Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Elections Indonesia'

The overarching characteristic of the 2009 legislative elections lay in the legislative candidates’ politics of image. It stemmed from the amendment to the election Law no. 10/2008 article 214 that ostensibly cut off the parties’ power in determining their candidates without the public’s “direct” consent. The public was then given a direct opportunity to choose and vote for their preferred candidates in the 2009 elections. This marked the emergence and proliferation of the candidates’ image construction, especially in the “outdoor” political arena. Billboards were chosen as the most effective outdoor advertising medium to introduce the candidates and propagate their slogans and platforms. However, at the same time, this mode of introducing and propagating reveals itself as an ideological map that demonstrates the contestation and synthesis of the two major ideological camps in the Indonesian political arena, i.e. the nationalist and Islamic. The candidates were coopted into and by this framework. They themselves could not escape as their political dispositions were unconsciously defined by this framework. Their billboards speak loudly the ideological contestation and synthesis. The investigation of the contestation and synthesis needs Bourdieuan analytical tools, such as capital, dispositions (habitus) and field. These are used not merely to show how the mechanism of the contestation and synthesis operated and was defined by the rules of political “game”, but also to show how this mechanism involves the intricate inter-relationships of various capitals, such as the political, social, economic, cultural and symbolic, that reflect the candidates’ (read also: the parties’) dispositions within the field of Pancasila discourse. Pancasila becomes not only an ideological basis for the state but also the bastion of the contestation and synthesis. The twin roles arguably derive from the dominant cultural root (Javanese) that highly values the concepts of harmony, tolerance and appropriateness as the essences that allow the ideological contestation and synthesis of the nationalist and Islamic strands as the dominant ideological markers in the Indonesian political arena. This thesis aims to demonstrate how the candidates’ billboards represent ideological contestation and synthesis as the billboards can also be perceived as the candidates’ visual “responses” which reflect their political dispositions and the process of taking stances amidst the contestation and synthesis. Therefore, this study was conducted in the form of a layered case study. Using a Bourdieuan lens, the first layer explores the historical background of the contestation and synthesis, their proliferation in the political arena and the mechanism of deploying these strands in the political parties’ branding. Using a social semiotic lens, the second layer investigates how the billboards as the products of the candidates’ political articulation represent not only these contestations and syntheses but also their dispositions. I found that the system of representation (on the candidates’ billboards) operates within the Javanese ideals of “equilibrium” in Pancasila discourse. These ideals frame the power relations between the nationalist and Islamic factions in an ostensible “consensus” in order to maintain the harmony and dilute ideological friction.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, Graduate School, 1988.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 370-387).

A phenomenal thing is occurring in Indonesia’s young democracy. Politicians who are actually interested in propagating good governance and addressing the needs of their constituents are coming to power across the archipelago in increasing numbers. These fresh faces bring with them a pragmatic style of leadership that balks the trend of poor governance set by their distant, corrupt, and bureaucratic predecessors. Unsurprisingly, they have been lauded as the heroes of the people and the products of a maturing democratic regime. The foreign media, in particular, seem convinced that the people’s power, as expressed through democracy, is the driving force behind the rise of such “new breed” leaders. A closer look at the Central Java gubernatorial elections, however, reveals a more complex picture. Through the use of a critical pluralist framework, this paper aims to shed light on the reality of how power is organized between oligarch and non-oligarch actors in the Indonesian polity. In the process, we also build a systematic framework that can be applied to other cases of “new breed” leaders coming to office, so that in the future, a more comprehensive comparative analyses on the topic can be done.

This study explores the construction of the Indonesian Presidential candidates’ image during the 2014 presidential election from the perspective of Facebook users. I analyzed Facebook users’ comments derived from one of the candidate’s Facebook pages, Prabowo Subianto, by employing a thematic analysis to examine an official posting’s comments on June 19, 2014 where a group of celebrities supported Prabawo Subianto. Comments were extracted from June 20, 2014 to July 8, 2014, which was 20 days before election day. Results indicated that the construction of a candidate’s image involved the relationship between the perceived attributes of the candidate and national identity; the relationship between the candidate and his supporters; the perceived personality traits of the candidate, and the ability of supporters to identify with the candidates on a personal level. Moreover, there were also inferences related to political scandals, their treatment by other politicians, spiritual values, and the future state of the country. The study also showed how users tried to make sense of their political world by simplifying the complexity of a candidate through the use of particular themes.

A few ruling individuals from party organizations overpowered Indonesia’s post-authoritarian, representative democracy. The legislative process of the 2017 Election Act was the case study employed to examine this assumption. The underlying thinking was that there was a contest between “wealth power” (oligarchy) and “participation power” (democracy). The power of wealth controls the party and government institutions. Notwithstanding the presence of participation power, there was, however, no balance between wealth power and participation power, because the formal control of politics was in the hands of party oligarchs. The study purpose was to bridge the gap in knowledge by exploring how the party oligarchs maintained the policymaking, reputedly using cartelized strategies, to defend the status quo. By employing the oligarchy and cartelization theories, the central research question of this inquiry focused on how the party oligarchs, allegedly using cartel work-patterns, mastered the policy process in post-Suharto Indonesia. A qualitative case-study was used with in-depth interviews with 15 participants for data collection and the N-Vivo program for data analysis. Qualitative findings indicated that the party oligarchs engineered the legal process in parliament applying cartelized strategies to defend privileges they obtained from collusive interpenetration with the state. The implications for social change include informing members of parliament, other policymakers, and civil society groups of the cruciality of comprehending the modus operandi of oligarchic cartels. Understanding the “oligarchic cartelization” theoretical postulate is a fundamental step for party members to improve their performance in public offices. The results of this study can also be a useful reference for pro-democracy activists to defend the ontological essence of public participation in implementing representative democracy at an appropriate level.

The 2014 Indonesian presidential election was the first election in the world's largest Muslim democracy where social media played an important role. Social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, became a public forum where Indonesians debated about and framed the presidential candidates - Prabowo Subianto and Joko Widodo - in what was said to be the closest and most polarizing election in the nation's history. A content analysis of two partisan newspapers, two independent newspapers, and tweets showed that both legacy media and social media focused on the personality frame when describing the candidates. In legacy media the second most prevalent frame was experience, while on Twitter it was integrity. Religion remained an important factor in the election, as reflected in both media platforms, while ethnicity was considered less important. Social media became an integral part of Indonesia's nascent democracy, with the public examining the candidates' leadership qualities and integrity on Twitter. The independent newspapers were not neutral in covering the candidates, thus making social media even more relevant as a relatively free and impartial marketplace of ideas during the election. This study discusses how legacy media - both partisan and independent - and social media portrayed the candidates, where and why these platforms differed, and what it means for the future of journalism in Indonesia.

This research explored the nature of political campaigning in the digital era through a case study of the 2019 Indonesian presidential election campaign. The project studied how the incumbent President attempted to set the discussion agenda through his engagements with both Facebook and traditional news media, and the implications of the dynamics of this campaigning strategy for Indonesian democracy. The research showed that the President could use Facebook’s technological features and audience reach to influence public discussion and traditional news media agendas. It also found that journalists would act independently and often followed different agendas that influenced social media.

ABSTRACT Much scholarship exists examining the question of whether religious people follow the teachings of their faith. The findings of such studies vary markedly, with some concluding that religious belief can shape behaviour, while others find the faithful deviating from their religion's teachings in significant ways. This dissertation is a study of religious law, morality and political behaviour, specifically the willingness of Muslim legislative candidates to buy votes in Indonesian elections. The nexus between religion and vote buying is largely absent from the literature, a gap which this thesis seeks to fill. I investigate if Islam plays a role in limiting money politics. My starting point is to examine the rulings of Islamic scholars (fatwa) on vote buying to establish whether Islamic law is interpreted as disapproving of or even forbidding the practice. I analyse the fatwa of Indonesia's most important Islamic organisations, as well as the opinions of leading preachers. In theory, these rulings provide the normative framework for Muslim behaviour. The thesis then studies the individual piety and political actions of Muslim candidates. My concern is to measure the avowed or lived pietism of Muslim candidates and then assess whether they follow the fatwa of pre-eminent Islamic authorities on vote buying. In effect, I want to know what role Islamic leaders are wanting their religious teachings to have and then find out if this has any impact. At a time when many scholars write about the growing Islamisation of Indonesian society, such a study on vote buying offers an interesting insight into the extent or limitations of religion's ability to influence public life, in this case electoral behaviour. I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. First, I conducted in-depth interviews with 60 legislative candidates in the 2014 general elections, as well as more than a dozen electoral brokers and 30 other informants, ranging from ordinary voters to intellectuals and election authorities in 13 districts and cities in Kalimantan and Java. Second, I conducted a survey in 2015 involving 237 Muslim candidates in Banjarmasin and South Hulu Sungai (South Kalimantan), Padang (West Sumatera), and Jember (East Java). This dissertation finds a vast gap between the religious rulings on vote buying provided by leading Islamic authorities and the actual behaviour of Muslim candidates. Whereas most fatwa discourage or condemn vote buying, the overwhelming majority of my Muslim candidates engage in the practice. This dissertation also shows unexpected findings in both the moral acceptance of vote buying among Muslim candidates and their distribution of material inducements as a campaign strategy. One finding indicates that most Muslim candidates believe that vote buying is justified and that such an attitude is found across the spectrum of religiosity. Another finding shows that the majority of Muslim candidates use various forms of inducements. Importantly, those who score highly on religiosity are not immune to this tendency, as they tend to also use electoral inducements, especially ones with religious symbolism. Thus, for most religious candidates, the question is not whether to resort to money politics, but rather which type. Ultimately, I argue that religion is an unreliable and insignificant factor in combatting vote buying. Nonetheless, the thesis warns that we should not leap to judgements that Muslim candidates who claim piety but also buy votes are either hypocritical or impious. Often, they have considered reasons for engaging in money politics and dislike the practice. Similarly, although the fatwa of Islamic scholars may be seen as ineffectual, their concern is primarily to provide moral and jurisprudential guidance, not black letter law. In reality, religiosity is neither neat nor clear cut in its impact.

This study analyses the character and trajectory of Indonesia's welfare regime in which government welfare provisions trigger social conflict and are used for the practice of clientelism. The study focuses on four issues: the administrative arrangements of government social protection programs; the implication of the administrative arrangements for social conflict; the threat of conflict to social capital; and political manipulation of the arrangements for clientelism. This study selects subsidised rice (Raskin) and unconditional cash transfer (BLT) programs as the cases to understand these issues. The study employs mixed methods, with a qualitative approach as the main method. Prior to qualitative data analysis, this research looks at Governance and Decentralisation Survey and Indonesia Family Life Survey using descriptive statistical analysis. After the quantitative analysis, this study examines qualitative data, which covers newspapers, television news footages, previous related studies, government documents, and primary data. The primary data were collected through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The fieldwork data collection was conducted at national, district, and community levels. This study involved 117 key persons consisting of the former vice president, parliament members, government officers, districts mayors, non-government organisation activists, village heads, and social leaders. The analysis of the data shows that since 1998, Indonesia's welfare regime has been undergoing a transformation from a productivist welfare regime to a liberal-informal one. The transformation is shown by a growing role of the state in providing social protection for the poor and at the same time, the role of community in providing livelihood for people is still thriving. The growing role of the state was triggered under pressure by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank through establishing conditionality to provide social safety net to support structural adjustment programs. The welfare-regime transformation suffers from complicated social conflict. Both quantitative and qualitative data show that the BLT program stimulated social conflicts, protests, and destructive demonstrations. The conflict, which was a result of recurring discord triggered by the Raskin program, occurred because of poor administrative arrangements of the BLT program which led to a problematic mis-targeted distribution. The conflict eroded trust and weakened social networks threatening social capital. Besides generating social conflict, the Raskin and BLT programs also provoked clientelism, which emerge at national, district, and community levels. At the national level, the ruling party used BLT program for vote buying in the 2009 presidential elections. The party manipulated the administrative arrangement of BLT programs, eliminated widespread political refusal of the program, distributed BLT during political campaign period, and claimed it as the ruling party's benevolence to mobilise voters to obtain their votes. At district level, BLT program was used by district mayors to show their political loyalties and to bargain with political-party leaders to secure their office. At community level, village heads utilised both Raskin and BLT programs to reward people who voted for the village heads in the village-head elections and to keep their political loyalties for the next village-head elections. Keywords: welfare-regime transformation, social conflict, social capital, clientelism, vote buying

How many voters sell their votes in Indonesia? My PhD research starts with this question that has haunted scholars for the last 15 years. Using data from a nationally representative survey, which included an experimental survey, my study demonstrates that vote buying has become central to electoral mobilisation in Indonesia. If we use the highest estimate, one out of three Indonesians was personally exposed to vote buying in Indonesia’s most recent national election, making the country the site of the third-largest reported sum of exchange of money for votes in the world, as indicated by voter surveys taken over the last decade. My nationwide survey and massive dataset of local election surveys also show that, among other things, partisanship is a significant predictor of vote buying. The closer the ties of a voter to a political party, the more likely that voter is to receive offers of vote buying (or to be accepting of the practice). Puzzlingly, however, the number of partisan voters in Indonesia is comparatively small. Only 15 percent of my national survey respondents admitted being close to any political party and this limited number of party loyalist are highly contested among candidates from the same party in the context of Indonesia’s open-list proportional systems. When we connect partisanship and distributive politics, we arrive at the centre of a lively scholarly debate that involves two competing camps: the so-called core- versus swing-voter models. The former says vote buying when parties or candidates try to mobilise their core supporters, viewing the practice as being above all about increasing turnout. The latter interprets vote buying as an electoral strategy to sway uncommitted voters. What types of voters do Indonesian politicians target? At first glance, the data I collected from low-level candidates and brokers provide more proof in support of the core-voter strategy than in support of the swing-voter strategy. My in-depth interviews with high-level politicians also reinforce the notion that they prefer to target partisan voters in their vote buying operations. Yet my voter surveys clearly showed that although in relative terms such voters are more likely to be targeted, in absolute numbers vote buying mostly happens among non-partisans. How do we explain this combination of features —actors’ insistence that they are targeting partisan voters with the reality that they are mostly providing cash and gifts to non-partisans? This study proposes an addition to the scholarly debate between the core- versus swing-voter models by combining an emphasis on the core-voter strategy and reliance on personal networks. It argues that in Indonesia, candidates and brokers actually intend to target partisan voters, but in reality they mostly distribute benefits to voters who are politically rather indifferent, but who are embedded in personal networks through which they are connected to the candidate and their brokers. This study offers the concept of ‘personal loyalist’ strategy, which targets people identified through personal networks. While the personal loyalist model still recognises the importance of partisan voters, it highlights that candidates seek voters who are not only loyal to the party, but who are also, or instead, loyal to the individual candidate within that party. However, given that partisan voters are not only limited in number but also highly contested among competing co-partisan candidates in the context of the open-list system, politicians seek to expand their electoral base by making use of personal connections mediated by non-party brokers. Given their reliance on personal networks, most candidates and brokers typically misidentify non-partisans as loyalists because they misinterpret personal connections as partisan leanings. In addition, many of the people who are identified through personal networks mediated by brokers are in fact not even loyal to the candidate. Indeed, some of the brokers are themselves not particularly loyal. These two factors– confusion of personal connections with loyalty, and agency loss– in combination contribute to another element of vote buying in Indonesia which I identify in this study: the provision of payments to large numbers of uncommitted voters who receive benefits yet do not reciprocate with their votes. If vote buying is tremendously inefficient, how can vote buying have an effect on electoral behaviour? Why do candidates still do it? Utilising multiple data sources and various methods, I provide strong empirical evidence that gifts of money ‘only’ influenced the vote choice of roughly 10 percent to 11 percent of the total electorate. In these seemingly low numbers, however, lie the key to understanding vote buying’s attractiveness. Across Indonesia, the average margin of victory for successful candidates in legislative elections when defeating their party peers (i.e. candidates who were on the same party list) was only 1.65 percent. In this context of such highly competitive elections, candidates therefore enthusiastically pursued vote buying because they see that it can be critical for determining electoral outcomes. By showing that vote buying helps generate narrow but sufficient victory margins, my study explains how and why vote buying is so prevalent in Indonesia.

It has long been noted that low district magnitudes tend to produce consolidated party systems. Between 1999 and 2004, Indonesia considerably reduced its district magnitude, yet experienced a significant increase in party fragmentation. Why did Indonesia's party system fragment under institutional pressure to consolidate? This thesis demonstrates that district magnitude did not affect the fragmentation of the legislative vote in Indonesia. The cause of the increased party fragmentation was the introduction of direct presidential elections. Aspiring presidential candidates bypassed the established party system and introduced their own parties as presidential vehicles in the legislative election. Voters also used their ballots to express different preferences in the legislative and executive elections, supporting inclusive leaders that could guarantee national unity in the presidential election and smaller ideological or sectarian parties in the legislative contest. The introduction of presidential vehicles combined with voters' increased willingness to support non-presidential parties effectively explain the increase in party fragmentation.
Arts, Faculty of
Political Science, Department of
Graduate

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
東亞學系
104
In 2014, Basuki Cahaya Purnama (popularly known as Ahok) was inaugurated as the first governor with Tionghoa ethnicity in the post-Soeharto era. His case not only marks the milestone of Tionghoa’s political participation in Indonesia, but also inspires more Tionghoa to engage in the local politics, with the aim of maintaining their social status and rights. Nevertheless, while Tionghoa enthusiastically participate in the local politics by means of establishing political parties, being upheld by mainstream parties for representative elections, or running for local elections, there are still some people in the public who do not recognize Tionghoa’s identity and their political participation. Therefore, with companion of recent advocacy to strive for self-identity, the Indonesian-Tionghoa can leap at the chance, through the approach of political participation in the democratic electoral system, to gain the preliminary identity from local society, and gradually achieve identity in other aspects. By analyzing the facts of Indonesian-Tionghoa’s political participation after the fall of Soeharto, this research firstly shows that running for elections of local chief executives has steadily become the trend for Tionghoa’s political participation. Moreover, with netnography as the method of data collecting for further analysis, the ideology of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) has been rooted in the public’s mind since several significant cases, discriminating Basuki’s Tionghoa identity, are denounced by most people in their comments. Accordingly, more people in Indonesia can also accept Tionghoa, as national citizens, to engage in local politics. Therefore, it is shown in these case analyses that Tionghoa’s political participation is not only the way to sustain their development, but also the entry point to obtain identity from the local public. Although Tionghoa still need to be more active in political participation with facing internal and external hampers, they may be benefited from interaction brought by more Tionghoa’s political participation, which enhances both their self-identity bound and the identity from the society. To sum up, this exploratory research concludes that Indonesian-Tionghoa should seize the opportunity to strive for identity from the public by political participation, which gives Tionghoa a potential approach to stimulating their interaction with the local public and other dimensions of identity from the latter, so as to embody the values disclosed in the national ideology, Pancasila and Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.