No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Localised impacts on Islamist political mobilisation in Indonesia: Evidence from three sub-provincial units
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2023
Abstract
What explains the regionally varying electoral outcomes of Islamist parties in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy? By employing a three-stage approach inspired by Evan Lieberman's nested analysis, this article aims to gain a better understanding of how adaptability to local political contexts matters in determining the vote share of the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) at the sub-provincial level. It uncovers that PKS’ electoral mobilisation in non-Javanese regions depends more on whether the party leverages a strong predisposition towards personal votes underpinned by pre-existing clientelistic ties. In contrast, the PKS support base in Java tends to be embedded in specific milieus shaped by deep-seated sociocultural cleavages. The findings thus not only demonstrate the limitations of programmatic, institutionalised parties like PKS in the Indonesian context, but also resonate with a larger body of broader literature on politics in the Muslim world, indicating strategic considerations of local political conditions as an important factor in electoral support for political Islam.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2023
Footnotes
Previous versions of this article were presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Asia Pacific Workshop, Penang, 2019, and the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Summer Online Meeting, 2020. I would first like to thank Jamie S. Davidson for his insights and invaluable academic guidance. I am also grateful to Subhasish Ray, Risa Toha, Bilveer Singh, Diego Fossati, Jeremy Menchik, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors are mine alone. This research was funded by the Graduate Research Support Scheme from the National University of Singapore, and supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5C2A01093243).
References
1 Sukma, Rizal, ‘Indonesia's 2009 elections: Defective system, resilient democracy’, in Problems of democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, institutions and society, ed. Aspinall, Edward and Mietzner, Marcus (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010), p. 65Google Scholar; Aspinall, Edward, ‘A nation in fragments: Patronage and neoliberalism in contemporary Indonesia’, Critical Asian Studies 45, 1 (2013): 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 The ideological difference between ‘Islamist’ and ‘Islamic’ parties, the main components of political Islam, is more apparent in Indonesia than other predominantly Muslim democracies. Despite their close relations with mass Muslim organisations, Islamic parties, particularly the National Awakening Party (PKB), officially advocates religious pluralism and does not adopt Islam as its ideological foundation. Islamist parties, in contrast, are more active in upholding Islam as a solution to the nation's problems.
3 Aspinall, Edward and Hicken, Allen, ‘Guns for hire and enduring machines: Clientelism beyond parties in Indonesia and the Philippines’, Democratization 27, 1 (2020): 137–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See for example, Fossati, Diego, Aspinall, Edward, Muhtadi, Burhanuddin and Warburton, Eve, ‘Ideological representation in clientelistic democracies: The Indonesian case’, Electoral Studies 63 (2020): 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arifianto, Alexander R., ‘Islamic campus preaching organizations in Indonesia: Promoters of moderation or radicalism?’, Asian Security 15, 3 (2018): 323–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buehler, Michael, ‘Revisiting the inclusion-moderation thesis in the context of decentralized institutions: The behavior of Indonesia's Prosperous Justice Party in national and local politics’, Party Politics 19, 2 (2012): 210–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caraway, Teri L., Ford, Michele and Nugroho, Hari, ‘Translating membership into power at the ballot box? Trade union candidates and worker voting patterns in Indonesia's national elections’, Democratization 22, 7 (2015): 1296–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fossati, Diego, ‘The resurgence of ideology in Indonesia: Political Islam, aliran and political behaviour’, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 38, 2 (2019): 119–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hadiz, Vedi R., ‘A new Islamic populism and the contradictions of development’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 44, 1 (2014): 125–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamayotsu, Kikue, ‘The political rise of the Prosperous Justice Party in post-authoritarian Indonesia’, Asian Survey 51, 5 (2011): 971–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jung, Eunsook, ‘Campaigning for all Indonesians: The politics of healthcare in Indonesia’, Contemporary Southeast Asia 38, 3 (2016): 476–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See for example, Liddle, R. William and Mujani, Saiful, ‘Leadership, party, and religion: Explaining voting behavior in Indonesia’, Comparative Political Studies 40, 7 (2007): 832–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Choi, Jungug, ‘The influence of poverty on the politicization of Islam in Indonesia’, Asian Survey 57, 2 (2017): 229–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Buehler, ‘Revisiting the inclusion-moderation thesis’, p. 218.
7 See for example, Andreas Ufen, ‘Lipset and Rokkan in Southeast Asia: Indonesia in comparative perspective’, in Party politics in Southeast Asia: Clientelism and electoral competition in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, ed. Dirk Tomsa and Andreas Ufen (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 40–61; Hadiz, ‘A new Islamic populism’.
8 See for example, Hamayotsu, ‘The political rise of the Prosperous Justice Party’.
9 See for example, Buehler, Michael and Tan, Paige Johnson, ‘Party-candidate relationships in Indonesian local politics: A case study of the 2005 regional elections in Gowa, South Sulawesi province’, Indonesia 84 (Oct. 2007): 41–69Google Scholar; Tomsa, Dirk, ‘Party system fragmentation in Indonesia: The subnational dimension’, Journal of East Asian Studies 14, 2 (2014): 249–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Mietzner, Marcus, ‘Party financing in post-Soeharto Indonesia: Between state subsidies and political corruption’, Contemporary Southeast Asia 29, 2 (2007): 238–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Lieberman, Evan S., ‘Nested analysis as a mixed-method strategy for comparative research’, American Political Science Review 99, 3 (2005): 435–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ELieberman, van S., ‘Nested analysis: Toward the integration of comparative-historical analysis with other social science methods’, in Advances in comparative-historical analysis, ed. Mahoney, James and Thelen, Kathleen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 240–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Arifianto, ‘Islamic campus preaching organizations in Indonesia’; Fossati, ‘The resurgence of ideology in Indonesia’; Fossati et al., ‘Ideological representation in clientelistic democracies’.
13 Liddle and Mujani, ‘Leadership, party, and religion’; Hadiz, ‘A new Islamic populism’; Choi, ‘The influence of poverty’.
14 Thomas B. Pepinsky, R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani, Piety and public opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Hamayotsu, ‘The political rise of the Prosperous Justice Party’.
15 Lieberman, ‘Nested analysis as a mixed-method strategy’, pp. 438–39.
16 Since 1999, DPR elections have taken place every five years. Each electoral district (Dapil) is allocated from 3 to 10 seats in accordance with the number of electorates. Voters are able to choose either a political party or a specific candidate for expressing their electoral support.
17 The exclusion of Papua province from this research is due to the dubious vote counting observed in almost all of its provincial-wide regions. For example, in Paniai district, 4 out of 94 candidates earned a total of 90,632 votes, and 3 of them won 30,000, 20,000, and 20,000 votes, respectively. However, it is beyond this study's scope to determine whether those irregular results were caused by electoral fraud. For the actual vote totals in Papua, see http://www.kpu.go.id/application/modules/rekap_hasil_suara/files/76_-_DD_1_DPR_PAPUA.pdf.
18 Admittedly, the proportion of Muslims relative to other religious groups cannot fully measure the aggregate-level of Islamic piety, as a significant section of Indonesian Muslims are tolerant toward non-Islamic perspectives (Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000]). However, given that the proportion of Muslims in West Java (97.2%), West Sumatra (98.1%), and South Sulawesi (89.6%)—where almost half of the total number of local sharia bylaws across the archipelago were implemented—is significantly higher than the national average (87.2%), one can assume that Muslims in a larger community tend to be more pious than others. See Buehler, Michael, The politics of Shari'a law: Islamist activists and the state in democratizing Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 215–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 They include mosques, prayer houses (langgar or surau), and prayer halls (musholla).
20 The official Islamic school system (madrasa) in Indonesia, is comprised of ibtidaiyah, tsanawiyah, and aliyah, which are equivalent to the elementary, middle, and high school systems, respectively. Most pesantrens—private Islamic boarding schools largely located in Javanese localities—had already been integrated into the madrasa system to obtain state assistance (Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Traditionalist and Islamist pesantrens in contemporary Indonesia’, in The madrasa in Asia: Political activism and transnational linkages, ed. Farish A. Noor, Yoginder Sikand and Martin van Bruinessen [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008], pp. 217–46). This indicator is useful for measuring the relative role of Islam in providing education, which has emerged as a promising tool for proselytisation by Islamist groups (Noorhaidi Hasan, ‘Islamizing formal education: Integrated Islamic school and a new trend in formal education institution in Indonesia’, RSIS Working Paper no. 172, Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, 2009).
21 Lieberman, ‘Nested analysis’, p. 438.
22 Noer, Deliar, The modernist Muslim movement in Indonesia, 1900–1942 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Madinier, Rémy, Islam and politics in Indonesia: The Masyumi Party between democracy and integralism (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
23 To control for as many variables as possible prior to the case studies, the predicted scores on the dependent variable are based on Model 2.
24 Lieberman, ‘Nested analysis’, pp. 443, 446.
25 As discussed in the next section, the proportions of Catholics and Muslims in Ngada are 90.9% and 6.7% of the total population, respectively.
26 Kimura, Ehito, Political change and territoriality in Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 According to Salahudin Pakaya, professor, University of Muhammadiyah of Gorontalo, the name was first used by Haji Abdul Malik bin Abdul Karim Amrullah (Hamka, 1908–81), one of Indonesia's most influential Islamic thinkers. During his visit to Gorontalo, Hamka eulogised that the peaceful interreligious relationship under the auspices of Islam in local Gorontalo society can be likened to that of Madinah during the time of the Prophet. Interview, Gorontalo City, July 2018.
28 Buehler, The politics of Shari'a law.
29 Author's calculations using data from Badan Pusat Statistik for 2001–16.
30 For example, in West Sumatra, PKS achieved 2.88% of the vote in 1999, 11.78% in 2004, 8.90% in 2009, and 8.35% in 2014.
31 Hasanuddin, and Amin, Basri, Gorontalo: Dalam dinamika sejarah masa kolonial (Yogyakarta: Ombak, 2012), p. 197Google Scholar.
32 Ibid., p. 200.
33 Shiraishi, Takashi, An age in motion: Popular radicalism in Java, 1912–1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
34 Ahmad-Norma Permata, ‘Islamist party and democratic participation: Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in Indonesia 1998–2006’ (PhD diss., Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität, 2008), p. 44.
35 Interview with Hendra Abdul, a PPP parliamentarian in the Gorontalo provincial assembly, July 2018.
36 Hasanuddin and Amin, Gorontalo, p. 199.
37 Ibid., pp. 200–201.
38 Before 1965, the current territory of Gorontalo province administratively belonged to Gorontalo district.
39 Geertz, Clifford, The religion of Java (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar.
40 Greg Barton, ‘Indonesia: Legitimacy, secular democracy, and Islam’, Politics and Policy 38, 3 (2010): 483.
41 Greg Fealy and Bernhard Platzdasch, ‘The Masyumi legacy: Between Islamist idealism and political exigency’, Studia Islamika 12, 1 (2005): 82–3.
42 Valina Singka Subekti, ‘Prolonged elite conflict and the destruction of the Indonesian Islamic Union Party (PSII)’, Studia Islamika 24, 2 (2017): 319–20.
43 Interview with Rustam Tilome, Head of Pusat Informasi Gorontalo (Gorontalo Information Centre), July 2018.
44 Udin Hamim and Sastro M. Wantu, ‘Pengembangan Program Studi Dana PNBP Tahun Anggaran 2012’ (unpublished manuscript, 2012).
45 Basri Amin, ‘Islam, budaya and lokalitas Gorontalo’ (unpublished manuscript, 2012), pp. 7–8.
46 Kimura, Political change and territoriality, p. 83.
47 Confidential interview with a local intellectual in Gorontalo City, Aug. 2018.
48 For example, see the following news articles: ‘Fadel Muhammad diperiksa sebelum Pemilu’, Kompas, 11 Mar. 2009; ‘Wali Kota Gorontalo laporkan wakilnya’, Kompas, 28 Jun. 2012; ‘Gubernur Gorontalo Rusli Habibie jadi tersangka pencemaran nama baik Komjen Buwas’, DetikNews, 17 Feb. 2015.
49 ‘Politik dinasti ramaikan Pileg 2019’, Gorontalo Post, 22 July 2018.
50 Interview with Aziz Amin, secretary of PKS branch in Gorontalo City, July 2018.
51 Kristiansen, Stein, ‘Institutions and rural stagnation in Eastern Indonesia’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 54, 2 (2018): 196CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Molnar, Andrea K., ‘Christianity and traditional religion among the Hoga Sara of West-Central Flores’, Anthropos 92 (1997): 396–7Google Scholar.
53 Karel Steenbrink, ‘Another race between Islam and Christianity: The case of Flores, Southeast Indonesia, 1900–1920’, Studia Islamika 9, 1 (2002): 76.
54 Aris Ananta, Evi Nurvidya Arifin and Leo Suryadinata, Indonesian electoral behavior: A statistical perspective (Singapore: ISEAS, 2004), p. 367.
55 Statistik, Badan Pusat, Ngada dalam angka 2015 (Ngada: Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Ngada, 2015), p. 371Google Scholar.
56 Geert Arend van Klinken, ‘Migrant moralities: Christians and nationalist politics in emerging Indonesia, a biographical approach’ (PhD diss., Griffith University, 1996), pp. 96–122.
57 Steenbrink, Karel, Catholics in independent Indonesia: 1945–2010 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.
58 Kristiansen, ‘Institutions and rural stagnation’, p. 197.
59 Vannessa Hearman, ‘The 1965–1966 violence, religious conversions and the changing relationship between the Left and Indonesia's churches’, in The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies, ed. Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 185–6.
60 Kristiansen, ‘Institutions and rural stagnation’, p. 197.
61 Donald K. Emmerson, ‘The bureaucracy in political context: Weakness in strength’, in Political power and communication in Indonesia, ed. Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Pye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 106–7.
62 Dirk Tomsa, Party politics and democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the Post-Suharto era (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 37.
63 Aritonang, Jan Sihar and Steenbrink, Karel, A history of Christianity in Indonesia (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 260Google Scholar.
64 Interview with Yohanes Don Bosko, Regent of Nagekeo district, Sept. 2018.
65 For example, Yohanes Samping Aoh, the founder of PM, switched to PAN to win a 2014 legislative seat. Similarly, Hendra Yusuf, a Protestant local businessman who was once affiliated with a smaller nationalist party called Democratic Renewal Party, has become a member of PKB since 2014. Lastly, Laja Friansiskus, then an incumbent district parliamentarian, switched his party from the nationalist National Front to PKS after the former's dissolution in 2009.
66 Confidential telephone interview with a PAN parliamentarian of the Ngada district assembly, Sept. 2018.
67 Interview with Zainuddin Paru, Oct. 2018.
68 For example, in the Riung Barat sub-district, where only 3.1% of the total population are Muslim, PKS won the largest vote share (31.1%) in the 2014 legislative election. Zainuddin secured about 94% of these PKS votes.
69 Heather Sutherland, The making of a bureaucratic elite: The colonial transformation of the Javanese priyayi (Singapore: Heinemann Educational, 1985); Dick, Howard W., Surabaya, city of work: A socioeconomic history, 1900–2000 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), pp. 419–24Google Scholar.
70 Abdul Chalik, ‘Religion and local politics: Exploring the subcultures and the political participation of East Java NU elites in the post-New Order era’, Journal of Indonesian Islam, 4, 1 (2010): 118–19.
71 Data on Pondok Pesantren by Department of Religion in Indonesia; available at http://pbsb.ditpdpontren.kemenag.go.id/pdpp/about (accessed 23 May 2019).
72 M.C. Ricklefs, Polarising Javanese society: Islamic and other vision (c.1830–1930) (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), pp. 71, 166–75.
73 Clifford Geertz, ‘The Javanese kijaji: The changing role of a cultural broker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, 2 (1960): 238.
74 David Charles Anderson, ‘The military aspects of the Madiun Affair’, Indonesia 21 (Apr. 1976): 21.
75 In 1957 and 1958, subsequent elections for the regional representatives were held in Java, South Sumatra and Kalimantan. While PKI became the largest party at the expense of PNI and Masyumi's losses at the national level, vote shares of the largest four parties in Mojokerto were almost identical to those in 1955. See Daniel S. Lev, The transition to guided democracy: Indonesian politics, 1957–1959 (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1966), p. 118.
76 Endang Turmudi, ‘Religion and politics: A study on political attitudes of devout Muslims and the role of the “kyai” in contemporary Java’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 23, 2 (1995): 21–2.
77 Bush, Robin, Nahdlatul Ulama and the struggle for power within Islam and politics in Indonesia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), pp. 80–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 Turmudi, ‘Religion and politics’, p. 34.
79 King, Dwight, Half-hearted reform: Electoral institutions and the struggle for democracy in Indonesia (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 37–8Google Scholar.
80 Ibid., pp. 131–2.
81 In 2006, several well-known conservative kyai, such as Maruf Amin, Choirul Anam and Idham Cholied, who were opposed to PKB's leadership, established the National Ulama Awakening Party (PKNU). Although PKNU fell below a minimal electoral threshold, it effectively penetrated PKB's electoral base in East Java.
82 Confidential interview with the former chairman of NU's branch in Mojokerto City, Mojokerto City, Nov. 2018.
83 Interview with Muhammad Asfar, professor at University of Airlangga, Surabaya, Nov. 2018.
84 Interview with Kuniawan Nugraha, PKS parliamentarian of the Mojokerto District Assembly, Mojokerto City, Nov. 2018.
85 Interview with Efendi Nugroho, chairman of the PKS Mojokerto District branch, Mojokerto district, Nov. 2018.
86 For example, Nathan W. Allen, ‘From patronage machine to partisan melee: Subnational corruption and the evolution of the Indonesian party system’, Pacific Affairs 87, 2 (2014): 221–45.
87 Lieberman, ‘Nested analysis as a mixed-method strategy’, pp. 449–50.
88 Cited in Hazan, Reuben Y. and Rahat, Gideon, Democracy within parties: Candidate selection methods and their political consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Indonesia adopted an open-party list proportional-representation electoral system beginning with the 2004 legislative election. Voters are given a chance to mark either a party label or a specific candidate on the list. Regardless of the ranking on the party list, a candidate would be allocated a seat if s/he received sufficient votes according to a pre-devised quota.
90 John Carey and Andrew Reynolds, ‘Parties and accountable government in new democracies’, Party Politics 13, 2 (2007): 255–74.
91 Choosing the 2004 legislative election was a function of data availability. At the time of writing, district/city level results from the 2009 legislative election was not accessible to the public. See also Appendix F for information on the model's robustness checks.
92 The influence of VCI2_PKS remained statistically insignificant while VCI1_PKS and VCI1_Golkar were removed from the OLS estimation.
93 See for example, Hadiz, ‘A new Islamic populism’.
94 Hew Wei Weng, ‘“Islamic ways of modern living”: Middle-class Muslim aspirations and gated communities in peri-urban Jakarta’, in Jakarta: Claiming spaces and rights in the city, ed. Jörgen Hellman, Marie Thynell and Roanne van Voorst (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 195–213.
95 Dirk Tomsa, ‘What type of party? Southeast Asian parties between clientelism and electoralism’, in Tomsa and Ufen, Party politics in Southeast Asia, pp. 20–39; Ufen, ‘Lipset and Rokkan in Southeast Asia’.
96 Kikue Hamayotsu, ‘Bringing clientelism and institutions back in: The rise and fall of religious parties in Indonesia's electoral democracy’, in Tomsa and Ufen, Party politics in Southeast Asia, pp. 120–41.
97 Adhi Priamarizki and Dedi Dinarto, ‘Capturing anti-Jokowi sentiment and Islamic conservative masses’, RSIS Working Paper no. 324 (Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, 2019).
98 Sikk, Allan, ‘Newness as a winning formula for new political parties’, Party Politics 18, 4 (2012): 465–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
99 Tavits, Margit, ‘Party systems in the making: The emergence and success of new parties in new democracies’, British Journal of Political Science 38, 1 (2008): 113–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
100 See for example, Boubekeur, Amel, ‘Islamists, secularists and old regime elites in Tunisia: Bargained competition’, Mediterranean Politics 21, 1 (2016): 107–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daadaoui, Mohamed, ‘Of monarchs and Islamists: The ‘refo-lutionary’ promise of the PJD Islamists and regime control in Morocco’, Middle East Critique 26, 4 (2017): 355–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kumbaracıbaşı, Arda Can, ‘An aggregate analysis of the AKP vote and electoral continuities in the Turkish party system’, Turkish Studies 17, 2 (2016): 223–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.