https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4678-298X
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ABSTRACT
The current worldwide democratic regression has prompted debate about the drivers of democratic decline. One country experiencing decline is Indonesia, where most analysts blame the shift on actions of illiberal elites, casting the public as a democratic bulwark. Yet, as in other fragile democracies, regression in Indonesia has come at the hands of politicians enjoying popular support. To investigate drivers of democratic decline we ask: How democratic are Indonesian citizens when compared to the politicians they elect? We answer this question using an original, representative survey of provincial legislators, which we compare to a general survey of the Indonesian population. While both populations express overwhelming support for democratic government, we find significant differences between how elites and masses conceive of democracy, and in their commitment to liberal norms. Though neither group is a bulwark of liberal values, we find the legislators are systematically more liberal than voters. These findings challenge widely held assumptions about Indonesia’s political class, and suggest a public that is either indifferent to, or supportive of, an increasingly illiberal democratic order. Our study demonstrates that comparing elite and mass attitudes to democracy and liberalism is one fruitful technique for investigating sources of democratic resilience and fragility.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Colm Fox and Matthew Singer, for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts, the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore for hosting a workshop at which the paper was first discussed, and the Australian Research Council for funding the research on which it is based.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Edward Aspinall http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4678-298X
Notes
1 Diamond, “Indonesia’s Place in Global Democracy”; Mujani et al., Voting Behaviour in Indonesia Since Democratization.
2 Mietzner, “Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism”; Warburton and Aspinall, “Indonesian Democracy.”
3 Miller et al., “Conceptions of Democracy among Mass and Elite in Post-Soviet Societies,” 157.
4 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2019.”
5 Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation”; Foa and Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect.”
6 For example, Fukuyama, “The Future of History.”
7 Mair, Ruling the Void.
8 For example, Mounk, The People Vs. Democracy, 53–98.
9 Haggard and Kaufman, Dictators and Democrats, 225.
10 Albertus and Menaldo, Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy.
11 Tomini and Wagemann, “Varieties of Contemporary Democratic Breakdown and Regression,” 691.
12 See for example, Diamond, “Indonesia’s Place in Global Democracy.”
13 Liddle et al., “Indonesian Democracy.”
14 See the debate in Ford and Pepinsky, Beyond Oligarchy.
15 See especially Robison and Hadiz, Reorganising Power in Indonesia.
16 See especially Slater, “Indonesia’s Accountability Trap”; For a critique see Mietzner, Money, Power, and Ideology.
17 Aspinall et al., The Yudhoyono Presidency; Mietzner, “Indonesia’s Democratic Stagnation.”
18 Hadiz, “Indonesia’s Year of Democratic Setbacks”; Power, “Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline”; Mietzner, “Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism.”
19 Mietzner, “Indonesia’s Democratic Stagnation,” 2011.
20 Power, “Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline.”
21 Mietzner, “Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism.”
22 Stecker and Tausendpfund, “Multidimensional Government-Citizen Congruence and Satisfaction with Democracy”; Powell, “Political Representation in Comparative Politics”; Belchior, “Explaining Left–Right Party Congruence Across European Party Systems.”
23 Miller et al., “Conceptions of Democracy among Mass and Elite in Post-Soviet Societies,” 158.
24 The most comprehensive articulation of this viewpoint is Hadiz, Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia.
25 Buehler, The Politics of Shari’a Law.
26 As Sumatra accounted for 29.5% of the total legislator population, we selected 150 respondents for our sample from this region. An additional 136 legislators were selected from DPRDs in Java (26.8%) and the remaining 222 (43.7%) were sampled from other provinces.
27 This has excluded from our sample the provinces of North Kalimantan, West Papua and West Sulawesi.
28 The number of legislators selected in each DPRD varies because of varying DPRD size across province. For example, provincial councils in large Javanese provinces can reach 100 members, while smaller provinces may have half as many seats.
29 The survey was implemented by Lembaga Survei Indonesia.
30 Laver, “Measuring Policy Positions in Political Space,” 214.
31 We were assisted in our ability to do so by the fact that one of the authors, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, directs one of Indonesia’s best established national public opinion polling institutes.
32 Bundi et al., “Self-Selection and Misreporting in Legislative Surveys,” 772–5; see also Caprara et al., “Personalities of Politicians and Voters.”
33 Bourchier, Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia.
34 is generated with the same classification of respondent ideology used elsewhere in this article (liberal, leaning liberal, leaning illiberal and illiberal). To identify respondents in leadership positions and with high-level electoral experience, we rely on questions on political background included in our questionnaire. Respondents who are DPRD chairman or vice-chairman are coded as having a leadership position in the local legislature (this group constitutes 8.5% of the sample); respondents who are chairman or vice-chairman of national, provincial or district-level party branches are coded as having party leadership positions (44.5%); respondents who have run for governor, vice-governor, district head or vice-district head are coded as having high-level electoral experience (23.2%). As for , support for democracy was measured by asking respondents the extent to which they agree or disagree with the statement “If Indonesia has to choose between democracy and development, then democracy is more important.”
35 Two other approaches to estimate social desirability bias are possible. First, experimental methods such as list experiments may be useful when trying to elicit preferences on sensitive issues. However, because of the relatively small sample size of the elite survey, we did not include an experiment in our questionnaire. Second, attitudinal data could be matched with behavioural data, such as legislator voting behaviour on specific bills, to ascertain if the two are consistent. Unfortunately, this method is not suitable for Indonesia, where decisions in local legislatures are generally taken by consensus, without voting: Sherlock, “The Parliament in Indonesia’s Decade of Democracy,” 168–9. Studying other forms of behaviour – for example, legislators’ participation in vote-buying or their support for illiberal groups – is possible in principle, but is exceedingly costly in practice; this might be a promising avenue for future research.
36 A second possible explanation for diverging support for democracy between elites and masses is that the difference may be due to the fact that the elite sample had, on average, respondents who were wealthier, better educated, older and more likely to be males and from religious minorities. To explore this possibility, we estimated a set of regression models in which support for democracy among DPRD members is a function of a host of sociodemographic variables and partisanship. Results, available upon request, suggest that age, education, ethnicity and religion are not associated with support for democracy. We find, however, that males are substantially more pro-democracy than females.
37 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives,” 641.
38 Norris, Democratic Deficit, 114.
39 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives”; Schaffer, Democracy in Translation; Camp, Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America.
40 Shin and Kim, “How Global Citizens Think About Democracy.”
41 Doherty and Mecellem, “Conceptions of Democracy in the Arab World.”
42 ibid., 3.
43 This argument has also been suggested in Aspinall and Mietzner, “Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox.”
44 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives”; Shin and Kim, “How Global Citizens Think About Democracy”; Norris, Democratic Deficit; Carlin and Singer, “Support for Polyarchy in the Americas.”
45 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives.”
46 Collier and Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives,” 434.
47 Shin, “The Third Wave in East Asia,” 19; Collier and Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives.”
48 Diamond, “Indonesia’s Place in Global Democracy,” 37–8; Chu and Huang, “A Typological Analysis of Democratic Legitimacy.”
49 See Aspinall et al., “Mapping the Indonesian Political Spectrum.”
50 It should be noted that none of the questions we used focus on issues of toleration, pluralism and minority rights, major concerns of scholars who have focused on the role of conservative Muslim actors in diminishing Indonesia’s democratic quality: see for example Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia. Had our focus been on social rather than political liberalism, we would likely have produced a very different finding. See Aspinall et al., “Mapping the Indonesian Political Spectrum.”
51 Similar results are found even in China: Ji and Jiang, “Enlightened One-Party Rule?”
52 Power, “Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline,” 332–33.
53 For a discussion of this trend in the United States, see Mason, Uncivil Agreement.
54 Mietzner, “Authoritarian Innovations in Indonesia.”
55 As we finalized this article for publication, one important exception was underway – an upsurge of student protest triggered by legislative attempts to gut the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission: Warburton, “Indonesia’s Pro-Democracy Protests.”
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Edward Aspinall
Edward Aspinall is Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University.
Diego Fossati
Diego Fossati is Assistant Professor of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong.
Burhanuddin Muhtadi
Burhanuddin Muhtadi is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, State Islamic University, Jakarta, and executive director of Indonesian Political Indicator and Director of Public Affairs at Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI).
Eve Warburton
Eve Warburton is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.