Curating Citizens' Verdict on Indonesian Democracy

Curating Citizens' Verdict on Indonesian Democracy Sana Jaffrey (bio) In recent years scholarly debates on democratic backsliding have become progressively abstract, with experts quibbling over definitional differences in an elusive quest for objective indicators to measure changes in democratic quality and gathering opinion data on perceptions of democratic trajectories from other experts. In the midst of this increasingly inward-looking scholarship, Diego Fossati's book Unity through Division: Political Islam, Representation and Democracy in Indonesia makes a refreshing attempt to guide us back to a much more basic question: How do ordinary citizens assess the democratic institutions that shape their lives? Drawing on a wide array of public opinion surveys and electoral data from Indonesia, Fossati persuasively argues that citizens' perceptions of democracy are driven by diverse concerns that do not always align with the structural and institutional criteria that scholars have used to judge democratic development. More importantly, he makes a compelling case for paying attention to popular evaluations of democracy, as citizens are the ultimate arbiters of the political orders that govern them. What is less convincing, however, is the book's empirical framing and its claims about the centrality of ideological cleavages in driving public perceptions of democracy in Indonesia. Fossati links his theoretical propositions to an empirical puzzle in Indonesia, where scholars have documented a steady decline of democratic quality over the past decade alongside a rise in public satisfaction with democracy. This discrepancy, which the author calls an "empirical anomaly" (p. 3), would be puzzling if we had reason to believe that there was a linear relationship between institutional changes and the public's experience of these changes. But the book offers no theoretical priors or comparative evidence to show how these two variables should move relative to each other over time. At the same time, the author rules out alternative explanations for public satisfaction with democracy because they do not fit the temporal trends. Most notably, Fossati argues that economic growth, which has long been linked with high levels of democratic approval in Indonesia, cannot explain the current trends because growth has been stable while satisfaction End Page 222 has increased (pp. 3, 8). This rejection of a strong alternative explanation does not consider that it takes time for states to translate economic growth into public goods provision and even more time for ordinary citizens to experience prosperity as a result. So, the burst of satisfaction with democracy that we are observing now could be the cumulative effect of Indonesia's stable growth and not despite it. The book then argues that democratic outputs, such as economic prosperity, public goods provision, and policy outcomes, cannot account for the simultaneous decline of democratic institutions and rise in public satisfaction with democracy in Indonesia. It posits instead that high levels of satisfaction can be explained by democratic inputs that relate to meaningful representation in the democratic process. The book attempts to trace the high levels of democratic satisfaction today to the ideological cleavage present at Indonesia's first democratic election in 1955. Drawing on district-level results from all democratic elections held in Indonesia since 1955, Fossati convincingly proves what many scholars have long argued: the durability of Islamist-pluralist cleavage in Indonesian politics. Despite having the choice of many political parties and programmatic platforms, voters are still guided by two ideological camps: the Islamists, who believe in a greater role for Islam in public life, and the pluralists, who have a more inclusive vision for the nation. This cleavage, the data shows, is also relatively well represented among the political elites that voters elect, although Islamists are significantly less represented than pluralists. The book uses an impressive range of data to show that voters aligned with these two ideological camps have distinctly different ideas of what is important in a democracy. Those who support a greater role for Islam in politics are less likely to express support for promoting liberal values and egalitarian principles and significantly more likely to value features of democracy that enable participation in the political process. Fossati posits that given these different understandings, citizens who place a greater emphasis on participatory features of the political system are more likely to be...