Indonesia's Democratic Performance: A Popular Assessment (original) (raw)
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2021
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Explaining Indonesia's Democratic Regression: Structure, Agency and Popular Opinion
After almost two decades of praise for Indonesia's democratic achieve ments, a scholarly consensus has begun to emerge that Indonesian democracy is in regression. In this article, we consider the sources of that regression. Drawing upon the comparative literature on democratic decline, we propose that Indonesia is an illiberal democracy, and argue that a constellation of structural, agential and popular forces has led to an incremental deterioration in democratic quality. We first reaffirm arguments that trace the origins of contemporary democratic weakness to the nature of Indonesia's transition, and the incorporation of antidemocratic elites into the governing structures of its democracy. We then show how Indonesia's two most recent presidents each eroded democratic norms and institutions in pursuit of political security. Finally, we cast a critical eye on the widely shared view that Indonesia's population is a bulwark of democratic strength. While most Indonesians support democracy as an abstract concept,
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The Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of Universitas Gadjah Mada consolidate a trans-national collaboration for studying three interrelated issues: Power, Wealth and Democracy. One of key agendas in the study is to design a country-specific m odel of democracy assessment. The models will emphasis on power relations regarding welfare production and distribution. An international workshop will be held to discuss the framework of the study. The same workshop is also aimed at developing a network of scholars across countries. The program is supported by The Royal Norwegian Embassy in Indonesia.
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The emerging crisis of both elitist and popular strategies of democratization calls for assessments of the problems and options in such a way that different arguments may be put to the test while facilitating debate on improved agendas. This article first discusses the development of a framework for such assessments in the context of the most populous of the 'third wave democracies', Indonesia. The best audit of institutional performance, that of Beetham, is developed further by adding the scope of the institutions and the will and capacity of the local actors to improve and use them. This is followed by a presentation of the salient results from a thus designed survey comprising 330 questions to about 800 experienced democracy workers in all 32 provinces. Indonesia's actually existing democracy is surprisingly liberal and accepted as 'the only game in town'. It suffers, however, from defunct instruments to really facilitate political equality and popular control of public affairs. This is due to monopolization of most rights and institutions by the establishment and the political marginalization of the democratic agents of change. The problems, however, are not all 'structurally inevitable'. The article concludes by specifying the potential for improvements.
Is Indonesia Losing the Soul of Its Democracy?
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This paper describes 11 year dynamics and trends of Indonesian democracy, specifically, aspects of Civil Liberty, Political Rights, and Democratic Institutions, through the results of Indonesia Democracy Index’s (IDI) annual assessment. IDI is an assessment of provincial democracy. Its calculation is based on events occurring throughout the year; it is an attempt to capture democracy from the ground up; a depiction of democracy as it is practiced in everyday life at the institutional as well as at behavioral level. The results indicate complex dynamics and trends where issues of civil liberty, political rights and democratic institutions intertwine to shape political reality on the ground. Discrepancies of performances between IDI’s indicators of democracy indicate a certain paradox in Indonesian democracy as it is practiced at the provincial level. On one hand, the space for civil liberty is open and the citizens are freely and enthusiastically express themselves; and on the other ...
Indonesia & Democracy: Development From The Outside
This paper studies democracy and identity issues. The paper proposes that democracy is measureable. There are indexes to measure the quality of democracy. Hereby, Indonesian democracy is in the era of upgrading. One of the contributive factors in supporting Indonesian democracy is Indonesian diaspora. It is undeniable that Indonesian diaspora has been such a very helpful contributions to the development of Indonesia and to the upgrading of Indonesian democracy. Their contributions reflected in the increasing number of diaspora voters in direct election (political participation), presidential and legislative, and the increasing number of social actions also financial donations (national wealth and economic development) to Indonesian people. These two contributions have been well established by the mediation of Indonesian diaspora institution, Indonesia Diaspora Network Global (IDN-Global). Through the innovation of Indonesian diaspora, Indonesia’s rank on democracy has been pulled up. The paper uses the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy to show and to prove that Indonesian diaspora has been succeeded in helping Indonesia to improve its quality of democracy.