R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani
In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan describe democratization as a two-stage process. A completed transition has occurred when four requirements are met: there is sufficient agreement about procedures to hold a democratic election; a government has been directly elected in a free popular vote; government has authority to formulate policies; and there is no power sharing outside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.1
A consolidated democracy, the second stage, has three characteristics: with respect to behavior, no significant political groups are attempting to overthrow the democratic regime by “turning to violence or foreign intervention to secede from the state”; with respect to attitude, “a strong majority of public opinion” believes that any further change should take place within the “parameters of democratic formulas,” even in the face of severe economic and political crises; and with respect to a constitution, all “governmental and non-governmental forces” agree that political conflict will be resolved “within the specific laws, procedures and institutions” of the new democratic regime.2
Finally, a consolidated democracy is conceived as an interacting system of arenas, each with its own organizing principle: civil society (freedom of association and communication), political society (free and inclusive electoral contestation), rule of law (constitutionalism), state apparatus (rational-legal bureaucratic norms), and economic society (institutionalized market).
Does the Indonesian case meet these criteria? We argue that the democratic transition began in 1998 and was completed in 2004. Since that time, on balance, behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional democratic consolidation has been achieved.
Consolidation has not been complete or unproblematic, however. Obstacles and weaknesses remain with regard to each characteristic and to the five interacting arenas: the impact of a low level and slow rate of economic growth; the policy successes of Islamist social movements; the uneven quality of local governance; the continuing force of separatism, especially in Papua; the link in the public mind between perceptions of economic well-being and support for democracy; uncertainty about electoral rules and the relationship between the executive and legislative branches of government; weak rule-of-law institutions; and the concentration of economic power in the hands of a small political elite.
The Transition
Indonesia’s democratic transition began in May 1998, when President Suharto resigned his office in the face of a collapsed economy, mass demonstrations throughout the country, and finally abandonment by his own elite supporters. The first three of Linz and Stepan’s requirements were met within a year, when Indonesia held its first democratic elections since 1955, and the fourth was met when Parliament convened after the second democratic elections in 2004.3
Suharto had held power since October 1965, when as an army major-general he assumed the leadership of an armed forces devastated by the murder of six of its most senior officers. He soon took over the presidency, pushing aside Indonesia’s first president and national founding father, Sukarno. Over the next three decades, Suharto’s Orde Baru (New Order) government was known for its rapid economic growth (averaging 7 percent per year from 1969 to 1996), but also for one of the highest levels of corruption in the developing world and for its willingness to repress domestic opponents.
To legitimize his power, both domestically and internationally, Suharto created the simulacra of a democratic political system. Closely managed elections for Parliament (the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat [DPR, People’s Representative Council]) and for regional legislatures were held every five years between 1971 and 1997. In each of those elections, Suharto’s own political party, Golongan Karya (Golkar, Functional Groups), won an absolute majority of the votes. Golkar was backed by the state bureaucracy and the armed forces, which maintained (and still maintains) a nationwide command structure paralleling the civilian government and political party branch hierarchies.
In all but the 1971 election, Golkar competed with only two other political parties, the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, Development and Unity Party) and the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI, Indonesian Democracy Party). Both were fusions imposed by the Suharto government, PPP of Islamic parties and PDI of secular nationalist and Christian parties, most of which had participated in Indonesia’s first democratic election in 1955.
After each parliamentary election, Suharto was reelected president by the Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly), a kind of superparliament consisting of all members of Parliament plus an equal number of delegates appointed to represent regions and other political and social groups. According to the 1945 Constitution (since amended), the MPR (not the Indonesian people) was the holder of sovereign power and thus the formal legitimator of Suharto’s rule.
Suharto was replaced after sharp protests on May 21, 1998, by his constitutionally ordained successor, Vice President B. J. Habibie, who within weeks of his accession to power freed the press, ended the prohibition on new political parties, and called for democratic elections for Parliament and regional assemblies within a year. How are we to explain these decisions? In the conventional wisdom, Habibie acted out of necessity, not choice. He was widely regarded as one of Suharto’s most loyal servants, not as an independent or potentially independent leader in a post-Suharto period. His decisions were therefore a product of the concatenation of forces acting upon him at the time.
In our view, Habibie, like all political actors, was constrained and enabled by many factors, distant and proximate, cultural and structural. Within those limits, however, he made real choices for which he deserves considerable credit because the outcome was a successful transition.4
At the global level, the zeitgeist surely was a major force constraining antidemocrats and enabling pro-democrats. During the Suharto presidency, the international Cold War ended, and many countries became democratic in Latin America and Africa as well as in eastern Europe, so that elite Indonesian actors had few attractive alternative models. Thirty years of steady economic development in Indonesia had laid the supportive foundation of a modern society, as in neighboring Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand, all of which had recently democratized (although Thailand has been unstable since a 2006 military coup). More proximate in time, the student and mass demonstrators who had persuaded Suharto to step down continued to constrain Habibie, who was pushed to resign in favor of a “presidium” or broadly based temporary executive council that would oversee democratization.
For the most prominent civilian elite actors outside Habibie’s government, representative democracy was the preferred outcome. These actors included Megawati Sukarnoputri, representing the powerful force of secular nationalism; Abdurrahman Wahid, head of the huge traditionalist Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama (Awakening or Rise of the Ulama); and Amien Rais, head of Muhammadiyah (Followers of Muhammad), the largest organization representing modernist Islam.
None of these civilian opposition leaders wanted a continuation of military rule, which, though not an immediate threat, was certainly a real possibility if the civilians failed to cooperate with each other. Armed forces commander General Wiranto, recently appointed by Suharto, had declared his personal and institutional loyalty to the Constitution of 1945 and therefore to the process by which Vice President Habibie had become President Habibie. This position was not unpopular within the armed forces, the army in particular. After thirty years of Suharto’s New Order, many officers believed that the army’s reputation had suffered from its involvement in and identification with the state party Golkar, perceived both as corrupt and as an instrument of Suharto’s favoritism toward cronies and family members. By recognizing Habibie’s constitutional legitimacy, General Wiranto also hoped to extend his own tenure as armed forces commander.
Each of the civilian leaders recognized that she or he could not govern independently, particularly as a dictator repressing the others in the style of Megawati’s father, Sukarno, at the height of his power from 1959 to 1965. Moreover, no other political force threatened their dominance, as the Indonesian Communist Party had done to its predecessors in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Wahid and Rais as well as the Muslim social and political organizations they represented had long since declared their opposition to an Islamic state, significantly reducing the anxiety once felt by tens of millions of moderate Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and others.
The availability and familiarity of Suharto-era electoral laws were also enabling factors. National elections had been conducted regularly throughout the New Order as part of Suharto’s strategy to legitimize his rule. With a few changes, the most important being the opening of the party system and the freeing of the press, the old laws could serve well as the infrastructure for democratic elections. All three civilian opposition leaders and most of their followers thus readily acquiesced when Habibie declared—only one week after Suharto’s resignation—that he would hold a democratic election within a year. They had much to gain and little to lose.
Although all of these factors must be included in a full explanation of the decision to democratize, the fact that it was B. J. Habibie who made the decision also matters in at least two senses. First, the pattern of constraining and enabling factors impacting Habibie, as described earlier, would have been different had a different individual occupied the presidential office at that time. As it happens, Habibie had replaced General Try Sutrisno, a former armed forces commander, as vice president just weeks before Suharto resigned the presidency.
As president, Try Sutrisno would have been institutionally much more dependent on the armed forces. He was also known, perhaps to a greater degree than other officers, for his contempt for civilian politicians, his fear of political Islam, and his belief that communism was still a powerful if latent force in Indonesia. As a career army officer, he was strongly committed to the defense of the integration of East Timor into the Indonesian republic. President Habibie, it will be remembered, called for and presided over a referendum on independence in East Timor. In doing so, he arguably helped Indonesia excise a rapidly growing cancer that might well have permanently damaged relations between the center and other provinces.
Second, as a conscious human being with the capacity to make reasoned judgments, Habibie might have chosen a course of action other than the paths preordained for him by the conventional wisdom, including stepping down in favor of a presidium and calling for elections he knew he was likely to lose. For example, he might have attempted to remain in office until the next scheduled elections in 2002 (the last New Order elections were in 1997) by cementing his personal alliance with General Wiranto (who was certainly interested in staying in his armed forces position and in becoming president after he retired from the military) and through Wiranto his institutional alliance with the armed forces (many of whose officers were certainly fearful of what would happen to them in a civilianized Indonesian polity).
In any event, Habibie became the president, and he decided to hold democratic elections on June 7, 1999. By agreement with the other major civilian players, the elections were conducted within the framework of Suharto’s New Order electoral system, itself rooted in the 1955 democratic elections. Voters chose among closed party lists with provinces as the multimember electoral districts. After brief debate between defenders of this system and advocates of a single-member district plurality system (an idea the democrats frequently proposed during the New Order, but Suharto always rejected), most actors accepted the decision by a majority of members of Parliament to postpone serious discussion of reform until the next election.
The 1999 election was contested by forty-eight parties, twenty-one of which won at least one of the 462 contested seats of a total of 500 (the remaining 38 seats were occupied by the armed forces, whose members did not vote in the general election). Eighty percent of the vote was divided among five large-and medium-size parties. On October 20, Abdurrahman Wahid, leader of the fourth largest party, was chosen president by a majority vote in the MPR.
The 1999 assembly consisted of the 462 elected and 38 unelected members of Parliament plus 200 additional unelected members representing the armed forces, political parties in proportion to their percentage of votes in the parliamentary election, and other groups in society. To most observers, these events fulfilled the first three of Linz and Stepan’s requirements for a transition (procedural agreement, free election, authoritative government), though admittedly imperfectly because of the large number of appointees, especially in the assembly, which was charged with electing the president. An end to power sharing with the armed forces, the fourth requirement, finally occurred in 2004, when all members of Parliament were elected, the president and vice president were directly elected for the first time in Indonesian history, the MPR was reduced to largely symbolic functions, and, finally, power sharing on security issues was greatly diminished with the military’s acceptance of the presidential agreement on Aceh in 2005.
Few observers today would contest the claim that the transition to democracy was completed by the 2004 elections. Has it since been consolidated?
Democratic Consolidation I: Behavioral
No significant political group currently threatens to overthrow democracy or to separate from the Indonesian nation-state. Perhaps the largest potential danger comes from the Islamist movement, followed by a much smaller threat from antidemocratic secular nationalists in alliance with antidemocratic army officers. The separatist conflict in Aceh appears to be resolved in favor of a reestablishment of Indonesian identity. The conflict in Papua, although unresolved, appears to be a long-term rather than short-term problem. More fundamental, there is little separatism in Indonesia because Indonesian national identity has deep roots and is probably on balance being further strengthened by the process of decentralization that has accompanied democratization.
This situation compares favorably with Indonesia’s first democracy (1950–1957), which was initially threatened by Islamists and Communists. It was overthrown by President Sukarno and the central army hierarchy headed by General Abdul Haris Nasution, leaders of the civilian, and military secular nationalists, respectively.
Islamism
Today’s Islamist movement consists of pro-Islamic state (sharia) parties that work within the democratic process and social movement organizations that mobilize and act politically in part outside it. Although not an immediate threat to democratic consolidation, recent cooperation between these two types of organization has reduced religious freedom and women’s freedom of movement. Islamists have also enjoyed the cooperation of officials in the Ministry of Religion, the Attorney General’s Office, and the quasi-governmental Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulama Council).
The oldest self-declared Islamist party is PPP, which won 7 percent of the 2009 vote (a decline from 8 percent in 2004 and 11 percent in 1999). Few observers see PPP as a genuine threat to democracy, however. Its leaders are widely believed to be more interested in the material than the spiritual benefits of political power. The party was created in 1973 by President Suharto, who fused existing Islamic parties into one and forced them to accept the non-Islamic name PPP and the state ideology of Pancasila as their basic doctrine. Pancasila is the pan-religious national credo first introduced in 1945 by President Sukarno, a secular nationalist, and imposed on all parties and social organizations by Suharto’s authoritarian New Order. After democratization, PPP jettisoned Pancasila and adopted Islam as its doctrinal foundation. As late as 2002, PPP members of Parliament proposed amending the Constitution to restore the so-called Piagam Jakarta (Jakarta Charter) requiring all Muslims to follow Islamic law.5 The proposal received little support from other parties and was withdrawn without a vote.
To most observers, the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party) is a greater threat to democratic consolidation than PPP. PKS is a cadre party founded in 1998 (as Partai Keadilan [PK, Justice Party]) by veterans of a widely supported university campus–based Islamist movement inspired by the Egypt-centered Muslim Brotherhood. Many of its cadres are well educated in domestic and foreign secular universities. PK won less than 2 percent of the 1999 vote, but PKS (the party was obliged to change its name under Indonesia’s unusual threshold law)6 surged to 7 percent in 2004, raising the hopes of many Islamists and the fears of many democrats.
PKS’s own intentions, however, are more ambiguous (or perhaps ambivalent, the product in part of internal party differences). Although a self-declared dakwah (call, proselytizing for, and preaching within Islam) party, PKS campaigned in 2004 not on Islamism, but on the claim to be a “clean” (bersih) and “caring” (peduli) party. Party leaders fully recognize that most of their 2004 support came not from fellow Islamists, but from voters who bought the party’s secular good-governance promise. In the hundreds of regional executive elections (provincial and district/municipality) held between 2005 and 2008, PKS formed coalitions of convenience with a wide range of parties, including the Christian Partai Damai Sejahtera (Prosperous Peace Party). In 2009, the party added “professional” as a new campaign theme, but only increased its parliamentary vote by 1 percent to 8 percent. It no longer appears as threatening to democracy (or as promising to clean-government reformers) as it did in 2004.
Though PKS’s basic doctrine, like PPP’s, is Islam, its leaders explicitly opposed the 2002 constitutional amendment championed by PPP and other Islamist parties requiring all Muslims to follow Islamic law. They claimed instead to support the Medina Charter, a reference to a historic agreement between the Prophet Muhammad and various non-Muslim groups, including Jews, that established the first Islamic polity. Critics, especially Indonesian Christians, argue that there is no substantive difference between an Indonesian state governed under the Jakarta Charter or one governed under the Medina Charter. The point may be moot because voter support for Islamist parties has waned.7
The main Islamist social movement organizations, in order of their popular recognition as reflected in national opinion polls, are Jemaah Islamiyah (JI, Islamic Group or Community), Front Pembela Islam (FPI, Islamic Defenders Front), Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI, Indonesian Jihad Fighters Council), and Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI, Indonesian Party of Liberation).
JI is a shadowy terrorist conspiracy founded in Malaysia around 1992 by Abdullah Sungkar, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, and other Indonesian Islamists in hiding from Suharto’s New Order government.8 Its roots are in the late 1940s Darul Islam (House of Islam) movement that first waged war on the secular Indonesian state. The leaders of FPI, founded in 1998, are self-proclaimed protectors of Islamic morality who conduct violent raids of nightclubs and bars, especially during the Islamic fasting month. MMI is a Surakarta-based organization of Islamists once headed by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and regarded at that time as a front for JI. HTI, founded in Jerusalem in 1953, is an international mass-based Islamist organization that has been growing rapidly in Indonesia since the 1990s.9 Like PKS, its appeal has been mainly to the educated middle class.
These and like-minded movements oppose democracy, and some, most notably HTI, oppose the nation-state as well. None is large enough to threaten democratic consolidation at the ballot box, and, indeed, none plans to contest elections. The danger instead lies in their growing ability to frame political issues in ways that advance their pro-sharia agenda. In particular, they have become skilled at persuading otherwise moderate Muslims that the Islamist position on a given issue is one that all Muslims must accept as Islamic.
Decentralization provided an early opportunity for pro-sharia Islamists. More than twenty-five districts (in a total of more than 450) quickly passed regulations either directly or indirectly reflecting Islamist norms, such as the requirement that women civil servants wear head scarves, bans on the sale of alcohol, antiprostitution ordinances, and so on. That part of the movement now appears to have lost steam, however. At the national level, two prominent 2008 examples of successful framing are the passage of an antipornography bill by Parliament and a campaign to ban Ahmadiyya (Followers of Ahmad), an Islamic sect whose founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is venerated by some sect members as a prophet after Muhammad.
In the case of the antipornography bill, social movement Islamists worked closely with Islamist members of Parliament to persuade moderate Muslim and other legislators to vote for a poorly worded bill that, if enforced, is likely to restrict the rights of women.10 In the case of Ahmadiyya, Islamists took advantage of a fatwa from the quasi-governmental MUI (one of whose members is a prominent HTI leader) to mount a violent campaign to ban the organization. Several Ahmadiyya communities were attacked and mosques destroyed. The campaign ended with a joint ministerial decree “freezing” Ahmadiyya and presidential acquiescence to the decree despite clear violation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion. There have been no attacks on Ahmadiyya communities since the decree. The conflict has not been resolved, however, because Islamists still demand that Ahmadiyya declare itself non-Muslim or disband.11
Secular Nationalism
A small group of civilian and military secular nationalists appears to oppose democratization. During MPR debates between 1999 and 2002, they rejected the four packages of amendments to the 1945 Constitution that established today’s presidential democracy.12 These amendments specifically stipulated that members of Parliament and regional legislatures be directly elected; created a new and directly elected Dewan Pemerintahan Daerah (Regional Representative Council); provided for direct election of the president and vice president separately from Parliament; limited future presidents to 2 five-year terms; inserted several articles guaranteeing human and political rights; and established the Mahkamah Konstitusi (Constitutional Court) to review laws that conflict with the constitution.
The civilian opposition to the amendments was and is concentrated in a conservative or “Sukarnoist” faction of the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDIP, Indonesian Democracy Party of Struggle), the largest political party in 1999 (33 percent of seats in Parliament), the second largest in 2004 (20 percent), and the third largest in 2009 (17 percent).13 PDIP’s roots are in the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI, Indonesian Nationalist Party), founded by Sukarno and other secular nationalist politicians in the 1920s. No longer led by but still associated in the public mind with President Sukarno, PNI won the most votes (22 percent) in the first democratic national elections in 1955.
During the New Order, PNI was forcibly incorporated into PDI. In the early 1990s, under the leadership of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno’s daughter, PDI mounted the first serious political challenge to Suharto’s New Order. As PDIP, the Struggle faction of the Suharto-era PDI, it is still led by Megawati, who succeeded Abdurrahman Wahid as Indonesia’s president in 2001 and served until 2004.
Within PDIP, opposition to the four amendments was justified as support for a return to party founder Sukarno’s original conception of the Constitution. Proponents of this return have not spelled out what it would mean in practice. In its original form, the Constitution leaves out such basics as how the members of Parliament and the MPR are to be chosen. The implication, however, is a desire to return to Sukarno-style authoritarianism or Demokrasi Terpimpin (Guided Democracy), the Sukarno–army coalition that ruled Indonesia from 1959 to 1965. Since 2002, conservative secular nationalist ideas have had little resonance in the polity, but it is not difficult to imagine their resurgence should separatist movements grow, the economy decline, or presidential leadership vis-à-vis Parliament weaken.
An undetermined number of active and retired armed forces (especially army—by far the largest, most powerful, and historically most politicized service) officers are also believed to reject the democratic idea on ideological and interest grounds. With respect to ideology, army officers have long claimed to be a self-created force—that is, a pro-independence army not established by the civilian rulers of the new Indonesian state.14 It was founded instead by Dutch colonial–era and Japanese occupation–era officers acting on their own initiative shortly after the August 17, 1945, declaration of independence. Moreover, many officers continue to believe that it is they, not the civilian politicians, who wrested sovereignty from the Dutch and who repeatedly saved the country from separatist, Islamist, and Communist threats between 1949 and 1965.
In 1999, armed forces leaders formally abandoned their “twin functions” doctrine (claimed responsibilities both to defend the country against foreign and domestic enemies as well as to participate actively in government). It is not clear, however, whether they now genuinely accept the standard international democratic norm of civilian supremacy. Indeed, officers often negatively interpret the latter term as a civilian claim to superior knowledge and competence, not formal authority of elected officials over the armed forces.
For more than three decades of Suharto’s New Order, preceded by several years of Sukarno’s Guided Democracy, active and retired armed forces officers enjoyed privileged status and material benefits. Under Sukarno, they ran many of the plantations and other businesses seized from the Dutch in the late 1950s and began to penetrate the legislative arena. Under Suharto, they held many executive, legislative, and judicial positions in national and local government. They first dominated and later were influential in Golkar, the New Order’s state party, and their businesses monopolized many sectors of the economy.
Many of these privileges are now gone or greatly reduced. The government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (familiarly called “SBY”), himself a retired army general, has made an initial effort to rationalize and reduce the influence of the military-backed businesses, many of them protection rackets, that have long provided officers with substantial extra income. According to Human Rights Watch, however, little progress had been achieved by the end of Yudhoyono’s first term.15 The president has also explicitly warned active-duty military officers not to engage in politics. In response, there have been periodic outbursts of discontent, as in the early 2009 rumors of an “anybody but Yudhoyono” movement in the army.16 None of these factors are to be taken seriously, however, as indicators of significant opposition to democracy. In chapter 5 in this volume, Marcus Mietzner makes a strong case that the military since 2005 has no longer been a veto power in Indonesian politics.
Separatism and Decentralization
The most powerful separatist movements in Indonesia have been in the northwesternmost province, Aceh, the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, and the southeasternmost province, Papua. Both Aceh and Papua remain potentially volatile, although Indonesian national identity is much stronger in the former than in the latter. For Indonesia as a whole, however, the most important center–region relations story has to do with the extraordinary decentralization process that has accompanied democratization.
In 1945, Acehnese leaders joined the Indonesian independence movement on the same terms as nationalists in other regions, laying the foundation for a supraethnic conception of national identity. Those same leaders first rebelled against the central government in 1953 on grounds of a betrayed promise of provincial autonomy. This act laid the foundation for two competing conceptions of identity, one of an ethnic group within the Indonesian nation but repeatedly betrayed and the other, more extreme, of an Acehnese nation that had struggled throughout history to maintain its independence.17
For decades, the contest in Aceh has been between the two latter identities. Few Acehnese now identify straightforwardly, as do most Indonesians elsewhere, with the Indonesian nation and state. The Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM, Free Aceh Movement) attempted to persuade fellow Acehnese, Indonesians, and the world that Aceh was an ancient nation entitled to statehood. Its rebellion against the Indonesian state began in 1976 and ended in 2005, when the province was given a unique autonomous status after long and brutal warfare followed by protracted negotiations under international auspices.
Acehnese have since directly elected a governor (himself a former GAM rebel) and members of a provincial legislature (in conjunction with the national parliamentary election in April 2009). Aceh’s special relationship with the Indonesian state includes the right, not enjoyed in any other province, to form local political parties. In the April 2009 election, the Partai Aceh (Aceh Party) won thirty-three out of sixty-nine seats in the regional legislature, followed by SBY’s Partai Demokrat (Democrat Party) with ten seats. Five other local parties contested, but none won seats.18 The other twenty-six seats were for politywide parties. Despite fears, the election was conducted without significant violence. Given Aceh’s history within Indonesia, future conflict is certainly possible. It is nonetheless realistic to conclude that the Acehnese have taken a major step toward renewing or accepting once again their Indonesian national identity. Indeed, in chapter 7 in this volume, Edward Aspinall makes a strong case that the Helsinki Agreement of 2005 will hold.
East Timor was forcibly incorporated into Indonesia in 1975. Few East Timorese accepted Indonesian nationality, however, then or later. After decades of occupation and civil war, the territory was finally allowed to secede in 2000. Relations between the two independent countries are now normal, and there is no movement on either side to restore Indonesian sovereignty.
Papua, though originally part of Netherlands India, to which Indonesia is the internationally recognized successor state, was not governed from Jakarta until 1963, after a U.S.-brokered withdrawal of Dutch forces and administration. Between 1950 and 1962, the Dutch educated an elite and supported their aspirations for independence separate from Indonesia. This elite was brutally suppressed by the Indonesian government and armed forces starting in 1963.
To many observers today, the region seems like an occupied territory still. Most Papuans appear to reject Indonesian nationality, although it is difficult to be sure because of Indonesian government restrictions on travel to and reporting from the region. A desultory separatist movement, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Organization), has existed for decades. Although by all accounts widely supported, it is poorly organized, even fragmented, resource poor, and not likely to mount a serious challenge to the Indonesian government for years, if not decades. Nonetheless, compared to Aceh, the greater ultimate separatist threat is in Papua.
Beyond Aceh and Papua, there is no significant separatist threat in Indonesia and little likelihood of one emerging. One reason for this lack of threat is how deeprooted Indonesian nationalism and national identity are from the colonial and revolutionary periods. Nationalism as an idea binding this very diverse society has prevailed despite the depredations of both Sukarno’s and Suharto’s excessively centralized and authoritarian governments.19
A second reason is the modest success to date of the far-reaching decentralization that has accompanied democratization. In 1999, under the leadership of President Habibie, laws were passed that decentralized most government functions to the districts and municipalities, bypassing the provinces, where separatist sentiment is most feared.
Between 2005 and 2008, regional executives were directly elected in all thirty-three provinces and more than 450 districts and municipalities. Elections for governors, district heads, and mayors will be repeated from 2010 to 2013. In 2014, provincial and district/municipality legislative elections will be held simultaneously with the national parliamentary election.
Scholars are divided on the implications for democratic consolidation of the 2005–2008 regional executive elections. There is general agreement on two points—one negative, one more positive. First, local-level political and governmental infrastucture in a poor country and after decades of authoritarianism is even weaker than at the national level. Many basic state- and party-building tasks remain before the promise of decentralized democracy can be fully realized.
Second, within that context, the 2005–2008 elections were conducted almost everywhere without excessive violence or (as far as we can tell from the public record) excessive corruption, particularly in the form of vote buying that is ubiquitous in many poor-country democracies. Given the history of violence during the democratic transition and the pervasiveness of corruption in Indonesian government at all levels over the past several decades, this achievement is major. It may also strengthen consolidation by giving local politicians and nongovernmental organization activists a vested interest in democracy as the “only game in town.”
The scholarly debate has focused on a different issue: the extent to which the newly elected executives represent and are accountable to the voters. At one end of the spectrum are those who argue that the new executives are mostly members of the Suharto-era oligarchy who have used their political resources (official position, personal wealth, access to state and private business funds for political campaigns) to continue their dominance in the post-Suharto era. The implication is that Indonesia is no more democratic now (in the substantive sense in which these authors define democracy) than it was during the New Order. Nevertheless, within the oligarchic camp a more positive view is that decentralization has allowed for a wider range of competition, but that the elites and their resources are still rooted in the New Order period. Finally, some scholars see a more dynamic election-driven process unfolding in which voters are becoming more and more issue oriented and demanding toward local level officeholders and candidates.20
Our view is closer to the last of these three views, emphasizing the effects of local elections, with the caveat that given the recentness of decentralized democracy it is too early to come to firm conclusions. It is also important to be aware that significant structural, policy, and implementation issues concerning decentralization remain to be resolved at the national level. For example, new laws are under consideration for the second Yudhoyono administration (2009–2014) that are likely to strengthen the provinces and perhaps the center at the expense of the districts/municipalities.21 Decentralization, perhaps more than any other aspect of Indonesian democracy, remains a work in progress.
Democratic Consolidation II: Attitudinal
With respect to attitude, Indonesian democracy appears on balance to be consolidating. There are nonetheless concerns about democracy’s meaning and its relative ranking in terms of other values. Indonesians almost universally regard democracy as a good, but they define it diversely. However democracy is defined, public support for it has been strong and growing since 1999. Satisfaction with democratic performance, though lower, has also been growing. Moreover, on key performance indicators, voters are able to distinguish between the nondemocratic Suharto and the democratic Yudhoyono governments. They unfortunately also value economic development more highly than democracy. Though not a current concern, it is possible that a sharp or prolonged economic downturn might significantly reduce public support for democracy.
Data analyzed in this section are responses to nationwide, systematic random-sample surveys of voting-age Indonesian citizens conducted by the Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI, Indonesian Survey Institute) and its precursors. LSI was founded in 2003, but the scholars associated with it have been conducting mass political opinion surveys in Indonesia since 1999, when it first became possible to do so after the fall of Suharto.22
When asked in 2008 to choose the most important from a range of definitions of democracy, only 22 percent of respondents chose freedom to elect the government, although a further 22 percent chose freedom to criticize the government, for a total of 44 percent who correctly identified basic attributes of democracy. Thirty-one percent chose the availability and affordability of basic commodities, and a further 8 percent chose a small gap between rich and poor, perhaps reflecting Indonesia’s history of anticolonialism followed by populist politics and economics.
Asked whether democracy is the best system of government for Indonesia compared to other systems, 68 percent agreed or agreed strongly in 1999. That number remained stable until 2004, when it rose to 75 percent, rising further to 83 percent in 2007 but declining slightly to 79 percent in 2008. Concerning the implementation of democracy or democratic performance, 38 percent expressed strong or moderate satisfaction in 2001. That number grew to 67 percent in 2005, declined to 62 percent in 2006 and 63 percent in 2007 before dropping to 54 percent in 2008. Compared to the Suharto era, most voters by very large margins perceive more freedom of speech and freedom to organize today (81 to 7 percent and 76 to 4 percent, respectively).23
On other issues as well, Indonesians prefer the Yudhoyono to the Suharto government—for example, equal treatment by the government of the people, 60 to 8 percent (a 52 percent gap); combating corruption, 65 to 12 percent (a 53 percent gap); providing security and order, 59 to 9 percent (a 50 percent gap); ordinary people’s ability to influence the government, 35 to 7 percent (a 28 percent gap); and closing the rich–poor divide, 39 to 18 percent (a 21 percent gap). The smallest gap, though still in Yudhoyono’s favor, concerns developing the economy, 42 to 34 percent (an 8 percent gap).
Mass perceptions of governmental economic development success or failure may indeed be the most important variable with ultimate consequences for democratic consolidation. In 2008, we asked: “If you were forced to choose just one of the following two goals, economic development or democracy, which would you choose?” By a huge margin, 76 to 10 percent, Indonesians chose economic development, a bald statement that they have priorities other than consolidating democracy.
FIGURE 2.1 Parallels Between Political Economy Components: Choice of President, Partai Demokrat (PD), Evaluations of Presidential Performance and National Economic Condition (Responses to Lembaga Survei Indonesia Surveys, in %)
What do our data show about the relationship between satisfaction with the performance of President Yudhoyono and the state of the national economy, on the one hand, and satisfaction with and support for democracy, on the other? For the current presidency, the data seem reassuring, but severe economic crisis or long-term stagnation might have a substantial negative effect on democratic consolidation. (See figure 2.1 and table 2.1.)
Figure 2.1 tracks the parallels in the rise and fall from late 2006 through 2008 in the public’s level of support for democracy as a political system, satisfaction with President Yudhoyono’s leadership, satisfaction with Indonesia’s performance in conducting democratic elections, the decision to reelect Yudhoyono if the election were held on the day of the survey, perception of the condition of the national economy at the time of the survey compared to a year earlier, and the choice of Partai Demokrat, Yudhoyono’s party, if the election were held that day.
Not all of these factors are statistically significant. Support for the idea that democracy is the best system of government correlates positively and significantly with satisfaction with democratic performance. Satisfaction with democratic performance in turn correlates significantly and positively with evaluation of the national economic condition but negatively with inflation (as measured by the Badan Pusat Statistik [Central Statistical Bureau]), as one would expect. Evaluation of the economy also correlates positively and significantly with satisfaction with the government of President Yudhoyono and with support for his Partai Demokrat and reelection as president.
The economy is therefore important for democratic consolidation and for strengthening support for the incumbent. But support for democracy and satisfaction with democratic performance are not correlated with support for Yudhoyono and the Partai Demokrat. The latter party won more votes than any other party in the 2009 parliamentary election, and Yudhoyono was reelected by a landslide. Had the outcome been different, with many fewer votes for Partai Demokrat and even a loss for Yudhoyono, support for democracy would not have been affected. Indonesian democracy is not vulnerable to political changes or to changes in national leadership, but it is very vulnerable to mass perceptions of the national economic condition.
Correlation of Political Economy Components and Democracy 2007–2008 (N = 10)
NOTE: All correlations significant at P-value 0.01 or better. NS = Statistically not significant. BPS = Badan Pusat Statistik (Central Statistical Bureau).
Democratic Consolidation III: Constitutional
Have governmental and nongovernmental forces alike throughout the country now agreed that conflicts will be resolved within the new democratic constitutional framework? The answer on balance again appears to be yes, although there are a number of methodological and substantive caveats.
The benchmark empirical research on social conflict during the last years of the Suharto era and the first three years of the transition to democracy is Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin’s United Nations–supported study based on data from 1990–2001 and published in 2002. His most important finding for our purposes is that there was “a significant upward trend of the number of incidents and the number of fatalities due to social violence during the transition period, reaching their peaks in 1999–2000.” In 1997 specifically, there were 131 deaths attributable to social violence. In 1998, the number skyrocketed to 1,343. In 1999, it rose further to 1,813 but then declined in 2000 to 1,617 and in 2001 to 1,065.24
Tadjoeddin’s sources were reports of conflict in the independent national daily newspaper Kompas and by the state-owned national news agency Antara. Overall in the period studied, he found at least 1,093 incidents of violence in which at least 6,028 people were killed. Communal conflict accounted for 77 percent of the conflicts, and 22 percent were connected to separatist movements in Aceh, Papua, and East Timor. Tadjoeddin’s communal category includes ethnic, religious, and migrant–native conflicts because all three of these elements were intertwined in most of the cases reported. Most of the incidents occurred in small towns and rural areas. The major exception is the May 1998 Jakarta riots just prior to Suharto’s resignation in which more than 1,000 people died. Much of the violence was concentrated in specific locations in just three provinces—Maluku, Aceh, and Central Kalimantan—out of thirty at the time.
Tadjoeddin argues tentatively that the principal cause of the spike in violence was the national-level transition to democracy. His argument is tentative for two reasons. His data collection ended in 2001, too early to be confident that the two-year decline would continue. Tadjoeddin also recognized that his pre-1998 data were less credible than his post-1998 data because the Suharto government in power until 1998 systematically suppressed reports of violence. Nonetheless, he argues in historical perspective that spikes in violent conflict have long been associated with major political transitions, from the independence revolution in 1945–1949 to the overthrow of Sukarno and the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965–1966. In each of these cases, the spike was followed by a long period of a low level of violence.
Tadjoeddin’s analysis is supported by political scientist Jacques Bertrand, who argues that Indonesia’s founding fathers adopted a “national model” or fundamental conception of Indonesian politics whose components included a single nation, a strong central government, and a commitment to a religious but not Islamic state. During several “critical junctures,” the most recent being the 1998–2001 (Bertrand’s dates) democratic transition, groups disadvantaged by a particular regime’s version of the model mounted violent challenges to that regime. The last critical juncture ended when Megawati Sukarnoputri became president and presided over the passing of constitutional and other reforms. Today’s presidential democracy is a renegotiated national model that has led to “a new, relatively stable institutional environment.”25
Most scholars probably agree with Tadjoeddin and Bertrand that there was a spike in violent social conflicts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that they have since subsided, that the cause was popular unrest and demands associated with the weakening New Order, and that most conflicts are now being resolved within the framework of the democratic state. New quantitative research is being conducted, however, that may challenge these conclusions and have implications for democratic consolidation as well. The new data include reports from subprovincial as well as provincial and national newspapers and a 2003 Indonesian government survey of all villages in Indonesia.
Based on this ongoing research, Patrick Barron, Kai Kaiser, and Menno Pradhan make three tentative arguments: there may be much more social violence than previously reported; violence may be much more evenly spread across the archipelago; and significant levels of violence may be continuing in the present. Their findings are based so far on data only from East Java and East Nusa Tenggara, but if corroborated they may force other scholars to rethink both their substantive and causal arguments.26 Relevant to democratic consolidation, it may turn out that a significant number of conflicts are not being resolved within the democratic constitutional framework.
The Five Arenas and Consolidation
In this final section, we identify a number of actual or potential threats to consolidation—that is, problems or weaknesses in Indonesian democratization associated with each of the five interacting arenas in a consolidated democracy specified by Linz and Stepan.
Civil Society
We have already discussed the most specific threat in the civil society arena: the Islamist social movement and its allies in the government and the quasi-governmental MUI. With the passing of an antipornography law and the “freezing,” if not outright banning, of Ahmadiyya, Islamists have already succeeded in restricting the rights of Indonesians to speak and worship.
The low level of economic development more generally means that civil society movements are typically resource starved in terms of capable personnel, effective organizations, as well as budgets to fund their programs. They are not effective links between important social groups, political parties, and the governmental process. An example is the labor movement, now totally freed of the heavy Suharto-era repression but still an extremely weak representative of workers’ interests. Even organizations that were most developed during the Suharto era, such as legal aid and environmental groups, report the loss of many of their most capable activists to political parties and government.27
Political Society
In political society, Indonesians have not achieved consensus on electoral procedures despite three national-level democratic elections. For decades, there has been pressure to make the parties and individual elected officials more accountable through elections, but that pressure has yet to produce an electoral law that can stand the test of time. In 1999, the Suharto-era electoral law, itself derived from the 1955 democratic elections, was continued on an emergency basis. In 2004, electoral districts were shrunk, a genuine achievement in the direction of greater accountability. A half-hearted attempt was also made to open party lists, but without substantial effect on national party leaders’ power to determine seat allocations. In 2009, party lists were finally completely open. The cause, however, was a nonpolitical Constitutional Court decision, not the new electoral law passed by Parliament in 2008. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the impact of opening the lists will be to bring Parliament closer to the voters or to further weaken already programmatically weak parties. So the debate will continue at least up to the 2014 election.
Legislators and political party leaders at all levels are more generally not well linked to civil society or to the governmental process.28 Legislators lack the most basic resources in terms of staff, library, and other investigative or law-making facilities. Legislators also tend to believe that once elected they do not have to be responsive to individual constituents or social groups (and, indeed, constituents make few demands on their elected officials).
Members of Parliament and the regional legislatures are anecdotally said to be chiefly interested in using their position to make money, often corruptly, not to legislate in the public interest. During general elections, vote buying (e.g., the so-called serangan fajar, “dawn attacks,” on election day when party workers offer direct cash payments in exchange for a promised vote) appears to be becoming increasingly common. LSI surveys have found that voters have less trust in Parliament than in any other government institution. Indonesian voters also have low levels of political interest and efficacy.29
Indonesia’s multiparty system interacts uneasily with presidentialism. In the 2004–2009 Yudhoyono administration, the president’s Partai Demokrat held only 10 percent of the seats in Parliament, requiring a coalition government with several parties represented in the cabinet. Many of his ministers appear to have given their primary loyalty not to the president, but to their own party. Vice President Jusuf Kalla’s Golkar party held an additional 23 percent of seats. This additional support made it possible for Yudhoyono to govern but at the same time set up an additional political tension within the government because of the two leaders’ different party affiliations.30
Rule of Law
The rule of law has never been strong in Indonesia, and increasing its strength may today constitute the greatest long-term obstacle to democratic consolidation. 31 According to the World Bank’s rule-of-law index, Indonesia’s standing is among the lowest in the world, although it has been improving slowly since 2003.32
The Dutch established the beginnings of a modern legal system before World War II, but it was undermined by the turmoil of the Japanese occupation and lengthy revolution for independence. None of the parliamentary cabinets of the 1950s accorded rule-of-law institutions a high priority. President Sukarno, committed to political upheaval as a governing style, undermined the rule of law further during the Guided Democracy period. Suharto’s New Order starved the legal sector of resources, explicitly subordinated the judicial to the executive branch of government, and manipulated legal processes behind the scenes.
After democratization, Presidents B. J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, and Megawati Sukarnoputri paid little attention to legal reform or rule-of-law issues generally, although the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (Corruption Eradication Commission) was created in 2003 during Megawati’s presidency. In his first presidential campaign, Yudhoyono pledged to make rule of law a high priority, and, indeed, both the Attorney General’s Office and the commission initiated several prosecutions. Indonesia’s improved standing in the World Bank’s rule-of-law index may reflect that effort. Yudhoyono also gets very high or high marks from voters for governmental performance regarding criminality, gambling, and combating corruption.33
State Apparatus
There is no direct or immediate threat to democratic consolidation from the state apparatus or from a high level of popular demand for better state performance. Nonetheless, it is well to remember that Indonesian democratic governments enjoy only a limited “capacity to command, regulate, and extract.” 34 They are constrained by a still small modern economy.
Under Suharto, that economy grew at a substantial rate and steady pace for more than a quarter-century. During those years, the state administrative apparatus, particularly the central government ministries responsible for economic policy formulation and implementation, were also strengthened. Unlike the 1950s, Indonesia now enjoys the basic minimum number of members of an “epistemic community” of trained economists capable of shaping Indonesia’s domestic economic future and its international economic policy.35
Even after decades of economic growth, however, today’s state budget is only about US$70 billion for a population of 230 million, slightly larger than that of the state of Illinois, which is $65 million for a population of 13 million. Corruption from within the Indonesian bureaucracy by all accounts takes a significant portion of that budget.36 Moreover, government ministers, many of whom represent political parties in coalition cabinets, are unreliable implementers of presidential policy. The armed forces are even more problematic, both because of their history as an independent force and because much of their budget originates outside the state.
Perhaps fortunately for democratic consolidation, few of these weaknesses are reflected in voters’ attitudes. Voters tend instead, according to LSI surveys, to give the government good marks across a wide range of substantive concerns. These concerns include demonstrably low-performance areas such as health (where 69 percent strongly agreed or agreed in October 2007 that the government was performing well), education (74 percent), and empowerment of women (67 percent) as well as genuinely higher-performance areas such as law and order and bringing peace in Aceh.37
Economic Society
Unlike the eastern European countries that are a principal focus of Linz and Stepan’s Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Indonesia has been a mixed economy since independence. Nonetheless, state intervention looms large, with problematic consequences for democratic consolidation. According to the Economic Freedom Network, Indonesia ranked 43rd out of 54 national economies in 1970 and 101st out of 141 in 2006 in terms of level of economic freedom.38
The modern private sector has been and is currently dominated by Sino-Indonesian businesspeople. As individuals, they have been particularly vulnerable to extortion by state officials because of their marginal position in Indonesian society. As a group, however, they have substantial economic power and thus the capacity to disrupt the national economy. They can move their financial capital out of the country at the slightest sign of economic crisis (as happened in 1997–1998) or policy change affecting their interests (such as proposed foreign-exchange controls).
In the state sector, there are more than 150 state enterprises, few of them profitable for the state or the national economy, but many providing lucrative sources of income for government officials, political party leaders, and private business associates of those officials and leaders. Pertamina, the state oil company, was a major source of personal and political funds for President Suharto and allegedly remains so for today’s democratic politicians.
The possibility of making money from politics is without question a major motive for many members of today’s political elite. It also provides a fortunate few with massive resources that can be deployed during election campaigns, as almost certainly occurred in 2009. Relevant to democratic consolidation, some scholars argue that the state–political–business elite constitutes an “oligarchy” that dominates political life today (as it did in the Suharto years) despite formal democratization. In this view, the real issue is not the transition to and consolidation of new democratic institutions, but the concentrated economic power of a few that renders those institutions meaningless.39
Between 1998 and 2004, Indonesians managed a successful transition to democracy. A preponderance of evidence suggests that democracy has now consolidated. In terms of behavior, there is no significant group that threatens the democratic regime either by attempting to restore authoritarian rule at the national level or by separating from the Indonesian nation-state.
In terms of attitude, Indonesians strongly support democracy even though many are unsure of its meaning or define it socioeconomically. LSI surveys show that they understand the differences between Suharto’s authoritarian rule and today’s presidential democracy and much prefer the latter on a wide range of democratic and policy performance criteria. With respect to the Constitution, after a violent transition most Indonesians now appear to want to resolve their differences within the framework of the democratic and importantly decentralized regime.
Despite these successes, there are reasons to conclude on a tentative and watchful note. In terms of behavior, anti- or at least dubiously democratic but politically skillful Islamists have won some battles, both at the local level and the national level, where in the past few years they have restricted both freedom of speech and religion. A few military and civilian secular nationalists oppose democracy and seek opportunities to undermine it. Separatist sentiment remains powerful in Aceh and Papua, in the latter case almost certainly a serious long-term threat. Local-level democracy, still in its earliest stages, is a question mark.
In terms of attitude, support for democracy and satisfaction with democratic performance are hostage to popular evaluations of government policy performance and national economic condition. A major economic crisis, long-term stagnation or decline, might well precipitate a significant rise in antidemocratic sentiment, providing new political resources to antidemocratic actors. With respect to the Constitution, all the data on social violence are not in. Current research may challenge the finding that social peace has been restored after the violent transition to democracy.
In the five interacting arenas, interaction is also less than optimal. Perhaps most troubling is the low gross domestic product and slow rate of economic growth that negatively affect civil and political society, rule of law, state bureaucratic performance, and economic society alike. No democratic government has performed as well economically as did Suharto’s New Order. In political society, neither the electoral system nor the relationship between the executive and legislative branches has stabilized. Despite progress under President Yudhoyono, Indonesia has one of the world’s worst rule-of-law records. Finally, state enterprises and Sino-Indonesian private businesses that are closely tied to state agencies continue to dominate the economy. The result, although not quite oligarchic control, is certainly too much concentration of economic resources in the hands of a few politicians for the current health and perhaps future stability of Indonesian democracy.
