Indonesia’s Media Oligarchy and the “Jokowi Phenomenon”

A key discussion among scholars of post-New Order Indonesian politics concerns the nature and influence of oligarchy. Two distinct strands now exist. The first, led by Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz, and by Jeffrey Winters, argues that while an authoritarian government no longer controls power or sets the agenda, Indonesia's "new era" of democracy post-1998 is dominated by oligarchs,* 1 through "the reorgan ization of the old predatory power relations within a new system" by those who have "interests in maintaining a system of arbitrary power."2 While Robison and Hadiz state that the oligarchic thesis does not mean "nothing has changed in Indonesia," they emphasize that "many of the old faces continue to dominate politics and business, while new ones are drawn into the same predatory practices that had defined politics in Indonesia for decades."3