The Surprising Democratic Behemoth: Indonesia in Comparative Asian Perspective

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, though some countries of Asia have experienced significant democratization, the overall democratic map of the continent has remained largely stable. When the spirit of reform swept through Eastern Europe during the 1990s, the Communist Party regimes of Southeast and Northeast Asia remained entrenched, with the exceptions of Cambodia, where a peace deal prompted a short-lived period of multi-party democracy in the 1990s, followed by electoral authoritarianism, and Mongolia, a country that was propelled into successful and lasting democratic change by the collapse of its Soviet ally. In South Asia, the democracy map today looks much like it did three decades ago, with India having anchored the region in the intervening period as a stable democracy, but with wild fluctuations occurring in the politics of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and (somewhat less wildly) Sri Lanka. Northeast Asia has undergone the most dramatic development, with, in addition to Mongolia, democratic transitions in the 1980s in South Korea and Taiwan being followed by their transformation into successful and stable multi-party democracies. In Indonesia's immediate neighborhood, Southeast Asia—once famously described as a “recalcitrant region” (Emmerson 1995) as far as democratization goes—democracy has spread, but not far. Apart from Indonesia, the Philippines restored a version of the oligarchic democracy that had flourished there before the authoritarian Marcos interlude. Cambodia has been mentioned. Myanmar has begun a period of democratic opening after decades of military-based rule, though it is far from certain how this process will end. Thailand, in the mid-1980s seen as the region's democratic pioneer, has gone backward, with periods of open contestation having been punctuated by three military coups in intervening decades. Otherwise, not much has changed in Southeast Asia. Overall, unlike Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa, Asia stands with the Middle East as the one major world region where sweeping democratic advance has not occurred over the last three decades.

Among the relatively few countries making democratic progress, one stands head and shoulders above most others: Indonesia. It is partly Indonesia's size that makes democratic change here significant: with a population of a quarter of a billion people in Indonesia, the post-1998 period of Reformasi in one sweep brought 3.6 percent of the world's population under democratic government, as well as 12.7 percent of the world's Muslim population. Indonesia now stands with India as Asia's second democratic behemoth. But it is also the extent of Indonesia's democratic change that makes it unusual among Asian countries. If we are to take the (admittedly imperfect) measure of Freedom House's “Freedom in the World” rankings, then only a couple of other Asian countries have made greater democratic progress in the last thirty years. In 1985–86, the agency ranked Indonesia at 5.5 in its freedom ratings (where a ranking of 7 was the maximum score possible, marking a country as entirely “not free”), with that figure worsening to 6.5 in the early 1990s. By 2006, Indonesia was ranked at 2.5, though it was downgraded to 3 in 2014. All in all, this is an improvement of between 2.5 and 4 places, depending on where we make our start and end. The only countries with comparable improvements across Asia in this time span have been in Northeast Asia, notably the far more economically developed countries of Taiwan, which improved 3.5 places, from 5 in 1985–86 to 1.5, and South Korea, which improved 2.5 places, from 4.5 to 2, as well as Mongolia, the only country with significantly more dramatic performance, with a score that was 7 in 1985, improving to 1.5 in 2015.

Indonesia's democratic progress is all the more surprising since it defied expectations and predictions. Back in the mid to late 1980s, Indonesia's authoritarian New Order government was deeply entrenched and even the regime's most fervent critics did not foresee short-term change. Even a few years later, as a new period of political openness began, most observers were highly skeptical of the country's democratic prospects (see, e.g., Bourchier and Legge 1994).

How then can we explain Indonesia's relative democratic success? In this article, I attempt such an explanation by discussing two factors that are frequently viewed as having critical bearing on democratic success or failure: economic modernization (and attendant social changes) and ethnic structure. The critical points made in these sections is that democracy in Indonesia has been advantaged because economic and social change has not produced a social-cum-political cleavage structure that has threatened entrenched elites (as in Thailand) nor has the structure of ethnic cleavages undermined democratic rule (as in Malaysia or Sri Lanka). Indonesian democracy has survived because it has not been undermined by polarizing political cleavages. In a third section, I generalize from these observations to locate the source of Indonesia's democratic survival in the highly inclusionary nature of the elite settlement embodied in the country's post-Suharto government structures. Powerful elite groups in Indonesian society have been absorbed and incorporated by Indonesian democracy rather than being disenfranchised or dispossessed by it. While this pattern has made democracy resilient, it has also undercut its quality, particularly its ability to deal with entrenched problems, such as corruption, and to provide tangible benefits to non-elite and marginalized groups (a point that is demonstrated by brief discussions of wealth and gender inequality). I conclude that Indonesia's democratic success has been built on numerous failures, and that the country exemplifies the travails of democratization experienced across the Asian continent, as much as it may be considered one of Asian democratization's finest achievements.

Economic and Social Structure

One of the most distinguished—but also most critiqued—explanations for democratization is modernization theory (Lipset 1959), which sees democratization arising as a consequence of economic development and attendant social changes, such as the spread of education and the strengthening of social classes (notably the urban middle and working classes) with an interest in democratic rule. Exhibits A and B for this approach in Asia are South Korea and Taiwan, where rapid industrialization from the 1950s through the 1970s set the scene for significant democratic protest movements and the rise of mass middle-class constituencies favoring reform, providing significant incentives for authoritarian incumbents to initiate or accede to democratic change (e.g., Tien 1989).

Indonesia's democratic transition was certainly not such a paradigmatic case. Not only was Indonesia's GDP per capita at the time of its democratic transition far lower than that of South Korea and Taiwan when their democratic transitions began a decade earlier, but it was also unremarkable in the regional context: according to the World Bank (2015a) figures, in 1996, on the eve of both the Asian financial crisis and democratic transition, Indonesian GDP per capita (current U.S. dollars) was $1,154, only a little higher than the East Asia and Pacific developing country average ($867) and much lower than that of all countries in that region ($4,010), though significantly higher than South Asia ($409). The timing of Indonesia's democratic transition in 1998–99 was linked to an external economic shock (the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98) and regime factors (the aging of Suharto), rather than being the product of a slow and steady accumulation of economic and social change. In any case, none of this should surprise us given that there is a growing consensus among scholars that economic modernization does not explain the timing of democratic transitions very well, though it does help explain which democratic regimes remain stable once they have been established. As Jan Teorell (2010, 5) puts it: “[M]odernization affects regime outcomes by hindering authoritarian reversals rather than promoting transitions toward democracy.”

Is it possible to extend this variant of the modernization argument to Indonesia? Can we see the relative robustness of Indonesia's new democratic order, rather than the transition per se, as a consequence of factors associated with the country's economic development? It is certainly possible to look at Indonesia and see the cogs and wheels of modernization theory turning. Long-term visitors to Indonesia see the signs of economic and social change everywhere, in both rural and urban settings. Since the early post-crisis years, Indonesia's economic growth has consistently hit rates of over 5 percent per annum, meaning an increase of per capita GDP from $1,076 (current U.S. dollars) in 2003 to $3,475 in 2013 (World Bank 2015a). There is no doubt that Indonesia's middle class is far larger than it was twenty years ago on the eve of democratization. In 1990, for example, the professional/administrative, sales, and clerical employment categories used by the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics made up 23 percent of the workforce; by 2014 the contemporary equivalents—financing, insurance, and real estate; community, social, and personal services; and sales and accommodation—made up 37.9 percent (Badan Pusat Statistik, n.d.). And we could find similar evidence and arguments for almost any of the measures usually attached to modernization theories of democratic change: exposure to the media and other modern forms of communication has greatly expanded,¹ education levels have risen significantly, and so on.

Perhaps if economic growth and associated social changes did not trigger Indonesia's democratic transition, they have helped to lock its new democratic system into place? Viewed in a single-country context, this proposition looks compelling. Viewed comparatively, it is less so. One obvious problem is that while economic change might help explain the relative stability of Indonesian democracy compared to the chronic instability and democratic breakdown we have witnessed in the more economically fragile countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, there is nothing here to distinguish Indonesia from, say, Thailand, which has significantly higher per capita GDP than Indonesia, as well as a much larger and more prosperous middle class, but far less democratic stability. Another problem is that such arguments have more than a faint whiff of ex post facto justification about them. Take the example of the middle class: if we wind back the clock a couple of decades, there was something of an academic cottage industry explaining why the Indonesian middle class was ambivalent about, if not outrightly hostile to, democratic change. A host of scholars argued that the middle class was largely dependent on the state—either directly, as bureaucrats, or indirectly, through clientelistic and rentier relationships—and therefore socially insecure, politically conservative, and largely satisfied with authoritarian rule (Dick 1985; Robison 1996; Tanter and Young 1990). Interest in the topic of Indonesia's middle class largely dropped off with democratic change, but there would be something akin to intellectual indecency if the middle classes were to be suddenly resurrected—after an interval that has not yet reached two decades—as the bulwark of Indonesian democratic life. Moreover, such characterizations would miss key points about the complexity of the middle classes and how the various subgroups’ political behavior and attitudes are molded by context.

The key questions therefore concern not the brute facts of economic structure and modernization, but rather how these are refracted through the party system, electoral institutions, social movements, and other mechanisms into political life. The distinction with Thailand here is particularly instructive: despite Thailand's greater relative prosperity—and “modernity” on a host of measures—than Indonesia, its politics over the last decade and a half has come to be dominated by a debilitating political cleavage, one aspect of which pits relatively poor, rural, northern and northeast voters against southern and Bangkok-based elites (Montesano, Chachavalpongpun, and Chongvilaivan 2012). Yet though income and wealth inequality is somewhat more severe in Thailand than in Indonesia, it is not dramatically so: according to World Bank (2015b) figures for 2010, the Gini coefficient was 35.6 in Indonesia and 39.4 in Thailand, while the top 10 percent of income earners received 28.2 percent of the total income share in Indonesia, compared to 31.0 percent in Thailand. But there is a critical difference in how such inequality has come to structure political competition. In the late 1990s, a change to the electoral system in Thailand allowed the populist Thaksin Shinawatra to come to power by appealing to poor, rural voters and offering them various policy concessions. As Hewison (2015) explains it, “Thaksin's attention to the lower classes meant an array of conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian forces came to oppose his government,” leading to the 2006 coup and the ensuing democratic unraveling. In Indonesia, by contrast, economic inequality also has profound political consequences, allowing the preponderant influence of oligarchs in official politics (Robison and Hadiz 2004). But the power of the oligarchs is dispersed, expressed through all major parties and levels of government, just as are forces promoting policy change in the interests of poorer Indonesians (Aspinall 2013b; Mietzner 2012). We saw the first hints of Thailand-style populism and polarization in Indonesia during Indonesia's presidential elections of 2014, but the authoritarian-populist challenge of former general Prabowo Subianto failed, and the more “polite” version favored by the winner, Joko Widodo, did not fundamentally challenge Indonesian elites or excite the anger of the poor (Mietzner 2014).

Ethnic Politics

If we switch our focus to ethnicity, another factor that is often seen as being important for democratic stability, we again see a similarly benign pattern of cleavages in Indonesia. Here an instructive starting comparison is Indonesia's larger Asian cousin, India. It is striking that Asia's two giant democracies are also its most diverse countries: according to one widely used measure of ethnic fractionalization, India is ranked as being the seventeenth most diverse country in the world, and Indonesia as the twenty-fourth; only Papua New Guinea, Lebanon, and a range of African states are ranked higher (Fearon 2003).²

Is there a connection between this ethnic diversity and these countries’ democratic success? Again, I must first caution against monocausal explanations and also note the major divergences between the countries’ political trajectories, notably India's long period of democratic stability—punctuated only briefly by Indira Gandhi's emergency rule in the 1970s—versus the much longer period of authoritarian rule in Indonesia between 1958 and 1998. Nevertheless, there are instructive similarities. Tudor and Slater (2015, 1, emphasis in original), for instance, argue that “India and Indonesia possess a shared but heretofore unrecognized historical source of democratic strength: the inclusive ideology of their founding political parties.” They argue that the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI) and India's Congress Party promoted broadly similar inclusive notions of popular sovereignty and national identity that achieved near-hegemonic status in the anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century, and then set the scene for these countries’ post-independence democratic discourse and institutions. The paths of the two countries’ democracies subsequently diverged, Tudor and Slater argue, in part due to the PNI's failure to achieve dominance in post-independence elections in a way that rivaled the position achieved by Congress, and in part due to the far more destructive effects of the international Cold War on Indonesia than on India. Even so, they suggest, the legacy of this early foundational ideal has subsequently enabled functioning democratic regimes to be built in India and, in more recent times, Indonesia (once the detour caused by Cold War dynamics had been corrected).

The inclusionary nature of Indonesian nationalism is indeed one of the country's great achievements and an important precondition for the country's recent democratic success. During the transition to democracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was significant violence in Indonesia as some ethnic groups and their elite leaders in the regions tried to settle old scores, negotiate more advantageous positions for themselves in local power structures, or, in a few cases, secede from the nation-state (Bertrand 2004). As the new democratic system has settled into place, it has largely been able to absorb such actors. One critical reform, much discussed in the Indonesia literature, was the decentralization of political power and financial resources to the districts (currently numbering around 500).³ This policy provided strong incentives to local elites to compete for power locally rather than to engage in conflict with Jakarta, and it also gave them plenty of scope to express local cultural values in government policies at the local level (one indication of which was the proliferation of regulations incorporating elements of sharia in some districts: Bush 2008). But the accommodationist nature of Indonesian nationalism has helped the post-Suharto consolidation of the democratic system in other ways, too: for example, through a formula that Jeremy Menchik (2014) refers to as “Godly nationalism,” the government accords official status to the major monotheistic religions and provides significant patronage to religious, notably Islamic, institutions and networks, thus blunting the potential of Islamic political forces to feel alienated from the body politic. At the same time, a range of informal institutions and practices are maintained to ensure broad inclusion: for example, every president endeavors to ensure that his or her cabinet includes individuals from a broad spectrum of Indonesia's major islands, ethnicities, and religious groups.

It should be noted, of course, that beyond their shared commitment to inclusive visions of national unity, India and Indonesia's models for ethnic and religious inclusion are very different. India has a federal system in which the states exercise significant authority and where state boundaries are drawn largely on linguistic lines. The party system also significantly features identity-based parties: regional and caste-based parties have become much more significant over the last two decades (Rudolph and Rudolph 2002; Varshney 2000), to say nothing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which now exercises power federally. In Indonesia, the provinces—the equivalents of Indian states—have been largely marginalized as part of decentralization reforms that handed power to the lower-level districts, and the provinces are rarely an important locus of identity politics, which tends instead to clump at national or local scales. Meanwhile, broad commitment to Bahasa Indonesia as both official language and lingua franca means that linguistic nationalism is all but absent at the subnational level: though local languages are used as a medium of instruction in the lower levels of Indonesia's schools, virtually nobody calls for them to be accorded official status. Even ethnic separatists in Papua use Indonesian as their language of choice. National regulations, meanwhile, require parties to demonstrate that they have broad nationwide organizational presence before they can compete in elections. The result is that, in sharp contrast to India, regional and ethnic political parties are entirely absent from Indonesia's legislatures, except in the province of Aceh, which negotiated an exemption to the national rules as part of a peace deal to end the separatist conflict there in 2005. Islamic parties are important, but in Indonesia's proportional-representation system they have never come close to achieving a majority in the national legislature (Fealy 2003). Such distinctions point to important differences in the Indian and Indonesian “national models” (Bertrand 2004), with the former emphasizing formal group representation in ways that are largely absent in Indonesia, which instead combines a stress on unifying national symbols and institutions with significant avenues for informal power sharing and access to patronage. Despite such differences, the point remains that both systems are broadly inclusionary of ethnic and religious differences.

In fact, it can be argued that the sheer complexity of these countries’ ethnic compositions might have been a democratic advantage. Though ethnic diversity was long considered a potential impediment to democratic rule (e.g., Horowitz 1993), most recent comparative studies suggest that ethnolinguistic diversity has had neither a positive nor a negative effect on democratization during the third wave (Fish and Brooks 2004; Teorell 2010, 46). But contrasting the Indian and Indonesian experiences of inclusionary nationalism with other Asian countries suggests that a key fault line may in fact lie between countries that have relatively high ethnic fragmentation, such as India and Indonesia, and those where a larger ethnic core is accompanied by one or more significant minorities, such as Malaysia and Sri Lanka.⁴

While early nationalists in India and Indonesia were compelled to forge inclusionary national models, in Sri Lanka and Malaysia nationalism was ultimately defined around ethnic cores in ways that have had highly problematic effects for democracy. In Malaysia, constitutionally mandated Malay supremacy helped forge a party system in which a dominant Malay party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), allied with subservient parties representing the major ethnic minorities, occupied the electoral center ground, pushing opposition out to the ethnic “flanks”—toward Malay nationalism and Islamism among ethnic Malays, and toward parties advocating more strongly for minority rights among Chinese, Indians, and other groups.⁵ The great obstacles this logic places in the way of unified action by opposition parties have been one major factor strengthening UMNO's dominance under a variety of electoral authoritarianism by which it has become one of the most entrenched ruling parties in Asia.⁶ In Sri Lanka, by contrast, in the early decades of independence, a process of ethnic outbidding by parties competing for the votes of the Sinhalese majority increasingly defined the state in ethnic Sinhalese terms, fueling alienation among ethnic Tamils and ultimately setting the scene for ethnic civil war and all its deleterious effects for democracy (DeVotta 2005).

The Indonesian Model

The above discussion of socioeconomic and ethnopolitical factors suggests that the absence of strong cleavage structures that polarize political contestation has been an important ingredient of Indonesia's post–Cold War democratic success. Unlike in Thailand, no electoral movement has arisen in Indonesia to challenge the economic and political privileges of entrenched elites and so trigger authoritarian backlash. Ethnic cleavages have neither advantaged undemocratic actors, as in Malaysia, nor created a cycle of securitization that has seriously undermined democratic governance at the center, as in Sri Lanka. It might be added that Indonesia also lacks deeply entrenched party system cleavages of the sort that have been so destructive of democratic government in Bangladesh, for example, where politics has been locked in a cycle of debilitating conflict between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by Khaleda Zia and the Awami League of Sheikh Hasina.

In contrast to such situations, with their deleterious effects for democratic stability, much of the literature on post-Suharto Indonesia has stressed the highly inclusionary nature of the elite settlement upon which the country's new democratic system was constructed. For scholars such as Slater (2004, 2014) and Ambardi (2008), Indonesian politics resembles a party cartel, in which all—or almost all—the major political parties collude in sharing out the spoils of office at the expense of horizontal accountability. At the national level, for example, all post-Suharto cabinets (with the exception of that recently formed by President Joko Widodo) have been “rainbow cabinets” that included representatives of parties whose members held far more than 50 percent of the seats in national parliament. Presidents divvyed up cabinet posts and other perquisites according to a patronage-sharing logic, rather than constructing their coalitions on the basis of shared ideology or policy platforms. For some analysts, this situation points to the continued power of the Suharto-era oligarchy, whereby “elements of that oligarchy have now reinvented themselves, and seek to maintain their position in relation to state institutions and resources in a new democratized and decentralized format” (Heryanto and Hadiz 2005, 270; see also Ford and Pepinsky 2014; Robison and Hadiz 2004). In this view, very widespread in the literature on Indonesian politics, the critical fact of Indonesia's new democracy is that it has allowed the actors who had privileged material and political positions in the Suharto period to maintain their privileges and dominance. The issue is arguably broader than a class dimension. As I have argued previously (Aspinall 2010), the power-sharing logic has operated in a wide range of spheres, with post-Suharto governments consistently co-opting potential democratic spoilers, such as the military, Islamists, and regional elites, and providing all of them a significant stake in the new dispensation. In this system, patronage has become the new glue holding the political system together. Accordingly, corruption has become the defining political issue of the new democratic era, the primary source of both political scandal and popular disillusionment with democracy (Aspinall and van Klinken 2011).

The critical issue here is thus not the basic composition of social forces but path dependency. The origins of Indonesia's inclusionary political settlement are to be found in the pattern of democratic transition undergone in Indonesia, whereby the leading forces of the old Suharto regime were not decisively defeated by democrats but instead were able to negotiate their continued access to power in the aftermath of the protests that were triggered by the economic crisis of 1997–98 (Aspinall 2005). As Horowitz (2013, 4) puts it, Indonesia's process of constitutional reform was “[b]rought about by insiders in an environment with little history of democratic praxis.” Accordingly, a distinctive feature of Indonesia's democratic transition was that it created a system in which no major elite group lost out significantly. A tiny group of Suharto's closest confidantes and supporters were pushed from power, or lost their riches, but few others suffered significantly. Even many of the leading conglomerates, whose crony practices had helped ensure that the Asian economic crisis was especially severe in Indonesia and whose indebted companies were taken over by the state, were eventually able to regain them through various backdoor methods (Chua 2008); today, almost two decades on, the Indonesian economy remains dominated by the massive conglomerates that had first risen to prevail over the heights of the Indonesian economy under the protective embrace of the Suharto regime. Likewise, the military was eased out of involvement in the day-to-day running of political affairs, but had to make few other costly concessions: no military officer was successfully prosecuted for human rights crimes committed during Suharto's rule, its territorial command structure that shadowed the civilian administration and through which its officers gain access to lucrative economic opportunities at the local level has not been dismantled, and it has been able to enjoy significantly increased budgetary allocations to boot (Baker 2015).

This pattern of transition also has had implications for the battle of ideas that, in Indonesia as elsewhere, accompanies democratization. During the Suharto years, the military and its ideologues propounded an authoritarian vision of state and society, known by the label “Pancasila ideology.”⁷ Though presented as an articulation of Indonesian tradition, many of the ideas associated with Pancasila ideology—such as the notion that Indonesia comprised an “organic state” whereby the rights of individuals were subsumed to those of society as a whole—had their intellectual roots in earlier strains of European and Japanese anti-Enlightenment thinking (Bourchier 1995). In the post-Suharto period, many political actors have challenged aspects of such thinking; for instance, notions of universal human rights have become a broadly accepted part of mainstream political discourse. Even so, prominent political leaders, such as military officers and conservative party politicians, still frequently recycle tropes of Pancasila ideology, for instance by claiming that democracy is not culturally suitable to Indonesia, given the emphasis on consensus rather than conflict that they allege is central to Indonesian tradition. At the same time, some of the new Islamist forces that have emerged explicitly condemn democracy as a product of Western thought. In short, Indonesia is as much an arena as any country for the ongoing contestation between Enlightenment thinking and its antagonists that Daniel Chirot identifies in his introduction to this special section as being an important feature of contemporary political debate across the globe. But in Indonesia, much of that contestation now takes place inside the country's officially constituted democratic institutions.

Overall, Indonesia's system of “collusive democracy” (Slater 2004) may have been beneficial for democratic stability, but it has also come at a price. While elites have generally done well, ensuring their buy-in to democratic government, the costs have been borne by marginalized and powerless groups in Indonesian society who have been largely unable to gain control of the levers of government. For example, though economic growth relatively quickly recovered after the Asian financial crisis, the rate of decline in poverty did not recover to Suharto-era levels (Yusuf, Sumner, and Rum 2014). At the same time, Indonesia has experienced increasing wealth inequality, with a dramatic boom in the numbers of Indonesian millionaires and billionaires, accompanying stagnating income growth among the poor and near-poor (Aspinall 2015). Even though frustration with social inequality was one of the factors that drove the popular protests that preceded the fall of the Suharto regime, Indonesia has actually become more rather than less unequal under democracy.

Likewise, the record of Indonesia's democracy in tackling the problem of gender inequality has been very poor. Though the opening up of democratic space allowed greater public attention to be paid to improving women's status, provided greater scope for social movements pursuing the same goal, and even promoted “gender mainstreaming” in government development programs (Surbakti 2002), the power structures of the new Indonesian democracy have remained strongly male-dominated. Women's representation in the national parliament, for example, actually fell slightly from 10.8 percent of seats to 8.8 percent with the first democratic election in 1999, before rising to 11.3 percent in 2004, 17.8 percent in 2009, and 17.3 percent in 2014. In 2014, the global average was 22 percent and the Asian average 18.5 percent (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2015). As Sharon Bessell (2010) has argued, the problem is that women often lack the personal wealth and other strategic resources needed to secure nominations and run successful campaigns in elections in which “money politics” is often a key factor. For very similar reasons, the proportion of women being elected to positions as governors, district heads, and mayors through direct local executive head elections has been minuscule, and many of the women who have gained such posts have done so because of a family connection to a local male powerbroker (Satriyo 2010). Unsurprisingly, such inequality in terms of access to positions of formal political power has also had negative impacts in terms of the broader social and economic place of women: Indonesia's place on the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Inequality Index actually slipped somewhat, from 100th in 2011 to 103rd in 2013.

Indonesia's Democratic Success in Comparative Perspective

A little over a decade ago, Croissant (2004, 157) concluded that “[t]he global tides of democratization generated the weakest results on the Asian continent.” Though Freedom House records significant gains in democracy in the Asia-Pacific region in the last five years (Puddington 2014, 4), if we take a slightly longer time scale, the overall democratic trajectory of the continent has indeed not been impressive when compared to other world regions. If we take the average of the Freedom House scores of eighteen of the most significant countries of Asia, though there has been a significant improvement over the last thirty years (from 4.69 in 1985–86 to 3.83 in 2015), the last ten years have in fact produced a slight reversal—the 2005 average score of the eighteen countries was 3.44.⁸ In other words, the continental average score is hovering somewhere about halfway between autocratic and democratic rule.

Indonesia's democratic success in this context is all the more significant. Especially given that international diffusion and “neighborhood effects” play an important role in democratic transition and survival (Stoner and McFaul 2013) and given that Indonesia's immediate surroundings are the democratically barren region of Southeast Asia, it is a remarkable achievement that we are beginning to consider Indonesia alongside the other democratic giant of Asia, India. Yet, as I have argued above, the successes of Indonesian democracy have to a large degree been born out of failure. Democracy has established itself relatively seamlessly in part because of its failures to deal with corruption, with the legacy of past human rights abuses, with military privileges, with bureaucratic resistance to reform, with vested interests, and so on.⁹ Viewed in such a light, Indonesia's gains are less impressive, and indeed the recent downgrading of its status from “free” to “partly free” by Freedom House accurately locates it within the universe of “low quality,” “illiberal,” “defective,” or “semi” democracies that have been the concern of many global democracy theorists over the last decade or so, displacing the previous, arguably more teleological concern with democratic consolidation—a shift of perspective that occurred not least because, as Slater (2013, 730) puts it, “[v]irtually everywhere, democracies exhibit the wobbly characteristics of fledglings, even after aging out of literal fledgling status.”

Indonesia's recent 2014 presidential elections, in which two (albeit very different) populist candidates competed at trying to articulate the inchoate mood of disenfranchisement felt by the masses, raised obvious parallels with countries of Southeast Asia that have experienced cycles of populism, popular mobilization, and oligarchic reassertion, or what Slater (2013) calls “democratic careening.” Though the new president, Joko Widodo, was the first Indonesian president who did not have a personal history of involvement in Suharto-era power structures, he has shown himself unwilling or unable to break with Indonesia's new post-Suharto traditions of collusive democracy, distributing key cabinet posts to party operatives deeply entrenched in patronage politics and former security officials with reactionary views. Indeed, by some measures democratic governance has gone significantly backwards in the months of his presidency.¹⁰ Indonesia may prove not to be the democratic success story of Asia but instead simply to be gravitating toward the continent's semi-democratic mean.

Notes

List of References