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Session 159: Explaining Political Party and Voter Behavior in the 2004 Indonesian Elections
Organizer and Chair: Dwight Y. King, Northern Illinois University
Discussants: Blair A. King, National Democratic Institute; Allen Hicken, University of Michigan
Until the three elections of 2004, the conventional wisdom about Indonesian voters was that they tended to identify with one of four socio-cultural orientations (aliran) in society. Each of these orientations was represented and articulated by a particular political organization (except for the abangan and the PKI after 1965). When allowed to vote freely and fairly as in 1955 and 1999, voters could be counted on to choose the party(ies) which represented a corresponding orientation.
But the results of the 2004 elections present us with a far more complicated picture. For example, in the legislative election (April), many voters shifted their support from the largest and well-rooted parties to two, new, smaller parties based on their campaigns emphasizing greater integrity and less corruption in public life. And the first-round winner of the presidential election (July), who was the leader of one of the smaller parties, drew significant support from voters who voted for other, major parties in the legislative elections.
Thus, the occurrence of four, nationwide elections since democratization began in 1998 has raised important questions for research and generated an immense amount of information about the behavior of both the political elite and the electorate (masses). This panel includes scholars who are engaged in comparative analyses of these questions using comprehensive, disaggregated election returns and voter attitudinal surveys based on (nationally) representative samples which lend themselves to measurement and theory development.
Comparing the 1999 and 2004 Indonesian Legislative Elections
R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani, Ohio State University
This paper is based on individual-level survey data collected just after the 1999 and 2004 legislative elections in Indonesia, in which a random sample of more than 2000 voters was interviewed after each election. With these data, the paper tests hypotheses about leadership characteristics, cultural affiliation or aliran, patron-client relations, economic variables, and political organizations in shaping the choice of the Indonesian voter.
The Relative Importance of Social-Based Voting in the 2004 Elections
Dwight Y. King, Northern Illinois University
This paper will be an extension to 2004 of my earlier study in which I attempted to explain influences on voting choices in the 1999 election. In that study, I found voting choices were affected by religion, ethnic (or regional) differences, class, and party identification. Further, I found evidence that voters chose a party out of their preference for the party rather than for the party leader (King, 2003). As indicated in the panel abstract, it appears that compared to 1999, social-based voting has weakened and that Indonesian voters have become more "rational" (i.e., vote in ways they think will advance their individual interests). Even if this conclusion is incontestable at the national/overall level, it will be useful to map and attempt to explain regional differences as well as differences across elections (legislative versus presidential).
Parties and Pestas: An Analysis Indonesian Democratization after the 2004 Elections through the Lens of Party System Institutionalization
Paige Johnson Tan, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
It is often said that it is not the first elections after the fall of an authoritarian regime that matter; instead, the path to democracy is seen to be assured only after second elections have been completed. Indonesia’s second post-Suharto elections (pesta demokrasi, festival of democracy), both parliamentary and presidential, were held from April to September 2004. Can the country be seen finally to be firmly on the path to democracy? Is democracy now the "only game in town?"
This paper examines what the performance of Indonesia’s political parties through the 2004 "year of elections" can tell us about politics in the country. The parties are an important part of the political society envisioned by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan as forming one of the integral "arenas" of democratic consolidation (Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996). By using the party system institutionalization framework first developed by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully in Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford, 1996), the paper analyzes the degree to which the party system can be seen to be institutionalized, thus contributing to, as Mainwaring and Scully found in Latin America, democratization and stable governance.
The paper finds that, across Mainwaring and Scully’s criteria of party system institutionalization, the 2004 elections represented a step toward deinstitutionalization, particularly as a result of the new system of direct presidential election. Democracy may be the "only game in town," but its operation is likely to be rocky.