Indonesian Electoral Behaviour: A Statistical Perspective

8 Culture and Electoral Behaviour: Testing Religious and Ethnic Loyalties

CULTURE AND ELECTORAL BEHAVIOUR 367 367 8 Culture and Electoral Behaviour Testing Religious and Ethnic Loyalties Most qualitative studies of Indonesian elections (including the 1999 election) show that religion and ethnicity played significant roles in influencing, if not determining, electoral behaviour. In this chapter, we use statistical methods to test whether there were such relationships/ associations in the 1999 election. Since there are commonly held notions that there are dichotomies between Muslims vs non-Muslims, Javanese vs non-Javanese, and Java vs the Outer Islands, we have decided to use these as a basis for our enquiry. We investigate whether variations in the numbers of Muslims and Javanese at the district level can explain the variation in the number of votes for each of the seven largest parties in the 1999 election. We further study whether the Muslims were likely to choose Islamic parties (the PPP, PBB, or PK), while non-Muslims preferred to vote for Pancasila parties (the PDI-P, Golkar, PKB, and PAN). The Islamic parties were practically never chosen by the non-Muslims, because the Islamic parties were clearly for the Muslims. The Muslims, however, could vote for either an Islamic or a Pancasila party. It should be noted again that some minor parties which officially declared themselves to be based on the Pancasila may have been perceived by the voters as Christian parties. These include the Partai Katolik Demokrat (PKD — Democratic Catholic Party), the Partai Kristen Nasional (KRISNA — National 368 INDONESIAN ELECTORAL BEHAVIOUR Christian Party), and the Partai Demokrasi Kasih Bangsa (PDKB — Love the Nation Democratic Party). Nevertheless, we do not include them in this chapter as we focus on the seven major parties at the national level. These and other small parties (including Islamic ones) are referred to in Chapters 6 and 7. In this chapter, we also examine whether the Javanese preferred to vote for ethnic Javanese-based parties (PDI-P and PKB), while nonJavanese opted for the non-Javanese parties (Golkar, PPP, PBB, and PK). PAN can be considered either a Javanese or non-Javanese-based party.1 It should be noted that no party officially declared its ethnic orientation: the “Javanese” and “non-Javanese” association of the parties simply reflect popular perceptions. As mentioned in Chapter 1, a number of studies on Indonesian elections have identified various socio-cultural influences on voting behaviour in the1999 and earlier elections. Here we focus on two cultural variables, religion and ethnicity. We measure religion with a variable denoted as RELIGION, referring to the number of Muslims in a district; ethnicity with a variable named as ETHNICITY, referring to the number of Javanese in a district. The dependent variable is VOTE, referring to the number of votes for each of the seven parties in a district. We ran the statistical analyses for each of them separately. Because a significant simple association between dependent and independent variables does not necessarily mean that the two have a relationship, we control the association between VOTE for each party on the one hand and RELIGION and ETHNICITY on the other, with other independent variables. We examined whether the association between VOTE and RELIGION or ETHNICITY could be explained by differences in some socio-economic variables. Therefore, we applied a multiple regression analysis using all available independent variables. During the selection of the variables, we excluded variables with coefficients having more than 10% significance of t statistic, but the significant effect of a variable is determined at t value of, at most, 5% significance. The socio-economic variables consist of URBANITE (urban population), LOW-ED (population aged 10 years old and above with primary school education or no education), HIGH-ED (population aged 10 years old and above with at least senior high school education), MIGRANT (population aged 5 years and over who are migrants), POVERTY (population under the poverty line), and INCOME (per capita gross domestic product).2 CULTURE AND ELECTORAL BEHAVIOUR 369 Because of the importance of regional differences — especially between Java and the Outer Islands — in Indonesian politics and socioeconomic development, we also include a dummy variable to capture the geographic cleavages. To better examine the different impact of religion and ethnicity across the regions, we also ran the statistical equations for Java separately from those for the Outer Islands. 8.1 Religious Loyalty Indonesia Our findings, presented in Table 8.1, show that RELIGION had a negative coefficient for the PDI-P, implying that the...