A Price for Democracy? Religious Legislation and Religious Discrimination in Post-Soeharto Indonesia

Abstract

Various studies have expressed concerns about the decline of religious freedom in Indonesia. These studies suffer from three limitations. First, they inadequately differentiate between various aspects of state–religion relations. Second, they are largely inward looking, overlooking how Indonesia compares with other countries in the world, especially other Muslim countries. Third, they do not explicitly test whether this decline in religious freedom was triggered by the downfall of Soeharto and the more open political and social space that ensued. Applying a synthetic control method to a global data set, the present study shows that Indonesia’s level of state discrimination against religious minorities has not changed much since 1998. The country’s levels of social discrimination and religious legislation, on the other hand, have increased significantly. This suggests that efforts to improve religious freedom in Indonesia should focus on tackling the proliferation of religious bylaws and discrimination by social groups.

Berbagai studi telah mengemukakan keprihatinan akan menurunnya kebebasan beragama di Indonesia. Namun, studi-studi ini memiliki tiga keterbatasan. Pertama, mereka tidak cukup melakukan differensiasi atas berbagai aspek hubungan negara-agama. Kedua, mereka berorientasi internal, mengabaikan perbandingan Indonesia dengan negara-negara lain di dunia, khususnya negeri berpenduduk Muslim lainnya. Ketiga, mereka tidak secara eksplisit menguji apakah penurunan pada kebebasan beragama dipicu oleh jatuhnya Soeharto dan semakin terbukanya ruang sosial dan politis yang mengikutinya. Dengan menerapkan metode kendali sintetis pada set data global, studi ini menunjukkan bahwa tingkat diskriminasi oleh negara atas kaum agama minoritas di Indonesia sesungguhnya tidak berubah sejak 1998. Sebaliknya, tingkat diskriminasi sosial dan legislasi agama naik secara signifikan. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa upaya-upaya untuk meningkatkan kebebasan beragama seharusnya berfokus pada penanganan penyebaran aturan-aturan setempat dan diskriminasi oleh kelompok sosial.

Keywords:

• religious freedom
• Islam and democracy
• state–religion separation

JEL classification:

• D73
• D74
• D91
• Y80

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Thomas Pepinsky and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, and the Indonesia Project at the Australian National University for granting me a fellowship to work on this manuscript. All errors are mine.

Notes

1 See http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2019.1661354.

2 Using a global data set has its own limitations, as it cannot detail instances of religious freedom violations as closely as a focused data set. The present study is conscious of these limitations. It is intended as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, the existing studies on Indonesia.

3 A comparison of Indonesia and other countries that have successful transitioned to democracy is presented in the online appendices. The results show that Indonesia has higher levels of state discrimination, religious legislation and social discrimination than the comparison countries. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2019.1661354.

4 An assumption shared by all such comparative approaches is that the mechanisms that tie politics and religion are comparable across countries. Pepinsky, Liddle and Mujani (2018) show why this is the case for Indonesia and what we can learn by comparing it with other countries.

5 A list of countries used to construct the synthetic control is provided in the online appendices, together with a comparison of Indonesia and the synthetic control on selected characteristics, as well as the results of several placebo and robustness tests.

6 In the online appendices, I present an analysis that excludes countries that have experienced regime change (defined as countries whose Polity IV scores changed from negative to positive or vice versa during the period). The results are practically identical to those presented here. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2019.1661354.