Marcus Mietzner
Biographic Data
| ID | 729151 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus Mietzner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus |
| FAMILY NAME | Mietzner |
| SIGNATURE | MIETZNER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8086-0830 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 493 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The limits of autocratisation in Indonesia
How does democracy survive in a polity that has witnessed consistent autocratisation trends for an extended period of time?In Indonesia, new patterns of autocratisation and broader democratic decline emerged in the late 2000s, but unlike some of its Southeast Asian neighbours, the country has not crossed over into the territory of full-fledged autocracy.This article argues that two interrelated factors explain this outcome: first, power was so wi…
Flirting with Autocracy in Indonesia
After ruling Indonesia for a decade, Joko Widodo (or popularly called "Jokowi") left the presidency in 2024 amid a heated debate over his democratic record. While his high approval ratings indicated support in the broader population, pro-democracy activists were scathing. Indeed, under his presidency, many democratic achievements of previous periods eroded. Yet democracy, however damaged, survived Jokowi's rule. This article adds to scholarship o…
Jokowi's Pyrrhic Victory
Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) is one of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute"s flagship publications. Now in its fourth decade of publication, CSEA has succeeded in building up an international reputation as one of Southeast Asia"s premier academic journals. The aim of the peer reviewed journal is to provide subscribers with up to date and in-depth analysis of critical trends and developments in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.…
Elite Collusion in Indonesia
After a largely successful post-authoritarian transition, Indonesia has experienced democratic backsliding since the 2010s. This backsliding accelerated under the presidency of Joko Widodo (2014-2024), but it has not yet pushed the Indonesian polity into a full-blown autocracy. I argue that Indonesia's specific pathway to democratic backsliding prefigured this outcome. While elites have colluded to share power and allow the president to engage in…
Democracy and Military Oversight in Crisis
In 1998, Indonesia endeavoured to civilianise its defence department after decades of military-dominated rule. This civilianisation project was widely seen as a crucial element of democratisation itself. But the initiative ended in disillusionment: by 2014, the ministry was again placed under a conservative former general, and in 2019, it came under the control of Prabowo Subianto, an ambitious ex-military leader with strong ties to the pre-1998 …
Elite opposition and popular rejection
In recent years, there has been an increasing body of scholarship analyzing the conditions under which incumbent presidents can launch successful attempts to evade existing term limits. It has generally been found that if presidents use multi-strategy approaches, the probability of their success is high. Failure of term limit evasion, on the other hand, is typically ascribed to opposition by judges or to popular disapproval. The case of Indonesia…
Young Soeharto
Cleavages and Electoral Support to Islamist Party in Javan Urban Areas
Several studies have noted that electoral support for one of the Islamist parties in Indonesia, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), is mostly concentrated in urban areas. While I agree with this observation, I found that these studies did not pay adequate attention to the diversity of socio-political conditions in urban areas that contributed to the varying electoral support for PKS. One of these socio-political conditions is what Lipset and Rokk…
Democratic Deconsolidation in Southeast Asia
Since the mid-2000s, the quality of democracy around the world has been in decline, and Southeast Asia is no exception. This Element analyzes the extent, patterns and drivers of democratic deconsolidation in the three Southeast Asian countries that boast the longest history of electoral democracy in the region: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. While the exact deconsolidation outcomes differ, all three nations have witnessed similar trends…
Indonesia in 2020
“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is…
Sources of resistance to democratic decline
Amidst a global wave of democratic regression, civil society has often been the last line of defence against campaigns to undermine liberal rights and freedoms. In many cases, society activists have been able to mitigate, or even arrest, anti-democratic initiatives launched by political elites with a host of vested interests. But some countries have recently seen a weakening of this democracy defence potential embedded in civil society. Using Ind…
Populist Anti-Scientism, Religious Polarisation, and Institutionalised Corruption
There is widespread agreement that compared to most other states in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s central government has offered a poor response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The government of President Joko Widodo initially ignored the threat, and when it did react, the crisis policies were piecemeal and confusing. But what explains this outcome? It would be easy to attribute Indonesia’s response to its lower middle-income s…
Rival populisms and the democratic crisis in Indonesia
Viewed as a stable democracy for much of the 2000s and early 2010s, Indonesia has in recent years been part of the global populist surge. In fact, national politics has been marked by competition between three rival populist streams: chauvinism, Islamism and technocratic developmentalism. This article discusses the conditions under which such a three-track populism could emerge in Indonesia. In identifying the drivers of populism, it points to th…
The Myth of Pluralism
In much of the scholarly literature, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, is recognized as a defender of religious tolerance and pluralism. This is to no small extent the result of how NU has portrayed itself and its actions-including during the 2019 presidential elections, when it professed to have aligned with incumbent president Joko Widodo in order to keep Islamist groups from power. In this article, we analyse …
Authoritarian innovations in Indonesia
In the last decade, autocrats and democrats alike have used a wide range of innovative illiberal methods to cement or expand their power. Especially in democracies, however, these techniques have often been difficult to detect as they are typically packaged as acts of democracy defense, not erosion. This article discusses the deployment of authoritarian innovations in Indonesia, where the elite as a collective, the opposition and the executive ea…
Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox
Indonesia’s 2019 elections confirmed both the country’s status as a competitive electoral democracy and the trend of decreasing democratic quality. In this article, we investigate this seemingly paradoxical pattern by highlighting four political arenas directly associated with the elections. First, the incumbent government’s failure to secure a larger margin of victory for President Jokowi highlights the continued competitiveness of the electoral…
Analyzing Indonesia’s Populist Electorate
Using original survey data, we test the level, distribution, and demographic patterns of populist attitudes in Indonesia. Populist attitudes are widely spread across the political spectrum; disproportionately high in the middle and upper classes; and particularly robust when coupled with other primary ideologies, such as Islamism and secularism
Southeast Asia's Troubling Elections
Though pluralism and democracy are generally seen as being mutually supportive, recent developments in Indonesia suggest that they can also be in tension. Over the last five years, an old social cleavage separating pluralists from Islamists has been reactivated. In the 2019 presidential election, the incumbent, Joko Widodo, won by increasing support from religious minorities and traditionalist Muslims; his authoritarian-populist challenger, Prabo…
Explaining the 2016 Islamist Mobilisation in Indonesia
There has been an intense scholarly debate about what caused the unprecedented Islamist mass demonstrations in Indonesia in late 2016. Some scholars have argued that increasing intolerance and conservatism among the Muslim population are responsible, while others have disputed such notions, claiming that there is no evidence of widespread support for an Islamist agenda. In this article, we analyse a unique set of polling data to show that a) cons…
Authoritarian elections, state capacity, and performance legitimacy
Political scientists have recently debated the extent to which strong state capacity helps authoritarian regimes to win elections and extend their rule. This article proposes that it is not only important to disaggregate the various forms of state capacity mobilized for that purpose, but also to analyze the sequence with which autocracies deploy them. Using Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia as a case study, I argue that regimes mobilize dif…
Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism
The global rise of populist campaigns against democratic governments has revived the long-standing scholarly debate on how democracies can best defend themselves against anti-democratic challenges. While some view an aggressive militant democracy approach as the most effective option, others propose accommodation of populist actors and voters. Others again suggest a merging of the two paradigms. This article analyzes how the government of Indones…
Entrepreneurs of Grievance
There has been much scholarly debate on the causes and effects of Islamist mobilizations. As some authors involved in this debate have identified rising Islamist attitudes \namong Muslims as a main cause of Islamist mobilizations, our study advances detailed research of opinion survey data as the best methodology to verify or falsify this assertion. Discussing the case of Indonesia, we use original survey data sets to show that prior to the 2016 …
Indonesia in 2016
During his second year in power, Indonesian President Joko Widodo faced contradictory yet interrelated trends: while he consolidated his grip over parliament and improved his approval ratings, the president’s remaining opponents shifted the focus of political contestation from the state’s institutions onto the streets. Additionally burdened by economic uncertainty and rising regional tensions over the South China Sea, Indonesian democracy thus co…
Checkbook Elections?
Indonesia provides an illuminating example of a political finance regime whose most important feature is its habitual abuse. The illusion of an effective regulatory regime is a facade behind which parties and candidates collect almost limitless donations and turn to oligarchs to get involved in their political parties: this is particular acute after the effective deregulation of political parties with the huge reduction in state subsidies to part…
Reinventing Asian Populism
Around the globe, populists have used the decline of established political parties and widespread societal fears of globalization to launch increasingly successful electoral campaigns. Indonesia is no exception. In the 2014 presidential elections, two populists even competed against each other--albeit with vastly different concepts of populism. Prabowo Subianto, the wealthy former son-in-law of ex-autocrat Suharto, offered a classic populist para…
Indonesia's democratic stagnation
As Egypt and Tunisia begin difficult democratic transitions, comparative political scientists have pointed to the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, as a role model. Seen as a stand-out exception from the global recession of democracy in the pre-2011 period, Indonesia has been praised as an example of a stable post-authoritarian polity. But a closer look at Indonesia's record in recent years reveals that its democratization is stagnating. …
Explaining the 2016 Islamist Mobilisation in Indonesia
There has been an intense scholarly debate about what caused the unprecedented Islamist mass demonstrations in Indonesia in late 2016. Some scholars have argued that increasing intolerance and conservatism among the Muslim population are responsible, while others have disputed such notions, claiming that there is no evidence of widespread support for an Islamist agenda. In this article, we analyse a unique set of polling data to show that a) cons…
Southeast Asia's Troubling Elections
Though pluralism and democracy are generally seen as being mutually supportive, recent developments in Indonesia suggest that they can also be in tension. Over the last five years, an old social cleavage separating pluralists from Islamists has been reactivated. In the 2019 presidential election, the incumbent, Joko Widodo, won by increasing support from religious minorities and traditionalist Muslims; his authoritarian-populist challenger, Prabo…
Sources of resistance to democratic decline
Amidst a global wave of democratic regression, civil society has often been the last line of defence against campaigns to undermine liberal rights and freedoms. In many cases, society activists have been able to mitigate, or even arrest, anti-democratic initiatives launched by political elites with a host of vested interests. But some countries have recently seen a weakening of this democracy defence potential embedded in civil society. Using Ind…
Authoritarian innovations in Indonesia
In the last decade, autocrats and democrats alike have used a wide range of innovative illiberal methods to cement or expand their power. Especially in democracies, however, these techniques have often been difficult to detect as they are typically packaged as acts of democracy defense, not erosion. This article discusses the deployment of authoritarian innovations in Indonesia, where the elite as a collective, the opposition and the executive ea…
Fighting the Hellhounds
In the literature on post-Suharto Indonesia, an increasingly dominant stream has portrayed the political system as being hijacked by predatory elite interests associated with the fallen New Order regime. While such characterisations describe important elements of the post-1998 polity, they do not tell the full story. At the same time that patronage-driven career politicians have staked their claims in the newly democratic state, a large number of…
Indonesia's 2014 Elections
This article discusses the 2014 presidential elections in Indonesia, which saw a strong populist challenge launched against the country’s young democracy. Prabowo Subianto, the former son-in-law of longtime autocrat Suharto, promised to roll back many of the democratic reforms of the last 15 years. Prabowo came within a hair’s breadth of winning the presidency, but ultimately lost out to Joko Widodo, a political newcomer from Central Java. The ar…
Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism
The global rise of populist campaigns against democratic governments has revived the long-standing scholarly debate on how democracies can best defend themselves against anti-democratic challenges. While some view an aggressive militant democracy approach as the most effective option, others propose accommodation of populist actors and voters. Others again suggest a merging of the two paradigms. This article analyzes how the government of Indones…
Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox
Indonesia’s 2019 elections confirmed both the country’s status as a competitive electoral democracy and the trend of decreasing democratic quality. In this article, we investigate this seemingly paradoxical pattern by highlighting four political arenas directly associated with the elections. First, the incumbent government’s failure to secure a larger margin of victory for President Jokowi highlights the continued competitiveness of the electoral…
Populist Anti-Scientism, Religious Polarisation, and Institutionalised Corruption
There is widespread agreement that compared to most other states in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s central government has offered a poor response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The government of President Joko Widodo initially ignored the threat, and when it did react, the crisis policies were piecemeal and confusing. But what explains this outcome? It would be easy to attribute Indonesia’s response to its lower middle-income s…
Party Financing in Post-Soeharto Indonesia
Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs - Volume 29, Number 2, August 2007
Comparing Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto era
This article compares Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto period. It explores the question of why the party system of the 1950s collapsed quickly, while that of the contemporary polity appears stable. Challenging established assumptions that party systems fail if their individual parties are weakly institutionalised, I submit that the fundamental difference between the party politics of the 1950s and today's democratic sys…
Coercing Loyalty
Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs - Volume 38, Number 2, August 2016
Rival populisms and the democratic crisis in Indonesia
Viewed as a stable democracy for much of the 2000s and early 2010s, Indonesia has in recent years been part of the global populist surge. In fact, national politics has been marked by competition between three rival populist streams: chauvinism, Islamism and technocratic developmentalism. This article discusses the conditions under which such a three-track populism could emerge in Indonesia. In identifying the drivers of populism, it points to th…
Indonesian Politics in 2014
Indonesian democracy experienced a near miss in 2014, when Jakarta governor \nJoko Widodo (Jokowi) defeated former general Prabowo Subianto by a margin \nof 6.3% in the presidential election. Both candidates were populists who rose to \nprominence in the context of public disillusionment with incumbent president Yudhoyono; \nPrabowo, however, condemned Indonesia’s democratic system and promised \nto take Indonesia in a more authoritarian directio…
Political Conflict Resolution and Democratic Consolidation in Indonesia
This article argues that Indonesia's Constitutional Court has played a significant role in that country's transformation from a violence-prone polity into Southeast Asia's most stable democracy. The Court has advanced institutional conflict resolution mechanisms and expanded democratic rights—two achievements identified by Linz and Stepan as major indicators of a consolidating democracy. Building on models developed by Ginsburg and Horowitz, my a…
Political opinion polling in post-authoritarian Indonesia
The introduction of democratic elections in Indonesia after the downfall of Soeharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998 has triggered intensive scholarly debates about the competitiveness, credibility and representativeness of these ballots. The main focus of such discussions has understandably been on the primary actors in the elections - parties, individual candidates and voters. But this concentration on voting behaviour and electoral ou…
Entrepreneurs of Grievance
There has been much scholarly debate on the causes and effects of Islamist mobilizations. As some authors involved in this debate have identified rising Islamist attitudes \namong Muslims as a main cause of Islamist mobilizations, our study advances detailed research of opinion survey data as the best methodology to verify or falsify this assertion. Discussing the case of Indonesia, we use original survey data sets to show that prior to the 2016 …
Authoritarian elections, state capacity, and performance legitimacy
Political scientists have recently debated the extent to which strong state capacity helps authoritarian regimes to win elections and extend their rule. This article proposes that it is not only important to disaggregate the various forms of state capacity mobilized for that purpose, but also to analyze the sequence with which autocracies deploy them. Using Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia as a case study, I argue that regimes mobilize dif…
The limits of autocratisation in Indonesia
How does democracy survive in a polity that has witnessed consistent autocratisation trends for an extended period of time?In Indonesia, new patterns of autocratisation and broader democratic decline emerged in the late 2000s, but unlike some of its Southeast Asian neighbours, the country has not crossed over into the territory of full-fledged autocracy.This article argues that two interrelated factors explain this outcome: first, power was so wi…
Analyzing Indonesia’s Populist Electorate
Using original survey data, we test the level, distribution, and demographic patterns of populist attitudes in Indonesia. Populist attitudes are widely spread across the political spectrum; disproportionately high in the middle and upper classes; and particularly robust when coupled with other primary ideologies, such as Islamism and secularism
Ideology, Money and Dynastic Leadership
Most comparative theorists of democracy have described Asia's political parties as highly personalized, weakly rooted and ideologically hollow. Indonesia has not been exempted from this assessment, with many authors identifying parties as the weakest link in the country's young democracy. But a more systematic analysis of Indonesian parties offers a different perspective. This article uses analytical tools developed by Paul Webb and Stephen White…
Elite opposition and popular rejection
In recent years, there has been an increasing body of scholarship analyzing the conditions under which incumbent presidents can launch successful attempts to evade existing term limits. It has generally been found that if presidents use multi-strategy approaches, the probability of their success is high. Failure of term limit evasion, on the other hand, is typically ascribed to opposition by judges or to popular disapproval. The case of Indonesia…
A Tale of Two Courts
This article examines the judicialization of electoral politics in Asia, an important but understudied trend, as demonstrated in Thailand and Indonesia. Though the constitutional courts in both have similar histories and institutional arrangements, their electoral interventions vary radically. We argue that the diffusion or concentration of power among post‐transition elites determines whether the effect of judicial activism will be to shore up o…
Successful and failed democratic transitions from military rule in majority Muslim societies
As majority Muslim societies with significant minorities and dominant militaries, Indonesia and Egypt experienced strikingly similar political trajectories between the early 1950s and the late 1990s. Yet, their respective democratic transitions have seen
Democratising Indonesia
Party Financing in Post-Soeharto Indonesia
Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs - Volume 29, Number 2, August 2007
Military Politics, Islam and the State in Indonesia
Based on a decade of research in Indonesia, this book provides an in-depth account of the military's struggle to adapt to the new democratic system after the downfall of Suharto's authoritarian regime in 1998. Unlike other studies of the Indonesian armed forces, which focus exclusively on internal military developments, Mietzner's study emphasizes the importance of conflicts among civilians in determining the extent of military involvement in pol…
Soldiers, Parties and Bureaucrats
This article discusses illicit fund-raising efforts in Indonesia's armed forces, political parties and bureaucracy after the fall of Suharto in 1998. It argues that while personal self-enrichment remains a key motivation for military leaders, party politicians and bureaucrats to collect off-budget funds, there are also other crucial factors. Most importantly, all three sectors aim to control independent funds in order to maintain or strengthen th…
Comparing Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto era
This article compares Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto period. It explores the question of why the party system of the 1950s collapsed quickly, while that of the contemporary polity appears stable. Challenging established assumptions that party systems fail if their individual parties are weakly institutionalised, I submit that the fundamental difference between the party politics of the 1950s and today's democratic sys…
Indonesia in 2008
Indonesia's political and socio-economic developments in 2008 were marked by two contradictory trends. On the one hand, the process of democratic consolidation continued, with Indonesia further strengthening its political institutions, making progress in its anti-corruption drive and generally maintaining healthy economic growth. Indeed, with very low levels of political and communal violence, Indonesia in 2008 appeared like a bulwark of stabilit…
Indonesia in 2008
Indonesia in 2008 presented an apparent paradox: despite generally strong political and economic performance indicators, the popularity of President Yudhoyono's government fluctuated wildly. As campaigning for the 2009 elections began, Yudhoyono's solid lead evaporated, although he recovered toward the end of 2008. The opposition, however, remains divided
Political opinion polling in post-authoritarian Indonesia
The introduction of democratic elections in Indonesia after the downfall of Soeharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998 has triggered intensive scholarly debates about the competitiveness, credibility and representativeness of these ballots. The main focus of such discussions has understandably been on the primary actors in the elections - parties, individual candidates and voters. But this concentration on voting behaviour and electoral ou…
Funding pilkada
One of the most intriguing features of illegal activity in Indonesia's post-Suharto state has been the unashamed 'transparency' with which political actors have violated existing laws and regulations. This chapter discusses illegal campaign financing in Indonesia's direct local elections (pilkada), which have seen a particularly high level of unreported donations from lobbyists and wealthy entrepreneurs. It approaches the issue of illicit financi…
Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia
Alternately lauded as a democratic success story and decried as a flawed democracy, Indonesia deserves serious consideration by anyone concerned with the global state of democracy. Yet, more than ten years after the collapse of the authoritarian Suharto regime, we still know little about how the key institutions of Indonesian democracy actually function. This book, written by leading democracy experts and scholars of Indonesia, presents a sorely …
Political Conflict Resolution and Democratic Consolidation in Indonesia
This article argues that Indonesia's Constitutional Court has played a significant role in that country's transformation from a violence-prone polity into Southeast Asia's most stable democracy. The Court has advanced institutional conflict resolution mechanisms and expanded democratic rights—two achievements identified by Linz and Stepan as major indicators of a consolidating democracy. Building on models developed by Ginsburg and Horowitz, my a…
Indonesia in 2009
Indonesia in 2009 witnessed the election of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to his second and final term in office. Rebounding from an all-time low in the opinion polls in mid-2008, Yudhoyono beat his opponents by initiating cleverly timed welfare programs for the poor and providing prudent leadership in the global economic crisis. Ten years after the end of autocratic rule, Indonesia has rather surprisingly established itself as Southeast Asi…
Overcoming Path Dependence
Theorists of civil-military relations have for long tried to identify the specific factors that lead to weak civilian control of the armed forces in some countries and very strong oversight regimes in others. While some authors highlight the importance of structural factors (such as the level of economic modernization), others point to the crucial role of personal agency (i.e., the quality and characteristics of leadership). Obviously, some form …
Autonomy and ethnic conflict in South and South-East Asia
Yudhoyono's Legacy between Stability and Stagnation
“Founded in 1974, Southeast Asian Affairs provides, without fear or favour, informed and in-depth annual analyses of this vibrant region and its component countries. It is the only publication which does this and is in its own class without peers. It is a mandatory reference and read for those seriously interested in knowing Southeast Asia.”—Professor A.B. Shamsul, Founding Director, Institute of Ethnic Studies, Universiti Bebangsaan Malaysia.“No…
Ideology, Money and Dynastic Leadership
Most comparative theorists of democracy have described Asia's political parties as highly personalized, weakly rooted and ideologically hollow. Indonesia has not been exempted from this assessment, with many authors identifying parties as the weakest link in the country's young democracy. But a more systematic analysis of Indonesian parties offers a different perspective. This article uses analytical tools developed by Paul Webb and Stephen White…
Political Resurgence of the Military in Southeast Asia
A Tale of Two Courts
This article examines the judicialization of electoral politics in Asia, an important but understudied trend, as demonstrated in Thailand and Indonesia. Though the constitutional courts in both have similar histories and institutional arrangements, their electoral interventions vary radically. We argue that the diffusion or concentration of power among post‐transition elites determines whether the effect of judicial activism will be to shore up o…
Indonesia's democratic stagnation
As Egypt and Tunisia begin difficult democratic transitions, comparative political scientists have pointed to the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, as a role model. Seen as a stand-out exception from the global recession of democracy in the pre-2011 period, Indonesia has been praised as an example of a stable post-authoritarian polity. But a closer look at Indonesia's record in recent years reveals that its democratization is stagnating. …
Coups, military consolidation and redemocratisation in South-East Asia and the Pacific
Military interventions break the rules. They require the mobilisation of men and materiel, alongside a commitment to rapid action and often violence, in the pursuit of an abrupt, illegal political
Praetorian rule and redemocratisation in South-East Asia and the Pacific Islands
Indonesia is an almost ideal case study to test a variety of explanatory propositions for the rise and fall of military regimes. Over the course of 50 years, Indonesia has witnessed a military takeover, the consolidation of praetorian rule, the toppling of a military-backed autocrat and the marginalisation of the armed forces from politics after democracy took hold. The analysis of these four periods delivers important insights into the condition…
Mutinies, coups and military interventionism
Scholars of civil–military relations have long been puzzled by the fact that despite a series of mutinies, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has never seen a full-blown military takeover. Indeed, when PNG became independent in the early 1970s, some veteran PNG watchers had predicted that the country was likely to follow in the footsteps of many coup-prone African countries. In this article, the authors highlight the reasons for the surprising absence of cou…
Fighting the Hellhounds
In the literature on post-Suharto Indonesia, an increasingly dominant stream has portrayed the political system as being hijacked by predatory elite interests associated with the fallen New Order regime. While such characterisations describe important elements of the post-1998 polity, they do not tell the full story. At the same time that patronage-driven career politicians have staked their claims in the newly democratic state, a large number of…
Money, Power, and Ideology
Indonesian Politics in 2014
Indonesian democracy experienced a near miss in 2014, when Jakarta governor \nJoko Widodo (Jokowi) defeated former general Prabowo Subianto by a margin \nof 6.3% in the presidential election. Both candidates were populists who rose to \nprominence in the context of public disillusionment with incumbent president Yudhoyono; \nPrabowo, however, condemned Indonesia’s democratic system and promised \nto take Indonesia in a more authoritarian directio…
Law (55 works) · Political science (55 works) · Politics (54 works) · Asian Studies and History (52 works) · Law (38 works) · Political economy (38 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Democracy (33 works) · Economics (30 works) · Indonesian Election Politics and Participation (24 works)