurate reflection of eventual vote result. |
III. Parties and elections considered legitimate |
Parties are embedded in the current system, but they are also loathed. |
|
Popular attitudes toward parties |
Popular antipathy toward parties, despite enthusiasm surrounding election in 1999. This is in part created by culture. In part, it is a result of Sukarno’s and Suharto’s crafting. |
|
Embeddedness of parties in system |
Parties embedded in legal, ideational framework of new regime. Party leaders strong by virtue of law and parliamentary work rules |
IV. Stable rules and structures |
Party organizations generally independent but weakly professionalized. |
|
A. Independence of the organization |
|
|
Variety and regularity of funding sources |
Funding irregular |
|
Independence from any sponsoring orgs. |
Large parties Independent of sponsoring organizations, with the exception of PKB |
|
Relative absence of personalistic parties |
More than half of parties can be seen as personalistic to some degree. Of top parties, PDI-P, PKB, PAN personalistic. Golkar, PPP, PBB not. |
|
B. Internal discipline |
|
|
Degree to which parties divided by faction |
Factions prevalent in all top six parties. Party splits in five of top six parties. Not likely to take great share of party support, however. |
|
Loyalty of elected representatives to party |
Vote record closed, so no means to evaluate national vote. Regional voting shows defections. In most cases, money politics involved. Lack of phenomenon of party switching (just four cases). |
|
Parties’ control process of candidate Selection |
Parties granted strong control over candidate selection. |
|
C. Routinization |
|
|
Routinization of processes |
Professionalization embraced by several top parties: PKB, PPP, PBB, PK |
|
Systemness, internal integration |
Central control provides some systemness. |
|
Territorial comprehensiveness |
Parties regionally concentrated. Only Golkar and PDI-P can present as national. |
Figure 8.1 makes abundantly clear the complexity of the criteria of party system institutionalization. While there are only four criteria to consider, coming to an evaluation of each criterion involves answering numerous sub-questions. In their 1995 volume, Mainwaring and Scully used a point rating scale to sum up levels of observed institutionalization for the four criteria for each country under consideration. These point scores were then totaled and used to compare the various countries’ party systems. In Mainwaring’s 1999 book on Brazil, he did not revive the point system. This exploration of the Indonesian case makes clear why he did not. A detailed examination of an individual party system is far too complex to reduce to the criteria to simple point values, and to arbitrary values at that.
In Mainwaring’s Brazil case, findings on the criteria of institutionalization are generally all negative, thus obviating the need for him to develop an alternative system of summing up on institutionalization. While admitting that levels of institutionalization exist along a continuum and cannot be reduced to either an institutionalized system or an uninstitutionalized system, in fact, Mainwaring says that in practice it is often thus.[109] Systems are either relatively institutionalized or relatively uninstitutionalized; this implies that all the criteria seemingly move in unison. Degrees of institutionalization for the contemporary Indonesian case, in the complex environment of a transition from authoritarian rule, cannot be so easily dispensed with. Indonesia is still in the process of becoming. What can we learn about the party system and effects on governance from observed levels of party system institutionalization?
Indonesia’s political parties are in certain ways very strong. The position they are given in the political system by virtue of the country’s political laws (first revised in January 1999) is strong. The proportional representation electoral system strengthens the parties, and the party central leaderships particularly. Cultural values as written into the work rules of the legislature make the parties stronger still. With an emphasis on the indigenous values of musyawarah and mufakat (consultation and consensus), as opposed to the “Western practice” of voting, the party leaderships, in consultation with one another, are able to shepherd most of parliament’s business. In addition to their strong position in Indonesia’s institutions, the parties, with a few exceptions, are also hardwired into the country’s socio-cultural cleavages. This is a form of “stable roots” as would be recognized by Mainwaring and Scully. But, when accompanied by parties run in an elitist, “leader-and-masses” manner, parties that are fiercely divided along the same socio-cultural divisions as the population can be a formula for communal conflict, as channeled through the political parties. This has been the case in Indonesia.
Indonesia’s parties are also weak. As just mentioned, the party leaders have shown themselves willing to exploit the basest communal sentiments for partisan advantage. This has polarized inter-party competition, even in the absence of substantive policy disagreements. In fact, the Islam-secular cleavage, the greatest programmatic difference displayed by the parties, has thus far been less polarized than the modernist Islam-traditionalist Islam cleavage manipulated to such effect by party leaders representing the two tendencies. Indonesia’s parties are also weak because they are divorced from the population, almost uniformly elite-led creations which, while having a stable socio-cultural constituency, have no stable popular involvement in decision-making. In addition, many of the parties are personalistic, trading on the charisma of socially prominent persons for votes and position. Finally, the parties are underdeveloped as organizations. Many, born only in 1998 or 1999, have struggled with a lack of internal rules, party splits, unprofessional management, and inability to develop an organization of national breadth.
The parties’ strengths, then, make the parties’ weaknesses worse. Because the party central leaderships are in a strong position in the legislature and the parties are personalistic, party leaders have little incentive to develop their organizations. Because the parties have socio-cultural ties to the population and the ability to call out mobs to support their stances, they have little incentive to engage in political education or dialogue with the population. Because the parties are strong, they can behave with impunity, unaccountable to the wishes of the population. As an example, the parties had the ability to spend almost a year and a half on the impeachment of Abdurrahman Wahid when it was abundantly clear that the population’s first priority was getting the economy back on track. The parties fiddled (impeached) while Indonesia burned (continued to experience severe economic difficulties, lingering effects of the Asian Financial Crisis). The parties’ startling weaknesses have contributed to a climate in which their legitimacy is fast dissipating.
The inter-relationship of the factors and Indonesia’s strong-weak parties make it abundantly clear why Mainwaring and Scully’s point system cannot be used as a means of evaluation of the party system. A “2” (a relatively weak score in Mainwaring and Scully’s 1995 treatment) in one area is not just a “2” when operated on by a “4” (a strong score) in another area. The net effect of a “2” and a “4” could be a “1.”
The ideas that parties can be, first, both strong and weak and, second, strong in ways that make the weaknesses worse is one not explored in depth by Mainwaring and Scully. This is partially a result of the nature of the authors’ cases. In particular, Mainwaring’s contemporary case of Brazil was generally extremely negative as far as the institutionalization criteria were concerned. Therefore, there was no need to explore the complex inter-relationships between the criteria. Mainwaring could concentrate his attention on developing an argument as to why party systems develop as they do. The Indonesian cases, though, leave the inter-relationship of the factors glaring.
The idea that party roots can have an extremely negative side is also not one that jumps up in much writing on party systems. This is a result of a selection bias and a division of labor. Party system theorists have tended to work on Western and Eastern Europe and Latin America, areas in which inter-communal tensions are less dramatic; therefore, the issue did not penetrate deeply into models of party systems and party system institutionalization. The division of labor is that inter-communal tensions occupy greatly the attention of specialists in ethnic conflict who tend to work on areas like India, Nigeria, and the Balkans. The problem is that these two sub-fields do not speak directly to one another, informing each other’s work.
The Indonesian case raises starkly the idea that, in a communally charged environment, even in an only potentially communally charged environment, stable roots can be dangerous, a negative rather than a positive for institutionalization of a healthy party system. Roots can contribute directly to polarization and to the declining legitimacy of the party system, as has been the case in Indonesia. Is the answer that there should be no roots? No, that cannot be. The argument for the relationship between roots and the stability of inter-party competition is too strong. Instead, in party systems with inter-communal tension, party system cleavages must be cross cutting. For Blondel, that means that “only if there is a mix of group-based loyalties and of support based on issues can a party system function efficiently. If parties are almost entirely oriented to a strong cleavage of a communal character, of an ethnic or religious kind in particular, tension is likely to be high among the parties and the pluralistic regime may be difficult to maintain and may be overthrown.”[110] Indonesians rightly perceive that, in an absence of politics based on issues, communal sentiments in their country have been and are being manipulated for political ends by members of the elite in an issue-less environment.
This is one reason I titled the study Streams of Least Resistance. It is an attempt to marry the idea of “paths of least resistance,” the paths chosen by Indonesia’s party leaders, and the idea of the party streams, or party families, in Indonesia, separated as they are along communal lines. As rational actors, Indonesia’s party leaders have perpetually used the least costly means available to reach their political goals. This has had important effects on the nature of inter-party competition and the nature of the parties themselves. Party leaders today, in an environment of high uncertainty and high stakes, have sought to take the least costly path to power. Communal mobilization is, for political elites, a relatively cost-free means of mobilizing supporters, much easier than years of political education, for example. This tactical choice has real impacts on the nature of Indonesia’s party system, particularly the degree to which the party system “feels” heavily polarized, despite the absence of strong policy-related disagreements among those at the highest levels.
The issue of communal roots is not a small one pointed up by the Indonesian case alone. In fact, using the party system institutionalization framework in much of Africa and Asia would bring the same issues to the fore. This raises important questions of how to make models and frameworks “travel” from one part of the world to another. Clearly, in heterogeneous countries, one might consider marrying the idea of party rootedness in the population based on communal group with the idea of issue orientation in order to reduce the cleavages’ flammability. Mainwaring does not see that parties need to be issue based in order to contribute to party system institutionalization. The Indonesian case suggests that absent some cross-cutting means to mitigate the impact of strong communal differences, as would be provided by issue orientation, conflict in the party system may be high.
This study is relatively unconcerned with coming to a single statement typifying the level of institutionalization in Indonesia’s party system. The parties have been shown to be both strong and weak. The in-depth consideration of the case has enabled a detailed consideration and description of the current party system (and past systems). It has raised important issues about why the party system has developed as it has and even, by implication, suggested ways in which activists might seek to foster party system institutionalization, by working on areas in which institutionalization is especially weak. The case has also raised interesting contributions to thinking about party systems. First, the case has pointed out that stable roots might be hazardous to institutionalization by increasing polarization and offering elites an irresistible means of advancing their political interests. Also, the case has drawn out the importance of international factors in determining how party systems come to be formed. The case informs an understanding of contemporary problems of governance in Indonesia and considers how observed levels of party system institutionalization might impact prospects for consolidation of democracy. It is to the latter two issues that I now turn.
Effects of Party System Institutionalization on Governance
From the observed levels of institutionalization, we can draw a number of conclusions about effects of the nature of party system institutionalization on governance in Indonesia. These have been alluded to throughout this work, but they merit summary here. These especially concern low levels of legitimacy for the parties and unaccountable politicians. Both suggest future instability.
Thus far, Indonesia’s party system has both commonalities and differences with the relatively uninstitutionalized systems. Indonesia’s party system is far from stable because we can expect the number of parties to change drastically in coming years. But, party roots are far stronger than the newness of the system might suggest. The major parties in the system, or parties just like them, are likely to continue to dominate. The parties’ legitimacy is declining, but there is no alternative ideational principle to compete with the parties and democracy at this stage. Lastly, the parties’ organizations are weak. Several parties have shown a keen interest in professionalization and organizational development, but, overall, the parties employ personalistic, traditional, and communal methods to reach their goals. Between elections, party bodies at lower levels have withered.
How do these factors impact on governance? Here again, Indonesia’s parties have both commonalities and differences with the relatively uninstitutionalized systems explained by Mainwaring and Scully. Indonesia’s parties do provide an underlying structuration to the party system unlike those of the uninstitutionalized systems the authors explore. The very rooting of the parties in the country’s communal groups guarantees that. For this reason, many of the figures at the top of the political system have been there since the earliest part of the transition: Megawati, Amien, Abdurrahman, and Akbar have all played key roles throughout the transition. Part of the reason they are able to do this is because of the grounding of their party organizations deep into the social fabric (Akbar’s role via Golkar owes more to the durable effects of the Suharto regime).
Voters may still float in future elections, leading to unpredictability as to the composition of future governments. As mentioned several times, Megawati Sukarnoputri’s PDI-P was the recipient of sympathy votes which the party may or may not receive again. Also, the idea that the PPP may run the 2004 elections on the issue of the imposition of Islamic law promises to shake up the vote, communalizing it even further than the rather more muddled 1999 vote, with its additional factor of reform versus status quo.
Whatever happens, the high number of parties in Indonesia’s parliament and the necessity of coalition arrangements in order to throw up a president have made for messy governments at the top. Both Abdurrahman Wahid’s and Megawati Sukarnoputri’s cabinets have been multi-party affairs. Further, the cabinets have included large numbers of military representatives as well. National unity governments may aid in the solution of crises of government and encourage all elements of the nation to accept new governing arrangements, but they also make holding any particular party responsible for any particular policy exceedingly difficult. This suggests that the elections in 2004 will not be run on the basis of record but on some other basis: personalities and/or communal issues, most likely.
The inability to hold politicians accountable has numerous effects on the system, all negative. Unsurprisingly, unaccountable politicians often behave as if they are not accountable to the people. The Indonesian experience thus far suggests that personal political calculus rather than constituent interest will be the driving force behind politics. In a vicious circle, lack of attention to the issues demanded by the population filters back into a growing sense of illegitimacy of the parties. That the parties could behave in an unaccountable manner was clearly shown in the impeachment of Abdurrahman Wahid, about which, outside a circle of activists, the country was entirely ambivalent (though nervous). A recent opinion poll has borne out that popular dissatisfaction with the parties is high.
Rooting in the population, such as is exhibited by Indonesia’s parties, does not assure that those parties are run in a way that makes politicians accountable to the interests of the people, even the people within the various party streams. In fact, traditional structures, elitist attitudes, and personalistic parties tend to add up to a marginalization of the people as a whole. Indonesia’s post-reformasi governments have shown this in spades. Issues of public concern, like the elimination of collusion, corruption, and nepotism, have barely been touched. The economy muddles as perpetual government crises threaten to derail whatever recovery has been seen. The military remains powerful. Analysts suggest its power has even risen since 2001. Parties have tended to view the people as a commodity that is mobilized at crucial junctures but not one which is valuable in and of itself.
Fly-by-night party organization structures reinforce the weaknesses of the parties and the ability of the parties to compete with the bureaucracy for control. Weak parties are little able to come up with policy options in highly complex areas of government. They need to do so, particularly in the case of a country like Indonesia, emerging from 30 years of authoritarian rule under a military-bureaucratic regime. The weakness of the parties in concrete policy development is evidenced in the parties’ election programs. It is also shown in the continuing power of the bureaucracy and other extra-party actors in the setting of policy. The immense power of Bambang Kesowo, State Secretary to Megawati and a Suharto-era fixture, reflects this weakness in the parties.
Unsure party discipline has also made passing legislation difficult. Seeming to prefer keeping parliamentary business under the rubric of musyawarah and mufakat, party leaders are compelled to negotiate with each and every fraction in parliament in order to secure agreement. This gives a veto to both the largest and the smallest parliamentary groupings. The effects are clearly seen in the sheer dearth of legislative output in Indonesia since 1999, despite the massive challenges confronting the country. Inability to pass legislation feeds back into perceptions that the parties are lazy and self-interested, thus threatening to delegitimize the parties further. Prominently mentioned in the newspapers have been the poor attendance records of many parliamentarians in parliamentary sessions. This reinforces the worst perceptions about the parties.
Mainwaring mentions that institutionalization of the party system is necessary for democracy but that it cannot cause democracy in and of itself. An institutionalized system supports democracy in numerous ways: by making politics more stable, by enabling representation of group interests in politics through the existing political system, by according legitimacy to the system of parties and elections, and by assuring that party organizations are strong enough and structured enough to guarantee some longevity. Institutionalization of the party system is linked to both stability and effectiveness of government, both of which can support the regular and continued operation of a democratic system.
Mainwaring and Scully say “the case for studying parties is less obvious” in situations “where democracy is not consolidated because parties do not as yet have the ability to offer an underlying structure to the political system.[111] This is certainly not the case in Indonesia. Democracy cannot yet be seen to be consolidated: its operation is messy, extra-democratic elements continued to have an important role in the political system, and constitutional revisions have not been completed since the time of authoritarian rule. Thus, the framework of the new political system is not yet set. In short, democracy is not yet “the only game in town,” as Linz and Stepan’s famous formulation has it. But, despite these factors which reduce the quality of Indonesian democracy, Indonesia can be seen to have experienced a significant democratization since 1998. By this I follow O’Donnell and Schmitter’s definition which “refers to the processes whereby the rules and procedures of citizenship are either applied to political institutions previously governed by other principles . . . or expanded to include persons not previously enjoying such rights and obligations . . . or extended to cover issues and institutions not previously subject to citizen participation . . ..[112] Here, Indonesia can be seen to have experienced a significant democratization, and the parties are key actors in that process. The parties have been at the core of major political developments since 1999. To ignore the development of the parties and the degree to which they are able to provide a fundamental structural support for the consolidation of democracy just because the country is in the throes of its transition from authoritarian rule would be a mistake.
As Cotta shows, the parties’ role in the consolidation of democracy elsewhere has been key. Cotta writes: “even a cursory survey of Western European countries where transitions to democracy have taken place in the past (Austria, France, Germany, and Italy after the Second World War; Greece, Portugal, and Spain in the 1970s) shows rather clearly that the party variable (and this means both the characteristics of party units and the nature of the party system) has made for significant differences.”[113] Pasquino adds: “[n]ot all processes of transition have been party dominated; but all processes of democratic consolidation have indeed been party dominated.”[114] Clearly, the parties are important in a consolidation of democracy. Institutionalization of the party system speaks to the parties’ ability to provide underlying structure and stability to evolving governmental forms.
Levels of party system institutionalization as detailed in this study show that the parties’ strong-weak characteristics have numerous effects on prospects for the consolidation of democracy. In addition, the study points out that, with the party leaders’ willingness to act “on the cheap,” mobilizing through the streams of least resistance, improvements in the level of democratization are imperiled by the parties’ actions. The parties’ willingness to exploit communal tensions has reduced their legitimacy. The parties’ glaring weaknesses raise questions about the effectiveness of democratic governance in Indonesia. The daily laments of Indonesia’s intellectuals as to the quality of the country’s parties are testaments to that. Accountability in the system is weak.
Last Words
It’s a big nationwide brainstorming session.
--Talk show host and columnist Wimar
Witoelar on Indonesia’s transition,
December 1999[115]
It is common among critics of the transitions and party system institutionalization literature to suggest that scholars working in these areas assume that democracy is inevitable or that low levels of institutionalization must eventually develop into higher levels of institutionalization. I make no such mistake here. However, I have found that examining party system institutionalization in the context of the transition from authoritarian rule in Indonesia to be a rewarding lens for developing an understanding of the nature of the contemporary Indonesian party system. Without assuming that Indonesia will necessarily become a democracy, this study does have a lot to say about what Indonesia is, how its politics functions, and why politics functions as it does. The parties are important pieces of the explanation. Admittedly, the situation is not yet “normal” (whatever that might be). But, by examination of the parties’ pasts, their current level of institutionalization, and comparing them with parties in other new democracies, much can be learned.
Indonesians like to say that the country is learning to have democracy, belajar berdemokrasi. As the Wimar quote above suggests, the country is engaged in “a big nationwide brainstorming session.” It is always fascinating to see what develops.
[1] “Sudah Terdaftar 300 Partai Baru,” Kompas, November 15, 2001 [ONLINE] http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0111/15/UTAMA/suda01.htm [accessed November 16, 2001].
[2] Partai Demokrat is seen to be a vehicle for military figure Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The party chair is Professor S. Boedhisantoso. “Inilah Tunggangan Politik Yudhoyono,” Gatra, March 27, 2002 [ONLINE] http://www.gatra.com [accessed March 28, 2002].
[3] Giacomo Sani and Giovanni Sartori, “Polarization, Fragmentation and Competition in Western Democracies,” In Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, eds. Hans Daalder and Peter Mair (London: Sage, 1983), 335-337.
[4] The 300 new parties, even the 48 original parties, will be whittled down for the second-round elections in 2004 as a result of an expected tightening of the laws on parties in elections expected in 2002/2003.
[5] Peter Mair, Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
[6] Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 11.
[7] Stokes points out that in the US case, parties grew to fill a need in the legislature of some form of coordination of action. This was despite the anti-“faction” views so eloquently argued by Madison in Federalist #10. See, Susan Stokes, “ Political Parties and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science. Volume 2, 1999 (Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, 1999),. 245-246.
[8] People are growing more and more frustrated with this procedural definition of democracy, however. Most countries today do hold elections, however there is a great deal of variation in the degree to which the governments formed out of those elections truly represent the popular will and thus can be considered truly democratic. Diamond discusses this issue in detail in his treatment of “hybrid regimes.” See, Larry Diamond, “Elections without Democracy: Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2002): 21-35.
[9] Mainwaring and Scully use the term “third-wave democracies” from Samuel Huntington’s seminal article. I choose to back that term out, however, to encompass new democracies as a whole. By the late 1990s before Indonesia’s transition, some were questioning whether the Third Wave was over. For Mainwaring and Scully, see Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
[10] Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
[11] Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems, 25.
[12] Mainwaring and Scully are working on Latin American party systems but explicitly intend their work to travel to former Communist countries and other developing areas as well.
[13] Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems, 23.
[14] Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems, 6.
[15] Ibid., 100.
[16] Gerardo Munck and Carol Skalnik Leff, “Modes of Transition and Democratization: South America and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective,” Lisa Anderson, ed. Transitions to Democracy (New York: Columbia, 1999).
[17] Geoffrey Pridham and Paul G. Lewis, eds. Stabilising Fragile Democracies: Comparing New Party Systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996), 10.
[18] I use the term consolidation of democracy despite disagreements in the field as to the multiple meanings of “consolidation.” For a detailed treatment of problems in “consolidology,” see “Andreas Schedler, “What is Democratic Consolidation?” The Global Divergence of Democracies, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 149-164.
[19] Linz and Stepan describe five “arenas” in which the consolidation of democracy takes place. Consolidation requires a vibrant civil society, an autonomous political society, the rule of law, a usable state, and an economic society. For more on the arenas, see the introductory chapter of Linz and Stepan. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe,South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
[20] Of the eleven countries of Southeast Asia (the ASEAN 10 + East Timor), only four are on the democratic path at all: Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and tiny East Timor. Others are far more restrictive. Look at the neighborhood: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma/Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Of the neighbors, only Malaysia and Singapore claim to be democratic. However, restrictions on participation, control of opposition, the press, and individual political rights render these countries “electoral democracies” at best.
[21] Alwi Shihab quoted in Susan Sim, “Indonesia Can Serve as a Model of Change, Says Alwi,” Straits Times. November 6, 1999. [ONLINE]. http://www.straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/reg/sea5_1106.html [accessed November 6, 1999]
[22] Modernist Muslims are those influenced by trends in the wider Islamic community which seek to purify the faith of cultural admixtures which developed over the centuries. Traditionalists retain in their religious beliefs and practices Islamic and extra-Islamic elements. Among traditionalists, the kyai, rural learned Islamic scholar retains an important role.
[23] The effective number of parties is calculated by squaring each party’s share of the vote, summing the squares, and dividing one by the result.
[24] The term Outer Islands is often perceived as pejorative as it implies that Java is the center of the nation and all other islands are outer, peripheral, and not central. Dealing with a country of 13,000 islands, though, it is difficult to develop a term of similar descriptive use. Sometimes, I have opted to retain the term Outer Islands. Sometimes, I have used the term non-Java Indonesia.
[25] Masyumi also had a core of support in heavily Muslim West Java.
[26] Sukarno, Sukarno: An Autobiography (as told to Cindy Adams) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), 265.
[27] Although not a member or leader of PNI, Sukarno had founded the original PNI in 1927. He was the charismatic glue of the organization and his ideas formed the party’s ideology.
[28] Sukarno, “The Dynamism of the Revolution,” in Herbert Feith and Lance Castles, eds., Indonesian Political Thinking: 1945-1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 111.
[29] Donald Hindley, The Communist Party of Indonesia: 1951-1963. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 276.
[30] Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the primary representative of traditionalist, Java-based Islam, continued to play a role at the top levels of the political system. In the formulation, NASAKOM (Nasionalisme, Agama, Komunisme), NU was the primary representative of religion. As a top official explained, however, the party was under no illusions about its ability to influence policy. It was simply trying to protect the interests of traditionalist Muslims as best it could in what it perceived to be a violent national storm. See, Idham Chalid quoted in Greg Fealy, “‘Rowing in a Typhoon’ Nahdlatul Ulama and the Decline of Parliamentary Democracy,” David Bourchier and John Legge, eds, Democracy in Indonesia: 1950s and 1990s, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, No. 31, Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1994, 95.
[31] The Communists tried several strategies. First, they attempted to ensure the NASAKOM’ization of the armed forces (that the force would represent the primary streams in Indonesian politics Nasionalisme, Agama (Islam), and Komunisme). The military responded, however, that each member of the armed forces was already NASAKOM’ed in his own person. Therefore, changes were unnecessary. Failing this, the Communists did attempt to secure weapons from the People’s Republic of China nominally to aid in Indonesia’s anti-colonial regional struggles, actually to arm the Communists to survive an attempted repression by the military.
[32] Volatility, too, was 63 from the elections of 1955 to those of 1971.
[33] The PPP could call upon the Muslim zakat tax to support its activities as well.
[34] Modified from Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, “Trends in Indonesian Student Movements in 1998,” Geoff Forrester and R. J. May, eds. The Fall of Soeharto (Singapore: Select Books, 1999), 174 -175.
[35] Some use a figure of 177, others 181. Because not all parties completed the process of registration through the Ministry of Justice, the true number may never be known.
[36] In 1955, the top four parties took 78% of the vote, the top six 83.6%.
[37] This calculation includes both PKB and PAN as Islamic parties, despite the fact that the organizational basis of each party was Pancasila (rather than Islam). Public opinion poll results show that the parties attracted little if any non-Muslim support. The parties are also based on the country’s two largest Muslim organizations.
[38] In the end, PBB supported Abdurrahman Wahid’s candidacy as part of the Poros Tengah alliance of Islamic parties.
[39] Maya Chadda, Building Democracy in South Asia: India, Nepal, Pakistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 13.
[40] It is true that Wahid had come to be considered somewhat of a joke. This does not mean, though, that the population uniformly favored his impeachment. A large chunk of Megawati’s PDI-P tried to oppose impeachment. Akbar Tandjung, too, spoke often as if compromise between the president and the legislature were possible. Rather than supporting or opposing the impeachment process, outside a circle of activists, most Indonesians seemed to look on in anticipation and disgust.
[41] Deborah L. Norden, “Party Relations and Democracy in Latin America,” Party Politics Vol. 4, No. 4 (1998), 423-443.
[42] Wahid and his supporters, of course, would debate this point, and their position has a great deal of merit. Absent proof of a criminal act or violation of the Constitution or the broad outlines of state policy (GBHN), Wahid argued that the parliament had no right to remove him from office. Parliamentarians were attempting to convert Indonesia’s presidential system into a parliamentary one, themselves in violation of the Constitution.
[43] O’Donnell and Schmitter, 66.
[44] Steven Wagner, “Summary of Public Opinion Preceding the Parliamentary Elections in Indonesia – 1999,” Survey by the International Foundation for Election Systems, 1999 [ONLINE] http://www.ifes.org/indonesia/survey.htm [accessed October 1999]. Subsequently referred to as IFES pre-election poll. Steven Wagner, “Survey of the Indonesian Electorate Following the June 1999 Elections,” International Foundation for Election Systems, August 1999 [ONLINE] Available on the website of the Indonesian MPR. http://mpr.wasantara.net.id [accessed December 16, 1999]. The latter poll is subsequently referred to as IFES post-election poll.
[45] Due to the volume of information, analysis was only conducted on the top seven parties.
[46] Pridham and Lewis, 10.
[47] Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems, 46.
[48] Dwight King, “The Elections of 1955 and 1999: Similarities and Continuities,” Colloquium Paper, June 8, 2000.
[49] Ibid., 3.
[50] Golkar also saw support in areas that had formerly been the preserve of the Partai Syarikat Islam Indonesia (PSII) (.45) and Parkindo, the Protestant Party (.39). Like Masyumi, these parties were predominantly off-Java parties (though PSII enjoyed support—as Golkar does—in the province of West Java).
[51] PAN is the most Java-based of the four parties. It scored well in the heavily Muslim areas of Sumatra, however.
[52] IFES post-election poll. N=1,520.
[53] Ibid.
[54] These data come from Mark F. Franklin, “The Dynamics of Electoral Participation,” Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting. (London: Sage, 2002), 150.
[55] Also from Franklin. These data represent average turnout over several election periods in the new democracies. Therefore, Indonesia’s single and first democratic election may not be illustrative in comparison.
[56] Polling Center, “Voice of the People” Poll, July 1999. Conducted as part of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs’ Political Party Workshop on Ethical Governance and Parliament, Jakarta, July 19-23, 1999, N=4,100.
[57] Linz and Stepan, 394.
[58] IFES pre-election poll.
[59] E. Shobirin Nadj, Rahadi T. Wiratama, and Wildan Pramudya A., “Pendapat Publik Tentang Problem Internal dan Masa Depan, Partai Politik di Indonesia,” CESDA-LP3ES, February 20, 2002 [ONLINE] http://www.lp3es.or.id/program/polling2/internal1.htm [accessed February 24, 2002]. N=1,236.
[60] Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives., eds., Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 51-52.
[61] “Immaturity and Temptation: Challenges for 2004.” Jakarta Post, March 9, 2002 [ONLINE] http://www.thejakartapost.com [accessed March 8, 2002].
[62] Steven Levitsky, “Institutionalization and Peronism,” Party Politics Vol. 4, No. 1 (1998), 79-80.
[63] Richard Gillespie, “Party Funding in a New Democracy: Spain.” Funding Democratization, eds. Peter Burnell and Alan Ware (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 76.
[64] API, Almanak Parpol Indonesia (Jakarta: API, 1999).
[65] Mainwaring, 5.
[66] Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, “What Makes Democracies Endure?” The Global Divergence of Democracies, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). This was a macro-level study observing 135 countries from 1950 (or independence) to 1990.
[67] UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
[68] Purchasing Power Parity
[69] Privatization has become a focus, especially under President Megawati Sukarnoputri. The process has been halting and troubled, however. At one level, Indonesians fret about the concept of privatization, seeing it as an IMF plot to help Western corporate interests buy the crown jewels of the Indonesian economy on the cheap. On another level, privatization has been hampered by regional demands. This was most clearly seen in the sale of the state cement firm to Mexico’s Cemex. Sumatra-based opponents claimed the central government could not sell parts of the firm in their area without their approval. Additionally, political opponents in parliament have used the issue to batter the president, presenting themselves as guardians of nationalism.
[70] Jungug Choi, “A Bargaining Theory of Economic Crisis and Political Cooperation: New Indonesian Democracy Born with a Defect,” Presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30-September 2, 2001, San Francisco, California.
[71] Przeworski, et; al., “What Makes Democracies Endure?” 177.
[72] William H. Frederick, ed. and Robert L. Worden, eds. Indonesia: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992).
[73] Chadda, 11.
[74] It is santri Muslims that can be divided into modernists and traditionalists.
[75] William Liddle and Saiful Mujani. “The Triumph of Leadership: Explaining the 1999 Indonesian Vote.” Undated Manuscript.
[76] William Liddle, personal communication, April 8, 2002.
[77] Sukarno’s Pancasila puts Indonesia in a netherworld as far as secularism is concerned. The formulation, Indonesia’s national ideology since 1945, was intended as a sop to Islamists for it stated that “Belief in God” was a fundamental precept of the nation. This enables the state to support religion, with the building of Islamic schools and mosques. The state is also secular, though, in the sense that all the religions which recognize belief in God (the five official religions, religions of the book) are recognized as equal.
[78] Pemerintahan Revolusioner Republik Indonesia—Perjuangan Semesta. Republic of Indonesia Revolutionary Government—Overall Struggle.
[79] One draws from the Kahins’ Subversion as Foreign Policy that overt anti-Communism was a means of leverage for support from the United States. See, Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin. Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995).
[80] The PKI would become part of the Guided Democracy ruling troika. The party was not an overt fan of Sukarno’s anti-party, anti-democratic maneuvers. Rather, the party went along with the political changes instituted by Sukarno and the military when it was clear that the tide of history was moving in that direction.
[81] See, Maya Chadda, Building Democracy in South Asia: India, Nepal, and Pakistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
[82] Officially, Indonesia’s 1999 system was a hybrid system of proportional representation (PR), with first-past-the-post features. The parties generally circumvented the first-past-the-post elements of the system and retained complete control over their candidate lists, as in a pure PR system.
[83] This may sound ironic given the chaos attendant to Indonesia’s regime change. The chaos could have been more dramatic, however, had the government broken down completely. Instead, Suharto resigned, and his vice president was elevated to the presidency. New laws were passed opening the political system and laying the groundwork for elections. Thus was the transition in one sense orderly.
[84] Traditionalist-modernist relations are structurally unstable. Because modernists generally seek to purify Islam, the syncretism of traditionalists is considered abhorrent and backward. In addition, the two communities have often been on opposite sides of the political fence in Indonesia. In the 1950s, traditionalists exited modernist-dominated Masyumi because they felt they were not getting a fair shake inside the party. In the Guided Democracy period, Masyumi was banned and modernists were left on the whole outside the political system. Traditionalists filled the role of “Islam.” During the New Order, both traditionalists and modernists were sidelined by Suharto and the generals. Their strong association with opposition politics leading them nowhere, the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama left official politics in 1984. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, modernists, on the other hand, grew closer and more favored by the regime, rising in the bureaucracy, occupying prominent ministries, and shaping moderately Islamizing policies. In the 1999 elections, traditionalists were again set against modernists. Modernists were denigrated by Abdurrahman Wahid, head of the Nahdlatul Ulama, as politicizing Islam.
[85] Wahid is generally considered a neo-modernist rather than a modernist or a traditionalist. I use the phrase arch-traditionalist here to indicate Wahid’s position as the supreme individual within the traditionalist movement.
[86] Munck and Bosworth, 483.
[87] Chadda, 25.
[88] “Para Pakar Sepakat Transisi Indonesia Menuju Demokrasi Masih Panjang,” Mandiri, September 27, 1999 [ONLINE] http://www.mandiri.com/isimandiri/contents/Buletin/0999/bul270999_2.htm [accessed September 28, 1999].
[89] O’Donnell and Schmitter, 19.
[90] Sukarno, “Let Us Bury the Parties,” Herbert Feith and Lance Castles, eds. Indonesian Political Thinking: 1945-1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 82.
[91] OTB, Organisasi Tanpa Bentuk.
[92] Julia I. Suryakusuma, “Indonesian Perceptions of the West,” Van Zorge Report, Vol. 4, No. 2 (February 4, 2002).
[93] For more information on international involvement in Indonesia’s 1999 elections, see Annette Clear’s excellent paper “The International Dimension of Democratization: Foreign Aid for the 1999 Indonesian Elections.” Paper presented to the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2000.
[94] This was supposed to be put into effect in 2004. It is unclear whether it will take effect in that year or in 2009. This depends on the revised political party laws expected some time in 2002.
[95] Scott Mainwaring, “Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy The Difficult Combination,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (July 1993): 199.
[96] Matthew Shugart and John Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
[97] Provisions for direct election of the president have been in the works since 1999. Some agreement looks likely, but is not certain in 2002.
[98] Linz and Stepan, 399.
[99] This is with the exception of the party’s secretary-general, Matori Abdul Djalil, who served also as a vice-head of the upper house of parliament. Matori was subsequently removed as party head by Gus Dur. This removal was not recognized by Matori, leaving two feuding PKB parties in its wake.
[100] Diamond, Political Culture, 8.
[101] Diamond, Political Culture, 7.
[102] Here, of course, Diamond is not referring specifically to Indonesia but rather to heterogeneous cultures in general. Diamond, Political Culture, 8.
[103] John Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Abdou Filali-Ansary, “Muslims and Democracy,” The Global Divergence of Democracies, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 37-51.
[104] Sukarno, quoted in Schwarz, 17.
[105] Moerdiono, “Budaya Politik Demokrasi Pancasila,” Alfian and Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin, eds. Profil Budaya Politik Indonesia. (Jakarta: PT Pustaka Utama Grafiti, 1991), 5.
[106] Ibid., 7.
[107] According to Kevin O’Driscoll, formerly of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Jakarta, PDI-P was the party most reluctant to embrace the idea of the political system as a site of free competition among ideas. Personal communication, April 12 ,2002.
[108] Jakarta, February 21, 2000.
[109] Mainwaring, 27.
[110] Jean Blondel, “The Role of Parties and Party Systems in the Democratization Process,” Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance: East and Southeast Asia (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1999) 39.
[111] Mainwaring and Scully, 3.
[112] O’Donnell and Schmitter, 8.
[113] Mauricio Cotta, “Building Party Systems after the Dictatorship: The East European Cases in a Comparative Perspective." In Democratization in Eastern Europe, eds., Geoffrey Pridham and Tatu Vanhanen. (London: Routledge, 1994), 100.
[114] Pasquino, cited in Pridham and Lewis, 7.
[115] Wimar would go on to serve briefly as spokesman for President Abdurrahman Wahid. For source of quotation, see Thomas Fuller, “Indonesians Optimistic Amid National Rebirth,” International Herald Tribune, December 17, 1999 [ONLINE] Available from the Van Zorge Report at http://www.vanzorgereport.com/scripts/display.cfm?id=7960 [accessed December 17, 1999].