Indonesia

The Irony of Success

Bibliographic Data

ID6286887
AuthorsEdward Aspinall (0000-0002-4678-298X, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume21
Issue2
Pages20-34
Publication date2010-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of democracy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1045-5736 • E-ISSN: 1086-3214
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jod.0.0157
OpenAlexW2034051577
LanguageEN
Citations received66
References cited4

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 from it, pointing to an absorptive capacity in Indonesian democracy inherited from the predecessor authoritarian Suharto regime. Indonesian democracy's resilience and its defects are not in fundamental conflict, but are two sides of the one coin

Authoritarianism · Democracy · Democratization · Development economics · Economics · Indonesian · Irony · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Unrest · Asian Studies and History · Indonesian Election Politics and Participation · Law · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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