Indonesia: Democracy and the Promise of Good Governance

3. Electoral and Political Party Reform

41 3 Electoral and Political Party Reform Benjamin Reilly Political parties are a crucial part of democratic political systems. With Indonesia’s return to democracy in 1999, operational controls on political parties and the ban on the establishment of new parties were lifted. Subsequent electoral reform was designed to reshape the party system by encouraging fewer, larger, parties. This chapter looks at this process from a comparative perspective, situating the Indonesian reforms in a broader Asian context. It also attempts to answer some basic questions about institutional reform. What are the trade-offs inherent in different electoral rules and party system configurations? Where does the Indonesian party system sit within the spectrum of party systems around the world? And how do trends in Indonesia compare with those elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region? Democratisation and Political Reform The number of East Asian regimes that can be considered to meet the basic Schumpeterian definition of democracy—governments chosen through open and competitive elections—has snowballed over the past 20 years (Schumpeter 1947: 269). While at the end of the Cold War only Japan could lay claim to being an ‘established’ East Asian democracy, the years since then have ushered in a new era of liberalisation and democratisation across the region (Lijphart 1999). Major transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy began with the popular uprising against the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the negotiated transitions from autocratic governments in South Korea and Taiwan in 1987. They continued with the resumption of civilian rule in Thailand in 1992; the 42   Benjamin Reilly UN intervention in Cambodia in 1993; the fall of Indonesia’s Soeharto regime in 1998; and the international rehabilitation of East Timor which culminated in 2001. While the 2006 coup in Thailand was a clear step backwards, today more East Asian governments are chosen through democratic processes than ever before. Indonesia, the largest of these new democracies, has now experienced several peaceful transitions of power since the end of the Soeharto era. Using Samuel Huntington’s ‘two-turnover test’ of democratic consolidation —that consolidation may be said to occur when the party or group that takes power in an initial election loses a subsequent election and turns over power, and those election winners then peacefully turn over power to the winners of a later election—then Indonesia (along with South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand) clearly passes this minimal test of democracy (Huntington 1991: 266–7). But while Indonesia has had four turnovers of power since the fall of the Soeharto regime, only one of these—the election of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2004—has come as a direct result of the electoral process. A more sober assessment of democratic consolidation thus suggests that Indonesia should probably be viewed as an emerging democracy. Despite rapid progress, Indonesian democracy cannot yet be said to be truly consolidated , in the sense of democracy being considered the ‘only game in town’ and any reversion from it unthinkable. Nonetheless Indonesia has clearly made great strides in a relatively short period of time, especially if a minimalist, Schumpeterian definition of electoral democracy is used. In this chapter, I argue that democratisation in much of East Asia, including Indonesia, has opened up opportunities for political elites to engage in overt ‘political engineering’—that is, the conscious design or redesign of political institutions to achieve specific objectives. In East Asia in general and Indonesia in particular, incumbent politicians have sought to engineer more consolidated, aggregative and stable democratic systems while simultaneously limiting potential challengers to the established political order. The emergence of this distinctive regional model of institutional design has been facilitated by deliberate reform strategies whereby the region’s electoral democracies have sought to transform the way their political systems operate in order to achieve certain specified outcomes—more stable government, for instance, or stronger political parties.  Indonesia’s first democratically chosen president, Abdurrahman Wahid, was elected by the members of parliament, not through a mass suffrage election. His successor, Megawati Soekarnoputri, inherited the position when Abdurrahaman was forced from office in 2001.  This is the definition suggested by Przeworski (1991). Electoral and Political Party Reform   43 This chapter examines the impact of these changes of political architecture —‘the complex of rules that make up the constitutional structure and party system’ (MacIntyre 2003: 4)—across the new democracies of East Asia. Drawing on a book-length study (Reilly 2006), I...