Illiberal resistance to democratic backsliding: the case of radical political Islam in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Democratic backsliding in many world regions has prompted scholars to study how democracies can resist and push back against autocratization, and many accounts suggest that a unified, pluralist opposition is key to mobilize voters against democratic backsliding. However, pluralist ideology is not necessarily associated with higher awareness of and opposition to backsliding, as evaluations of democratic erosions are highly contingent on political context. We illustrate this point with the case of Indonesia, a country where a pluralist government coalition has deepened democratic erosion by harshly repressing an anti-pluralist Islamist opposition. Using data from a national survey, we document that Islamist Indonesians are systematically more likely than pluralist individuals to believe that democracy has worsened: Resistance to democratic erosion is thus concentrated in the most ideologically illiberal citizens. Rethinking the pluralist/anti-pluralist dichotomy has implications for how we conceptualize democratic backsliding and assess democratic resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic backsliding
• Indonesia
• Political Islam

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for excellent feedback, and to Jenika Huang for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome change.”

2 Tomini, “Don’t think of a wave!.”, Skaaning, “Waves of autocratization and democratization,”---.

3 Lührmann, “Disrupting the autocratization sequence,”---.

4 We understand pluralism as an ideology that values diversity and dissent, and advocates for tolerance among political, social and cultural groups with often contrasting views; as such, pluralism has been foundational for the development of liberal democracy. Sartori, “Understanding pluralism.” As for populism, we follow the widely accepted notion of a “thin ideology” that pits virtuous masses against self-interested elites. Stanley, “The thin ideology of populism.” In its oversimplification of the social world and pretense that diverse, plural societies should be treated as homogeneous, populism may be considered as subsuming anti-pluralist ideology. Galston, Anti-pluralism.

5 Kaltwasser, “The ambivalence of populism.”, Huber and Ruth, “Mind the gap!.”

6 Graham and Svolik, “Democracy in America?”, Singer, “Fiddling while Democracy Burns.”

7 Fossati, Unity through division.

8 Hadiz, “A new Islamic populism.”

9 Power, “Jokowi’s authoritarian turn and Indonesia’s democratic decline.”

10 Cianetti and Hanley, “The end of the backsliding paradigm.”

11 Slater, “Democratic careening.”

12 Bermeo, “On democratic backsliding.”, Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome change.”

13 Lührmann, “Disrupting the autocratization sequence.”

14 “Eroding regimes: What, where, and when?.”

15 Merkel and Lührmann, Resilience of democracies, Holloway and Manwaring, “How well does ‘resilience’apply to democracy?”

16 Shin and Moon, “South Korea after impeachment.”

17 Grömping, “Agents of resistance and revival?”

18 Thompson, “Pushback after backsliding?,”---, Bolleyer, “Civil Society, Crisis Exposure, and Resistance Strategies.”, Mietzner, “Sources of resistance to democratic decline.”

19 Croissant and Haynes, “Democratic regression in Asia,”---, Chull Shin, “Democratic deconsolidation in East Asia,”---, Welzel, “Democratic horizons,”---.

20 Helmke and Levitsky, Informal institutions and democracy.

21 Svolik, “Polarization versus democracy.”

22 Eisen et al., The Democracy Playbook, Lührmann, “Disrupting the autocratization sequence.”, Sato and Arce, “Resistance to populism,”---.

23 Lührmann, “Disrupting the autocratization sequence,” 1026.

24 Mudde, “The populist zeitgeist.”

25 This is not to deny that some populist movements may indeed display authoritarian tendencies. But only exceptionally populism could be described as being anti-democratic: In most cases, populist mobilization brings to the fore legitimate and widespread concerns about crucial issues such as immigration, economic inequality, globalization and political exclusion. Eatwell and Goodwin, National populism: The revolt against liberal democracy.

26 Indeed, several studies have identified a close link between populism, satisfaction with democracy and participation. Anduiza et al., “Populism, participation, and political equality.”, Huber and Ruth, “Mind the gap! Populism, participation and representation in Europe.”

27 Lindberg et al., “V-Dem: A new way to measure democracy.”, Huber et al., “The paradoxes of contemporary democracy: formal, participatory, and social dimensions.”, Ruth-Lovell et al., “Democracy and populism: Testing a contentious relationship.”

28 Fawcett, Liberalism: the life of an idea.

29 König, “Support for a populist form of democratic politics or political discontent?”, Mair, “Populist democracy vs party democracy.”

30 Curato and Fossati, “Authoritarian innovations.”

31 Grillo and Prato, “Reference points and democratic backsliding.”

32 Bermeo, “On democratic backsliding,” 15-16.

33 Gidengil et al., “The partisan nature of support for democratic backsliding.”, Singer, “Fiddling while Democracy Burns.”, Mazepus and Toshkov, “Standing up for Democracy?.”, Graham and Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States.”

34 Fossati, Unity through division, Mietzner, “Fighting illiberalism with illiberalism.”, Warburton, “Polarisation and democratic decline in Indonesia.”, Hadiz, “Imagine all the people?.”, Aspinall and Mietzner, “Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox.”, Nuraniyah, “Divided Muslims.”

35 Hiariej, “Aksi dan identitas kolektif gerakan Islam radikal di Indonesia.”, Damayanti et al., “Radikalisme agama sebagai salah satu bentuk perilaku menyimpang.”

36 Survey research, for example, indicates that about one in four Indonesians are sympathetic to an Islamist agenda. Mietzner and Muhtadi, “Explaining the 2016 Islamist mobilisation in Indonesia: Religious intolerance, militant groups and the politics of accommodation.”.

37 To be sure, the pluralist coalition has included some prominent figures with Islamist credentials, most notably the two vice-presidential candidates in the elections of 2014 and 2019. Nevertheless, as the data analysed in the next section show, ideological differences between the two camps are very significant.

38 Mietzner and Muhtadi, “Explaining the 2016 Islamist mobilisation in Indonesia.”

39 Peterson, Islam, Blasphemy, and Human Rights in Indonesia, Osman and Waikar, “Fear and Loathing.”

40 Hadiz, “Imagine all the people?.”

41 Power, “Jokowi’s authoritarian turn and Indonesia’s democratic decline.”

42 Fealy, Jokowi’s Repressive Pluralism.

43 Sya’rani, The impact of the Indonesian government’s crackdown on Islamists.

44 Nuraniyah, The cost of repressing Islam---.

45 Hadiz, “A new Islamic populism and the contradictions of development.” Some analysts of Indonesian politics have argued that Widodo himself may be described as a populist. Gammon, “Is populism a threat to Indonesian democracy?.” However, although Widodo’s campaigns have often emphasized his humble background and ability to establish a direct link with voters, he has not articulated the polarizing, anti-pluralist populist rhetoric that we associate with democratic regression.

46 Fossati, Unity through division.

47 Syarif and Hannan, “Islamic populism politics and its threat to Indonesian democracy.”

48 Setiawan, “A state of surveillance? Freedom of expression under the Jokowi presidency.”, Power, “Assailing accountability,”---.

49 Mujani and Liddle, “Indonesia.”

50 Ibid., Mietzner, “Authoritarian innovations in Indonesia.”

51 Capoccia, “Militant democracy.”

52 Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman, “What’s wrong with militant democracy?.”

53 Fealy and White, The politics of banning FPI.

54 Mietzner, “Sources of resistance to democratic decline.”

55 Olivia et al., “Indonesia in the Time of Covid-19.”

56 The previous surveys adopted a multi-stage clustering sampling procedure that has often been used in academic studies based on Indonesian samples Pepinsky et al., “Testing Islam's political advantage: Evidence from Indonesia.”.

57 Specifically, Muslim respondents represent 90.3% of the sample and 87.5% of the population; middle-aged respondents (i.e., 41–55-year-old respondents) are 36.3% of the sample, as opposed to 25% in the population; older respondents (older than 55 years old) are 19.2% of the sample and 15.2% of the population. No significant differences are identified between the sample and the Indonesian population in terms of gender, residence (urban/rural) and regional (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku-Papua and Bali-Nusa Tenggara) distribution.

58 Bartels, “Democracy Erodes from the Top.”, Foa and Mounk, “The danger of deconsolidation.”

59 Blaydes and Linzer, “The political economy of women's support for fundamentalist Islam.”, Pepinsky et al., Piety and Public Opinion.

60 Fossati and Martinez i Coma, “How popular conceptions of democracy shape democratic support in Indonesia..”

61 Kuipers et al., “Encouraging Indonesians to Pray from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

62 We therefore estimate a logistic regression model for Models 1 and 2, and an ordered logit model for the remaining four models.

63 Note that the significant association between ideology and perceptions of backsliding does not extend to democratic satisfaction. If the same models were estimated with a simple indicator of satisfaction with democracy as the dependent variable, the coefficient for ideology would not be significant at conventional levels. This may indicate that evaluating democratic backsliding (i.e., change in democracy over time) may be at least in part a distinct process from a more general appraisal of the state of democracy, although an exhaustive analysis is beyond the scope of this article.

64 As a robustness check, we have re-estimated the six models with the inclusion of two additional covariates, namely approval of President Widodo and evaluation of national economic performance. The results, reported in the Online Appendix, show that the findings hold with this alternative model specification.

65 Landwehr and Steiner, “Where democrats disagree.”, Ulbricht, “Perceptions and conceptions of democracy.”

66 Cianetti and Hanley, “The end of the backsliding paradigm.”, Slater, “Democratic careening.”

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [Project No. (21603520), e.g. CityU 9048199].

Notes on contributors

Diego Fossati

Diego Fossati is Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong. He studies representation and political behaviour, especially in the context of East and Southeast Asia. He is the author of “Unity through Division: Political Islam, Representation and Democracy in Indonesia” (2022) and “The Meaning of Democracy in Southeast Asia” (2023), both published by Cambridge University Press.