Introduction

In 2009, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat (PD) came seemingly out of nowhere to capture 150 seats in Indonesia’s parliament, almost tripling its previous tally. In recent years, nationalist parties have acquiesced to the passage of Islamic-inspired legislation at the center and at the regions, seemingly violating their own ideological bases. In addition, parties are widely excoriated in the media as self-seeking, corrupt, and devoid of ideology. Finally, many parties’ organizational structures slumber between elections. These phenomena reflect Indonesia’s relatively uninstitutionalized contemporary party system. Why does a party system become institutionalized or fail to do so? Why does it become institutionalized in the ways that it does and in the strength that it does?

This chapter uses the ideas from Hicken and Kuhonta’s Introduction for this volume to examine independent Indonesia’s four distinct party systems. The chapter then analyzes the factors that explain the observed levels of party system institutionalization (PSI), with particular reference to the hypotheses Hicken and Kuhonta test for Asia as a whole in their introductory chapter.

Based on Hicken and Kuhonta, the Indonesia cases do not point to the significance of the passage of time as a factor in institutionalization. Indonesia has gone through several upheavals in its party systems; even within the authoritarian New Order, volatility was high, then low, then rose again. Also, as a Third Wave democracy, Indonesia’s parties are relatively uninstitutionalized, as the period effect would predict, but the parties began life early, some as early as the 1920s, and were major actors in the country’s national liberation struggle. Despite this, they failed to institutionalize.