Money, Power, and Ideology: Political Parties in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia

Chapter 7: Assessing the Systemic Functionality of Indonesian Parties: Recruitment, Articulation, Participation, Communication

192 Money, Power, and Ideology 192 7 Assessing the Systemic Functionality of Indonesian Parties Recruitment, Articulation, Participation, Communication Discussing the level of institutionalization, cartelization, and ideological diversification of parties in a particular polity delivers invaluable insights into the nature of a country’s party politics. Hence, the book’s previous chapters have used these approaches to analyze post-authoritarian party politics in Indonesia. However, while such paradigms allow us to classify parties as strongly or poorly institutionalized , heavily or marginally cartelized, and so forth, they often circumvent a more vital question: that is, do parties carry out the functions that citizens and scholars alike can realistically expect them to perform? For example, although some scholars imply that weakly institutionalized parties are dysfunctional, there is no immediate correlation between institutionalization and functionality. It is possible , for instance, for a strongly institutionalized party to be so dominant in a party system that it sees no need to act as an agent of interest articulation. In the same vein, cartelization scholars assume that high levels of cartelization automatically translate into poor party functionality, but this is not necessarily so. Even strongly cartelized parties could still execute some or even all party functions. Finally, the degree of a party system’s ideological partisanship does not say much about the functionality of its parties. While most Assessing the Systemic Functionality of Indonesian Parties 193 scholars agree that some extent of politico-conceptual partisanship is healthy (Dix 1989; Torcal and Mainwaring 2003; Bonilla et al. 2011), excessive ideological fragmentation can render a party system dysfunctional. Some authors, however, have made party functionality a major focus of their research. Webb and White (2007: 13), for example, introduced the “systemic functionality of political parties” as an important level of analysis, complementing their discussions of party legitimacy and organizational strength. In concrete terms, Webb and White look at four areas of party functionality: governance and political recruitment; interest articulation and aggregation; political participation; and political communication and education. In each of these sectors, they test parties in the new democracies of Latin America and Eastern Europe against a select set of indicators. In doing so, they make qualitative judgments on factors that neither the institutionalization nor the cartelization school has paid sufficient attention to. Significantly, they conduct their evaluations against the background of an earlier research project on parties in advanced democracies (Webb, Farrell, and Holiday 2002), allowing them to build analytical bridges between the research on established and new democratic polities. Consequently, Webb and White’s analytical tools seem perfectly suited for a study on party politics in Indonesia — especially one that tries to locate this subject within the context of global and regional trends. In particular, their warning that no democracy — anywhere — has parties that fully satisfy all criteria of systemic functionality sits well with the assertion of this book that the deficiencies of Indonesian parties are not only due to the country’s patrimonial culture, but also reflect universal patterns. Thus, this chapter uses Webb and White’s four levels of analysis to assess the functionality of Indonesian parties. The first section focuses on their role in elite recruitment and governance. It evaluates the degree to which parties are involved in the selection of political leaders, have control over government, and maintain the solidity of their legislative caucuses. In the second section, I discuss to what extent Indonesian parties have accomplished their task of interest articulation and aggregation. In this regard, it especially considers “whether single-issue group and social movement activity rivals or outweighs that of parties in articulating social group interests” (Webb and White 2007: 15). The third part of the chapter concentrates on parties’ efforts to mobilize citizens for political causes. Participation 194 Money, Power, and Ideology in elections is only one aspect of this discussion — the impact of parties on grassroots activities is equally important. Finally, the fourth section considers the mechanisms through which Indonesian parties try to communicate with and educate the population at large — a hard task in times of universally shrinking party membership. Generally, the chapter finds that while there is a host of deficiencies in the way Indonesian parties function, it is difficult to argue that they are dysfunctional. Like their counterparts in other new democracies , Indonesian parties have struggled to stem the rise of nonparty actors in political society — so far, however, none of these players has been able to replace the former as the...