The Electoral Paradox of Party Institutionalisation: The Case of PKS in Eastern Indonesia

ABSTRACT

What caused the surprising electoral success of an Islamist party in one of Indonesia’s most Catholic regions, and why was this success short-lived? This article argues that in Ngada district on Flores Island in 2014 the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) deftly mobilised local voters not because of its own organisational and programmatic discipline but because of its “project of commonness”, or adaptation to prevailing local patterns of personalistic local electoral competition. The party’s growing popularity in Ngada, however, paradoxically fell after it sought to build solid and coherent relations with the electorate in preparation for the subsequent election. The case of the PKS in Flores thus suggests that under certain conditions, in which voter–party linkages are highly fragmented and cleavage-based politics remain undeveloped, party institutionalisation can harm electoral performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Project of commonness
• party institutionalisation
• voter mobilisation
• eastern Indonesia
• PKS (Prosperous Justice Party)

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Jamie S. Davidson for his insights and invaluable academic guidance. I am also grateful to Subhasish Ray, Risa J. Toha, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. All errors are mine alone.

Notes

1. Party institutionalisation, referred to as “a process in which individual political parties that participate in elections experience an increase in organizational stability and value” (Basedau & Stroh, 2008, p. 8), has been generally measured by a model that highlights the following four dimensions: adaptability, complexity, autonomy, coherence. More recently, this four-dimensional model was fine-tuned by Panebianco (1988) and Randall & Svåsand (2002), who suggest structural (systemness and autonomy) and attitudinal (value infusion and reification) aspects of party institutionalisation typology, respectively. Regarding the party institutionalisation of new parties, scholars put more emphasis on the structural than the attitudinal dimension because the former is conceptually more comprehensive than the latter (Kumbaracıbaşı, 2016, pp. 221–224).

2. Before separation, Nage and Keo comprised western Ngada and shared similar languages and customs. These two regions gradually became integrated in the 1930s when the leadership of Keo was transferred to the raja of Nage.

3. See Table 7 (column 3) for further details about the demographic characteristics of Ngada.

4. The exact number of victims in Ngada is unknown. However, according to Prior (2011, p. 126), at least 800 people in Sikka (formerly known as Maumere), one of the neighbouring districts to Ngada, were killed by army officers.

5. Except in 1992, when the PDI secured double-digit support due to its campaign strategy relying on the personal appeal of Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of founding president Sukarno, Golkar had won more than 95 per cent of Ngada’s vote in every DPR election under Suharto since 1977.

6. For further discussion of this inter-communal violence, see Bertrand (2004).

7. The importance of being placed high on a party’s list has been less emphasised since the parliament revised the electoral law by shifting from a closed-list to an open-list proportional representative system in 2008. Nevertheless, candidates with higher spots on the list are prioritised in seat allocation under conditions specified in the law (Horowitz, 2013, pp. 184–186).

8. For example, the average numbers of votes of elected candidates in Ngada’s 2009 and 2014 local elections were 777 and 887, respectively.

9. In 2017, the total amount of General Allocation Funds (DAU) and Special Allocation Funds (DAK), the overwhelming sources of Ngada’s district budget, was 3.5 times larger than in 2002: 141 billion Rupiah (US$10 million) compared to 490 billion Rupiah (US$35 million).

10. The PKB, PAN, PKS, PPP and PBB were classified as Islamic parties in this regression analysis.

11. During my interview, Paru mentioned that it became impossible for him to spend as much time in Ngada and Flores as he did in the 2014 election after being nominated as the PKS’s chief legal counsel.

Additional information

Funding

The National University of Singapore provided support for the research in this article under the Graduate Research Support Scheme.