Regime resilience and presidential politics in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article builds on insights from the coalitional presidentialism literature and a more ideational regime-based approach to examine the reasons behind Indonesia's ongoing democratic stagnation. It argues that this stagnation is not, as institutionalists might posit, an ultimately inevitable result of the institutional setup of multiparty presidentialism. Nor is it merely a manifestation of unchallenged oligarchic domination or the cartelization of party politics as other influential approaches to Indonesian politics have argued. Instead, this article argues that presidential politics in Indonesia is above all a reflection of a complex regime configuration in which presidents need to navigate between popular demands from the electorate, the interests of powerful veto actors who use democratic procedures only as an instrument to defend their predominantly material interests, and a constantly evolving but still inefficient set of political institutions that has largely failed to ensure accountability and transparency.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• presidentialism
• democracy

Acknowledgements

The first draft of this article was written during a fellowship at the Freiburg Institute or Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and then presented at the Euroseas conference in Vienna in 2015. The author would like to thank FRIAS and the Euroseas panel organizers for their support and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dirk Tomsa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the Post-Suharto Era (Routledge, 2008) and co-editor of two volumes on Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics. His writings have been published in Political Research Quarterly, International Political Science Review, Journal of East Asian Studies and South East Asia Research, among others.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.