Edward Aspinall
Biographic Data
| ID | 729344 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward Aspinall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward |
| FAMILY NAME | Aspinall |
| SIGNATURE | ASPINALL E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4678-298X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 814 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Politics in a Pandemic: Governance and Crisis Management in Southeast Asia
The COVID-19 pandemic offers unique insight into how regimes govern in 'hard times.' In Southeast Asia, public health and economic strain revealed the scope for adaptation in the face of crisis, against the pull of path-dependent habits and patterns. Recent experience of SARS and other outbreaks, as well as wider political and economic contexts, shaped readiness and responses. Especially important were legacies of the developmental-state model. E…
Participation without accountability: Deliberative democracy in village Indonesia
This article explores the character of public deliberation in Indonesia by studying village meetings. In policies such as the 2014 Village Law, these village consultative meetings are envisioned as an important avenue for fostering citizen participation and accountability. In this article, we evaluate to what extent village meetings indeed strengthen village-level democratization in Indonesia. Using both ethnographic field research in eighteen vi…
Analysing and explaining variation in village governance regimes across Indonesia
This article analyses variation in patterns of village governance across Indonesia, drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in eighteen villages in nine provinces. The research focused on the performance and behaviour of village authorities as well as the character and quality of participation by residents in village affairs. We use this material to analyse variation in ‘village governance regimes’ in terms of twenty comparative dimensions, in…
Comparing village politics across time and space
This special issue examines whether and how village politics in Indonesia have changed after the passage of a new Village Law in 2014. Written by researchers who participated in a collaborative study of eighteen villages across Indonesia carried out at the start of 2022, the special issue takes stock of the nature of village politics and explores its variation across Indonesia. In this introduction to the special issue, we outline the research pr…
Commodity Booms, Conflict, and Organized Crime: Logics of Violence in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Plantation Economy
This article examines the relationship between commodity booms and the incidence of group conflict and criminality in the context of Indonesia’s expanding oil palm sector. Informed by original fieldwork, the article theorizes that violence will occur where there are choke points in a commodity’s production supply chain. Such choke points create the opportunity and incentive for armed groups—including “mafias,” youth gangs, landholders, and state …
The Politics of Government–Business Relations in Urban Southeast Asia: Introduction and Overview
Recognising the increasingly urban character of Southeast Asian politics, our introduction to this special issue explores the varied patterns of government–business relations found across the region. In some urban centres, businesses form collusive rent-seeking relations with mayors and other politicians; in others, they support governance reform and urban renewal. In beginning to unpick this variation, we briefly highlight what we can learn from…
Voting against Women: Political Patriarchy, Islam, and Representation in Indonesia
We examine cultural and ideological barriers to gender equality in a young democracy, Indonesia, where women’s political representation has increased slowly since democratization, but where survey results point to declining support for women’s political leadership. In both country and comparative literature, the effect of ideological factors—including religion—on voter support for women candidates is contested. Using results of a nationally repre…
Parties, Patronage and Covid-19 Vaccination Distribution in Indonesia
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.…
Varieties of Clientelism: Comparing Patronage Democracies
Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia
Politicians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries. Mobilizing for Elections presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. The book draws o…
Buying Brokers: Electoral Handouts beyond Clientelism in a Weak-Party State
Studies of electoral clientelism—the contingent exchange of material benefits for electoral support—frequently presume the presence of strong parties. Parties facilitate monitoring and enforcement of vote buying and allow brokers to identify core voters for turnout buying. Where money fuels campaigns but elections center around candidates, not parties, how do candidates pitch electoral handouts? The authors analyze candidates’ distribution of cas…
Women’s Political Representation in Indonesia: Who Wins and How
This article analyses barriers to women’s political representation in Indonesia and the ways that women candidates overcome them. Surveying the literature and drawing on three data sources – findings of thirteen teams of researchers studying women candidates running in the 2019 election, a survey of 127 such candidates, and a nationally representative survey of Indonesian citizens – the article identifies widespread patriarchal attitudes as one s…
When does class matter? Unequal representation in Indonesian legislatures
Around the world, legislatures are dominated by politicians who are wealthier and more educated than their constituents. This is particularly so in developing democracies, where clientelist politics and wealth inequalities make it difficult for lower-class citizens to run for office. We contribute to scholarly debates about the substantive consequences of descriptive inequality by analysing a new and important case–Indonesia, the world’s third mo…
Roundtable: Global Pandemic, Local Politics: Covid-19 in Urban Southeast Asia
Attained SCOPUS CiteScore of 1.4 in 2019. Attained Journal Citation Report (JCR) Journal Impact Factor of 0.717 in 2019.SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SJR) 2019 for the Asiatic Region: Ranked 1st in Political Science and International Relations; 1st in History; and 3rd in Arts and Humanities. Ranked 19th by Google Scholar Metrics 2020 in the category of “Asian Studies and History”
Parties as pay-off seekers: Pre-electoral coalitions in a patronage democracy
Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia
Guns for hire and enduring machines: Clientelism beyond parties in Indonesia and the Philippines
Since their transitions to democracy, electoral politics in Indonesia and the Philippines \nhave become heavily clientelistic, marked by high levels of vote-buying and other \nforms of material exchange. In both cases, the organizational form taken by \nclientelism is similar: political candidates build informal pyramidal structures of \nbrokers to connect them to voters, largely operating outside national parties. In the \nPhilippines, these str…
How clientelism varies: Comparing Patronage Democracies
Clientelistic vote mobilization is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s \ndemocracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this \npractice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains \nstrikingly underdeveloped. This special issue makes the case that clientelistic politics \ntakes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for \nunderstanding…
Elites, masses, and democratic decline in Indonesia
The current worldwide democratic regression has prompted debate about the drivers of democratic decline. One country experiencing decline is Indonesia, where most analysts blame the shift on actions of illiberal elites, casting the public as a democratic bulwark. Yet, as in other fragile democracies, regression in Indonesia has come at the hands of politicians enjoying popular support. To investigate drivers of democratic decline we ask: How demo…
Ideological representation in clientelistic democracies: The Indonesian case
Electoral Dynamics in the Philippines: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots
The role of clientism, political machines, and money in grassroots electioneering in the Philippines has been much analyzed by those who study the subject, but never as extensively as Allen Hicken, Edward Aspinall, and Meredith Weiss do in Electoral Dynamics in the Philippines . Combining in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in localities across the Philippines during the 2016 elections with polling data and national comparative data, this study sheds…
Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia
Democracy for Sale is an on-the-ground account of Indonesian democracy, analyzing its election campaigns and behind-the-scenes machinations. Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot assess the informal networks and political strategies that shape access to power and privilege in the messy political environment of contemporary Indonesia.In post-Suharto Indonesian politics the exchange of patronage for political support is commonplace. Clientelism, argu…
Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox: Competitive Elections amidst Rising Illiberalism
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…
Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia
Southeast Asia's Troubling Elections: Nondemocratic Pluralism in Indonesia
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…
The Construction of Grievance
This article makes a case for extending social constructivist approaches to the study of grievance in natural resource conflicts. It does this by analyzing the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia, which is often portrayed as a paradigmatic resource conflict due to the importance of the natural gas industry there. It is argued here, however, that natural resource exploitation promoted conflict in Aceh only because it became entangled in wider p…
Health care and democratization in Indonesia
Analyses of Indonesian democracy often emphasize elite capture of democratic institutions, continuity in oligarchic power relations, and exclusion of popular interests. Defying such analyses, over the last decade, Indonesia has experienced a proliferation of social welfare programmes, some with a redistributive element. This article analyses the expansion of social welfare protection by focusing on health care. At the national level, Indonesia ha…
Indonesia: The Irony of Success
Indonesia is alternately lauded as a democratization success story and derided as an exemplar of low-quality democracy. This article explains both Indonesian democracy's surprising survival and its defects by focusing on how it fended off three potential spoilers: the military, Islamism and ethnic and regional unrest. In each case, democratic spoilers were granted concessions and incorporated into the democratic system, rather than being excluded…
Democratization and Ethnic Politics in Indonesia: Nine Theses
After the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, communal violence occurred in several Indonesian provinces, producing an image of the country as one characterized by strong ethnic politics. In this article, I propose that this image is mistaken. The political salience of ethnicity has subsided greatly as a new democratic system has settled into place. Overall, Indonesia is a weakly ethnicized polity. Ethnicity still counts in arenas such as loca…
How clientelism varies: Comparing Patronage Democracies
Clientelistic vote mobilization is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s \ndemocracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this \npractice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains \nstrikingly underdeveloped. This special issue makes the case that clientelistic politics \ntakes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for \nunderstanding…
When Brokers Betray: Clientelism, Social Networks, and Electoral Politics in Indonesia
Research in many countries shows that where voters and campaign workers are motivated by material rewards, the brokerage networks delivering those rewards can be highly unstable. Brokers often exercise considerable autonomy, shifting between candidates, disobeying their directives, or stealing the cash or goods they are supposed to pass on to voters. What determines whether brokers betray their ca ndidates in such ways? This article answers this …
Elites, masses, and democratic decline in Indonesia
The current worldwide democratic regression has prompted debate about the drivers of democratic decline. One country experiencing decline is Indonesia, where most analysts blame the shift on actions of illiberal elites, casting the public as a democratic bulwark. Yet, as in other fragile democracies, regression in Indonesia has come at the hands of politicians enjoying popular support. To investigate drivers of democratic decline we ask: How demo…
Southeast Asia's Troubling Elections: Nondemocratic Pluralism in Indonesia
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…
The state and illegality in Indonesia
Cover photos: Front: A pendekar (strongman) of the Betawi Brotherhood Forum.This volume is the product of an extended and intensive process of collaboration in which many individuals participated
Indonesia's 2014 Elections: Parliament and Patronage
Analysing the 9 April 2014 legislative elections in Indonesia, this article presents a case study of patronage politics in an open-list proportional-representation electoral system. Under this system, candidates focus on increasing their personal vote rather than votes for their party. Most candidates did so in the 2014 elections by relying on personal brokerage networks rather than party machines. They also distributed material rewards—including…
The State and Illegality in Indonesia
Cover photos: Front: A pendekar (strongman) of the Betawi Brotherhood Forum.This volume is the product of an extended and intensive process of collaboration in which many individuals participated
Ideological representation in clientelistic democracies: The Indonesian case
Buying Brokers: Electoral Handouts beyond Clientelism in a Weak-Party State
Studies of electoral clientelism—the contingent exchange of material benefits for electoral support—frequently presume the presence of strong parties. Parties facilitate monitoring and enforcement of vote buying and allow brokers to identify core voters for turnout buying. Where money fuels campaigns but elections center around candidates, not parties, how do candidates pitch electoral handouts? The authors analyze candidates’ distribution of cas…
Explaining Indonesia’s Democratic Regression: Structure, Agency and Popular Opinion
Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs - Volume 41, Number 2, August 2019
When Religion Trumps Ethnicity: A Regional Election Case Study from Indonesia
The authors analyse the 2010 mayoral election in the city of Medan, North Sumatra. Medan is an ethnically and religiously diverse city and the authors treat the elections here as a case study of inter-communal dynamics in local elections in plural regions of Indonesia. The first round of the vote was contested by 10 pairs of candidates and occurred in a climate of cross-ethnic alliance building and appeals that, the authors argue, are typical of …
Guns for hire and enduring machines: Clientelism beyond parties in Indonesia and the Philippines
Since their transitions to democracy, electoral politics in Indonesia and the Philippines \nhave become heavily clientelistic, marked by high levels of vote-buying and other \nforms of material exchange. In both cases, the organizational form taken by \nclientelism is similar: political candidates build informal pyramidal structures of \nbrokers to connect them to voters, largely operating outside national parties. In the \nPhilippines, these str…
Indonesia’s Democratic Paradox: Competitive Elections amidst Rising Illiberalism
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…
The Triumph of Capital? Class Politics and Indonesian Democratisation
This article assesses the role played by Indonesian capitalists in the country's new democratic political system. It takes as its starting point the analysis presented by Richard Robison in his influential 1986 book, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital. Robiso
The New Nationalism in I ndonesia
A new nationalist mood is visible in I ndonesia, expressed in increasingly bellicose rejection of alleged foreign interference in I ndonesia's affairs and in demands for greater international recognition of I ndonesia's power and status. This new mood has been visible for several years, but became particularly marked during the 2014 presidential election and under the new J oko W idodo administration. This article analyses I ndonesia's new nation…
From Islamism to nationalism in Aceh, Indonesia
This article analyses a dramatic political transformation in Indonesia's Aceh province. In the 1950s, an Islamic rebellion (Darul Islam) aimed not to separate Aceh from Indonesia, but rather to make Indonesia an Islamic state. A successor movement from the 1970s was GAM, the Free Aceh Movement. GAM, however, was essentially secular‐nationalist in orientation, sought Aceh's complete independence and did not espouse formal Islamic goals. The transf…
Elections and the Normalization of Politics in Indonesia
Between April and September 2004, Indonesian voters went three times to the polls, first to elect members of legislative bodies, then in two rounds to elect directly a president and vice-president. There were two starkly different views on the elections
Vote Buying in Indonesia: Candidate Strategies, Market Logic and Effectiveness
What underlying logic explains candidate participation in vote buying, given that clientelist exchange is so difficult to enforce? We address this question through close analysis of campaigns by several dozen candidates in two electoral districts in Java, Indonesia. Analyzing candidates’ targeting and pricing strategies, we show that candidates used personal brokerage structures that drew on social networks to identify voters and deliver payments…
Oligarchic Populism: Prabowo Subianto's Challenge to Indonesian Democracy
In 2014, Indonesian democracy came close to experiencing significant regression when Prabowo Subianto missed winning the presidential election by 6.5 percentage points. Prabowo, a leading hardline general during the final years of the Suharto regime, aimed to wind back important elements of Indonesia’s democratic reforms. This article analyzes the ideological and material foundations of Prabowo’s challenge, and its implications for Indonesian dem…
Indonesian Politics in 2014: Democracy’s Close Call
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…
Popular Agency and Interests in Indonesia's Democratic Transition and Consolidation
This article reviews the part played by lower class groups in Indonesia's democratic transition and consolidation. While mainstream analyses emphasize dominance of Indonesian politics by oligarchs and other elites, this article also finds many new avenues for lower class political agency. It focuses on two: fragmented activism, through which lower class groups organize and mobilize to advance their own interests, and electoral populism, by which …
The break-up of Indonesia? Nationalisms after decolonisation and the limits of the nation-state in post-cold war Southeast Asia
One noteworthy feature of the political crisis in Indonesia, which followed the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was the speed with which the collapse of the Suharto government was subsumed by a wider crisis of the Indonesian nation-state. One aspect of this crisis is the strengthening of secessionist movements in several regions of Indonesia, calling into question the country's national boundaries, themselves a legacy of the Dutch colonial era. Th…
Sovereignty, the Successor State, and Universal Human Rights: History and the International Structuring of Acehnese Nationalism
Most definitions of the nation emphasize notions like common sentiment, community, or collective identity.In Benedict Anderson's famous phrase, the nation is an "imagined political community," one that is "always conceived as a deep, historical comradeship."1 2 Anthony Smith defines the nation as "a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal…
Local Power & Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation & Democratisation
Indonesia is experiencing an historic and dramatic shift in political and economic power from the centre to the local level. The collapse of the highly centralised Soeharto regime allowed long-repressed local aspirations to come to the fore. The new Indonesian Government then began one of the world’s most radical decentralisation programmes, under which extensive powers are being devolved to the district level. In every region and province, diver…
Indonesia after the Tsunami
The post-tsunami relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts ... pose enormous challenges for a new government that inherits, and is partly a product of, a ramshackle and ineffective state apparatus
Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia
Opposing Suharto presents an account of democratization in the world's fourth most populous country, Indonesia. It describes how opposition groups challenged the long-time ruler, President Suharto, and his military-based regime, forcing him to resign in 1998. The book's main purpose is to explain how ordinary people can bring about political change in a repressive authoritarian regime. It does this by telling the story of an array of dissident gr…
Elections and the Normalization of Politics in Indonesia
Between April and September 2004, Indonesian voters went three times to the polls, first to elect members of legislative bodies, then in two rounds to elect directly a president and vice-president. There were two starkly different views on the elections
Selective Outrage and Unacknowledged Fantasies: Re-thinking Papua, Indonesia and Australia
This article discusses the public controversy that occurred in Australia after the arrival of 43 asylum seekers from the Indonesian province of Papua in early 2006. Noting that human rights abuses elicit greater public attention in Australia when they occur in Papua than in any other Indonesian province, the article examines several explanations for the relatively great Australian interest in the Papua issue. Among these are a tendency to romanti…
A Reply to Peter King
In responding to my article in this issue, Peter King makes a number of points.I disagree with some and agree with others.Many of the points raise issues I explicitly decided not to focus upon in my initial piece, including the nature and extent of human rights abuses Papua and the orientation of Australian foreign policy.Rather than taking the debate into these new areas, in this response I will emphasise how King's contribution illustrates one …
From Islamism to nationalism in Aceh, Indonesia
This article analyses a dramatic political transformation in Indonesia's Aceh province. In the 1950s, an Islamic rebellion (Darul Islam) aimed not to separate Aceh from Indonesia, but rather to make Indonesia an Islamic state. A successor movement from the 1970s was GAM, the Free Aceh Movement. GAM, however, was essentially secular‐nationalist in orientation, sought Aceh's complete independence and did not espouse formal Islamic goals. The transf…
The Construction of Grievance
This article makes a case for extending social constructivist approaches to the study of grievance in natural resource conflicts. It does this by analyzing the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia, which is often portrayed as a paradigmatic resource conflict due to the importance of the natural gas industry there. It is argued here, however, that natural resource exploitation promoted conflict in Aceh only because it became entangled in wider p…
Ethnic and religious violence in Indonesia: A review essay
Glossary
Index
Preliminary Material
The state and illegality in Indonesia
Why did we write this book? The popular 1998 reformasi movement that brought down President Suharto’s regime demanded an end to illegal practices by state officials, from human rights abuse to nepotistic investments. Yet today, such practices have proven more resistant to reform than people had hoped.Many have said corruption in Indonesia is “entrenched.” We argue it is precisely this entrenched character that requires attention. What is state il…
Abbreviations
Building relations: Corruption, competition and cooperation in the construction industry
Building things has been the essence of development in Indonesia, at least since the oil boom began in the mid-1970s. Indeed, the word pembangunan, a central trope of the New Order regime, means both development and building (Heryanto 1988). But the very large construction industry is plagued by poor standards and corruption. It is widely known that money is routinely skimmed off construction contracts to pay off tendering committees, public work…
Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions and Society
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 …
Soeharto's New Order and Its Legacy: Essays in honour of Harold Crouch
Indonesia’s President Soeharto led one of the most durable and effective authoritarian regimes of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet his rule ended in ignominy, and much of the turbulence and corruption of the subsequent years was blamed on his legacy. More than a decade after Soeharto’s resignation, Indonesia is a consolidating democracy and the time has come to
Soeharto's New Order and its Legacy: Essays in honour of Harold Crouc
Indonesia’s President Soeharto led one of the most durable and effective authoritarian regimes of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet his rule ended in ignominy, and much of the turbulence and corruption of the subsequent years was blamed on his legacy. More than a decade after Soeharto’s resignation, Indonesia is a consolidating democracy and the time has come to reconsider the place of his regime in modern Indonesian history, and its …
Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness
Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to Amer…
Indonesia in 2009: Democratic Triumphs and Trials
In 2009, national affairs in Indonesia were dominated by elections that were held in two rounds: legislative elections on 9 April and presidential elections on 8 July. A second round of presidential elections was scheduled for September, but proved unnecessary because the incumbent, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, won a landslide victory in the first round, with just over sixty per cent of the vote. With his political party also coming first in the par…
Indonesia: The Irony of Success
Indonesia is alternately lauded as a democratization success story and derided as an exemplar of low-quality democracy. This article explains both Indonesian democracy's surprising survival and its defects by focusing on how it fended off three potential spoilers: the military, Islamism and ethnic and regional unrest. In each case, democratic spoilers were granted concessions and incorporated into the democratic system, rather than being excluded…
When Religion Trumps Ethnicity: A Regional Election Case Study from Indonesia
The authors analyse the 2010 mayoral election in the city of Medan, North Sumatra. Medan is an ethnically and religiously diverse city and the authors treat the elections here as a case study of inter-communal dynamics in local elections in plural regions of Indonesia. The first round of the vote was contested by 10 pairs of candidates and occurred in a climate of cross-ethnic alliance building and appeals that, the authors argue, are typical of …
Democratization and Ethnic Politics in Indonesia: Nine Theses
After the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, communal violence occurred in several Indonesian provinces, producing an image of the country as one characterized by strong ethnic politics. In this article, I propose that this image is mistaken. The political salience of ethnicity has subsided greatly as a new democratic system has settled into place. Overall, Indonesia is a weakly ethnicized polity. Ethnicity still counts in arenas such as loca…
Political science (64 works) · Asian Studies and History (58 works) · Law (55 works) · Politics (55 works) · Sociology (43 works) · Law (39 works) · Political economy (39 works) · Democracy (36 works) · Economics (36 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (29 works)