Unity through Division: Re-evaluating Democracy in Indonesia

Unity through Division:Re-evaluating Democracy in Indonesia Michael Buehler (bio) A number of scholars have argued over the past few years that democracy in Indonesia is in decline. Electoral institutions established after the collapse of Suharto's New Order dictatorship in 1998 have been curtailed, and the state has continuously shrunk the public sphere through laws and regulations that violate basic human, political, and civil rights. However, this narrative of a democratic rollback has received surprisingly little critical examination and scrutiny in the scholarly community. The claim that Indonesian democracy is in decline can be contested on either empirical or conceptual grounds. Empirically, a critical evaluation of the literature could point out that many of the democratic achievements after 1998 were exaggerated (ironically, often by the same scholars who have now identified a democratic rollback). Political parties have been weakly institutionalized throughout the past 25 years, unable to aggregate the interests of societal groups and represent them at the national or even subnational level. Moreover, the parliament has remained a marketplace for elites rather than a lawmaking body, while the executive branch of government has continued to represent a narrow group of interests, many of which have ties to the New Order dictatorship. The judiciary has remained dysfunctional throughout the last two-and-a-half decades, unable and unwilling to hold elites to account. Besides the persistence of ineffective formal institutions from the foundation of Indonesian democracy, informal political dynamics have consistently hindered democratic progress and consolidation in the country since 1998. Indonesian politics may be competitive, but they are also deeply clientelist. The transactional nature of politics in the country's democracy has long undermined accountability along both vertical and horizontal lines and compromised the quality of public service delivery. In short, the alleged democratic decline over the past few years is not as pronounced as claimed if one looks at the quality and functioning of both formal and informal institutions since the post-Suharto era began. End Page 210 A conceptual critique of Indonesia's democratic rollback might challenge how democratic decline is defined in the literature that claims to have identified this trend in Indonesia's political trajectory. This is the approach Diego Fossati takes in his book Unity through Division: Political Islam, Representation and Democracy in Indonesia, where he examines the question, "Why have Indonesians become increasingly satisfied with democracy despite their country's democratic decline in recent years?" (p. 4). Fossati argues that ideological cleavages are more pronounced in Indonesian society than most of the existing literature on post–New Order Indonesia is ready to admit. The most salient cleavage is over the role Islam should play in politics and the public sphere. Not only does this ideological division within society have deep historical roots, but it has become more sharply defined over the past few years. It has also entered the formal political arena through political parties that push for a more significant role for Islam in the archipelago's politics. According to Fossati, the increasing visibility of a wide spectrum of ideological views to ordinary Indonesians and the representation of these views within the system are key reasons why more Indonesians feel satisfied with the political system they inhabit (p. 35). Hence, Fossati suggests that scholars need to rethink their understanding of democracy and democratic decline. While most researchers studying Indonesian democracy focus on its outcomes, such as legislation and public service delivery, Fossati argues that many Indonesians assess their political system based on the input side of democracy, or how well it incorporates their views and participation. In other words, a growing number of Indonesians are satisfied with their democratic system because they evaluate it with regard to whether it allows for a range of increasingly popular views associated with political Islam to be represented. Since it does, according to Fossati, Indonesians are satisfied with their democracy, even though it may fall short on output variables, such as the protection of liberal values, the integrity of electoral mechanisms, or the quality of public service delivery. Fossati's account raises several questions. For instance, is there really an increase in the number of Indonesians that are satisfied with democracy? At the very...