Introduction to the Special Section on Presidentialism and Democracy in Indonesia

Abstract

The three articles in this special section on presidentialism and democracy in Indonesia analyse the state of Indonesian democracy through a careful study of the 2024 elections and the presidential transition from Joko Widodo to Prabowo Subianto. The three articles examine this election and its significance using different but complementary approaches, analysing elite politics, voting behaviour, political cleavages and electoral institutions. Together, these articles contribute to ongoing debates about the quality of Indonesian democracy, the drivers of democratic backsliding, and the institutional and demographic factors that shape vote choice in a diverse society.

Indonesia's 2024 elections were the sixth elections conducted in Indonesia's democratic era in which voters directly elected their president. After having twice been defeated by the popular former Solo mayor and Jakarta governor Joko Widodo, Prabowo Subianto—a former general from a prominent family, with a troubling history tied to the former authoritarian New Order regime—was elected president with a commanding majority of the popular vote. Prabowo won this election with the support of the term-limited Widodo, whose son Gibran Rakabuming Raka was named Vice President in a controversial process that required the Constitutional Court to rule that Gibran was eligible to run despite not meeting the Constitutional age requirement. At the same time, legislative elections led to a parliament in which eight parties are represented but none holds more than 20% of legislative seats. This outcome continues a long-standing pattern of legislative fractionalisation in Indonesia, which requires multiparty coalitional arrangements to pass legislation, as well as fostering multiparty cabinet coalitions within the executive branch.

Prabowo's background and the irregularities associated with the election have led to many analyses of the state of Indonesian democracy. Inspired by these events, Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program, under the auspices of the Modern Indonesia Project, convened an international workshop in Ithaca in July 2024 to analyse the state of Indonesian democracy. The participants shared their insights about the drivers of democratic decline in Indonesia, the meaning and significance of the 2024 elections within the context of Indonesian political history, and how to place the 2024 electoral results in a comparative perspective. The three articles in this special section reflect discussions about presidentialism and democracy from that Ithaca meeting. The authors contribute original data and distinct perspectives on the 2024 results and their significance for Indonesian democracy.

The articles take distinct analytical and methodological perspectives on presidentialism and Indonesian democracy. In “Flirting with Autocracy in Indonesia: Jokowi's Majoritarianism and its Democratic Legacy” (forthcoming), Marcus Mietzner (Australian National University) argues that Indonesian democracy has been damaged by Widodo's actions while in office, but that the country has not crossed the threshold of authoritarianism. The centrepiece of Mietzner's analysis is Widodo's “majoritarian thinking,” which is his tendency to make decisions with an eye towards their popularity among the Indonesian mass public. On one hand, this strategy helped him to remain widely popular throughout his time in office, as he cobbled together a centrist coalition within the electorate that could defeat Islamist forces and delivered broadly popular results in terms of social and economic development. Majoritarian thinking also prevented him from acting on some of his most anti-democratic impulses, such as seeking a third term in office, because such moves were quite unpopular. On the other hand, intra-elite politics are not easy to poll and are not generally seen as relevant for the electorate, so Widodo was willing and able to engage in executive aggrandisement (Laebens 2023), to the detriment of Indonesia's democratic quality. Mietzner's analysis relies on his unparalleled access to Indonesia's political elites, including Widodo himself; it also carefully engages with the comparative politics literature on backsliding. This piece shows the value of qualitative interview-based fieldwork for capturing how elites make decisions, and how their choices guide the overall trajectory of Indonesian democracy.

Turning from Widodo's actions in office to Prabowo's election, one of the central questions that occupies Indonesian citizens and researchers alike is how Prabowo was able to win such a decisive victory, given his association with the authoritarian New Order regime. Burhanuddin Muhtadi (UIN Jakarta) provides a compelling perspective on this question using comprehensive public opinion data in “Collective Memory, Democratic Ambivalence, and Authoritarian Notions of Democracy: Explaining the Rise of Prabowo Subianto” (forthcoming). Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of Indonesian public opinion and voting behaviour, Muhtadi outlines two broad approaches to understanding Prabowo's support. The first links his popularity to authoritarian nostalgia (Chang et al. 2007), the belief that the New Order regime was a time of progress, growth, and stability. If voters were nostalgic for that kind of politics and viewed Prabowo as associated with the New Order, then this would explain why voters supported him despite his own past actions. The second explanation for Prabowo's popularity is that voters simply favour a strongman form of politics, which Prabowo has embodied throughout his military and political career. Muhtadi shows convincingly that authoritarian nostalgia is not associated with Prabowo support in 2024; on the other hand, support for personalistic strongman rule is. These findings show how careful analysis of public opinion data can help to interpret what the 2024 elections mean for Indonesia's democratic future. The signs are troubling for Indonesian democracy: Indonesians strongly support democracy as a matter of principle, but also embrace illiberal politicians like Prabowo with authoritarian leadership styles.

The third article, by Thomas Pepinsky (Cornell), focuses on how proportional representation and presidentialism shape the character of Indonesian democracy and interprets the 2024 elections in light of how these institutions interact with the country's social cleavages. “Cleavages, Institutions, and Democracy in Indonesia: The 2024 Elections in Comparative Perspective” (forthcoming) uses the literature on electoral systems and party systems around the world to explain why Indonesian democracy is characterised by oversized governing coalitions and a fractionalised legislature that cannot effectively check the power of the president in most cases. Pepinsky describes coalitional presidentialism as the expected result of a presidential form of government combined with proportional representation with high district magnitudes in legislative elections. Electoral data from 2024 elections reveal how presidentialism structured party competition in the country's legislative election, and how Prabowo's candidacy intersected with the Islamist-pluralist cleavage that has long been a feature of Indonesian politics and society. Although oversized grand coalitions among parties that are weakly programmatically differentiated are the expected consequence of Indonesia's electoral system, Pepinsky notes that supermajority power-sharing (McGann and Latner 2013) creates the conditions for executive aggrandisement that Widodo and now Prabowo can use to their own advantage.

These three articles, taken together, reveal the challenges of presidentialism in contemporary Indonesia, as well as 2024's implications for the future of Indonesian democracy. The three articles also place Indonesia's 2024 elections in comparative, historical, and theoretical perspective, drawing on theories, concepts, and arguments with broad relevance outside of the Indonesian case. As Indonesia navigates the first year of the Prabowo administration, the perspectives in these three articles will help scholars to understand the possible paths that Indonesia's presidential democracy may take.