ISSUE: 2016 No. 52 ISSN 2335-6677 RESEARCHERS AT ISEAS – YUSOF ISHAK INSTITUTE ANALYSE CURRENT EVENTS Singapore | 20 September 2016 Partisan Affiliations Remain Strong in Indonesia Diego Fossati* EXECUTIVE SUMMARY • Indonesian politics has traditionally featured a cleavage between secularist and Islamic political parties. In recent years, non-ideological, personalistic parties have risen to prominence challenging the traditional dichotomy. • Between 1999 and 2014, there has been a change in voting patterns because of an erosion in long-standing ideological and partisan affiliations, known in Indonesia as aliran • However, important continuities remain. Correlations between historical and contemporary support for secularist and Islamic parties are still significant and strong, especially in Java and Bali. • For a substantial segment of the electorate, partisan affiliations appear to be of not only patronage considerations or party leadership, but also from deep-seated ideological and social identities. * The author is grateful to Pearlyn Pang for excellent research assistance and to Kevin Evans for sharing electoral data from 1955. This paper has benefited from comments by participants at the Indonesia Study Programme Symposium, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 12 August 2016. 1 ISSUE: 2016 No. 52 ISSN 2335-6677 INTRODUCTION Indonesian politics is more fragmented and competitive today than it has ever been since the democratic transition in the late 1990s. In the first legislative elections to be held after the fall of the New Order regime, the two largest political parties, PDI-P and Golkar, jointly gathered 56.2% of the vote. By 2014, the joint vote share of the same two parties, still the two largest in Indonesia, had decreased drastically to 34.7%. Similarly, the number of parties obtaining at least 30 seats in the House of Representatives (DPR), increased sharply from five in 1999 to nine in 2014. At the subnational level, fragmentation in local legislative councils is even higher, and has clearly increased steadily from 1999 to 2009 (Tomsa, 2014). Scholars of Indonesian politics have argued that increased electoral competitiveness has changed the way Indonesians relate to political parties. In the early years of the Indonesian state, voters were divided between the secularist abangan, nominal Muslims who practice a syncretic version of Islam with strong Hindu-Buddhist influences, and the santri, who adhere to a more orthodox, ideological form of Islam and support Islamic political parties (Geertz, 1976). Today, however, ideology is often believed to have lost much of its relevance. Contemporary research focusing on the predominance of other drivers of voting behavior, such as support for political leaders, evaluations of economic performance, and patronage suggests that a process of “dealignment”, or erosion of the historical “streams” of ideology and partisanship, known in Indonesian as aliran (Ufen, 2008), has been taking place (Aspinall & Sukmajati, 2016; Liddle & Mujani, 2007; Mujani & Liddle, 2010). This paper analyzes contemporary electoral returns from national legislative elections to probe the extent to which historical partisan and ideological affiliations are shaping voting behavior today. It argues that electoral outcomes show substantial continuities with the past, when factored on political party, election year, and region. ALIRAN, PAST AND PRESENT During the Old Order, when Indonesian politics was dominated by the figure of President Sukarno, Indonesian political parties were divided into two main camps. On one hand, secularist parties such as the Nationalist Party (PNI), the Communist Party (PKI), and the Socialist Party (PSI) drew most of their support from abangan Indonesians. On the other, santri Indonesians split between two forms of political Islam, namely the “traditionalist” Islam propagated especially in rural Java by the Nahdatul Ulama (NU), a religious organization that also acted as a political party in the 1950s, and the “modernist” Islam more common in cities and regions outside Java, which was represented by the Muhammadiyah (another religious organization) and the Masyumi party. Today, although the ideological profile of Indonesian political parties is less clear-cut than in the past, it is still possible to identify differences (Mietzner, 2013, pp. 167-191). At one end of the 2 ISSUE: 2016 No. 52 ISSN 2335-6677 spectrum, the PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle) continues Sukarno’s ideological tradition in prioritizing nationalism over religion. At the opposite end, several parties compete for the Islamic legacy, with the PKB (National Awakening Party) maintaining close ties to NU’s traditionalism, parties such as PKS (Prosperous Justice Party), PAN (National Mandate Party) and PBB (Crescent Star Party) typically being described as modernist, and the PPP (United Development Party) trying to appeal to both constituencies. One is tempted to ask if support for these parties overlap with traditional aliran identities, and if so, to what extent? Before presenting data that may help to answer this question, it is important to emphasize that a quantitative analysis at this level of aggregation is insufficient to render the complexity of how voters interact with political parties. Although we can establish an empirical association between historical and contemporary electoral patterns and measure its magnitude, establishing causality and ascertaining what partisan affiliations today really mean to Indonesian voters require a more complex endeavour. Further research is needed to ascertain if and how ordinary citizens and political leaders have engaged with and perpetuated aliran identities, and how their profile has changed over time.1 Keeping these caveats in mind, Table 1 reports a series of correlations in district-level support for selected political parties using data from the 1955, 1999, 2009 and 2014 national legislative elections.2 When we compare 1999 with the 2009 and 2014 elections, the general trend emerging is a progressive erosion of aliran affiliations over time. So for instance, the correlation between PNI and PDI-P vote was .59 in 1999 and .47 in 2014, the correlation between NU and PKB vote has decreased dramatically from .84 to .59, and the correlation between Masyumi and PAN vote has dropped from .53 to .34. 1 Moreover, this analytical framework is best applied to political parties for which a sufficiently clear ideological profile can be determined from existing research. While support for the abovementioned parties amounted to 67.5% of the votes cast in 1999, it decreased to only about half of the Indonesian electorate by 2014. 2 1999 data is reported from King (2003, p. 130); returns for the 2004 elections are not available. As for 2009 and 2014, current district boundaries differ significantly from those in 1955 and 1999, especially outside Java, due to the proliferation of subnational administrative units. To calculate correlation coefficients, I have assumed 1955 outcomes to be uniform within each district, and I have thus associated the same 1955 values to all contemporary districts that have split from a “mother” 1955 district. While 2009 data vary at the district (kabupaten) level, 2014 election returns are aggregated by electoral district (daerah pemilihan). Reported coefficients are significant at the .05 level, and data is missing for Jakarta and Papua. 3 ISSUE: 2016 No. 52 ISSN 2335-6677 Table 1. Cross-District Correlations of Party Support (1955, 1999, 2009, and 2014) Correlation coefficients Political parties today Political parties in 1955 1999 2009 2014 PKI .38 .31 .37 PDI-P PSI .48 .39 .37 PNI .59 .49 .47 PKB NU .84 .48 .59 PAN Masyumi .53 .19 .34 PKS Masyumi - .32 .41 PBB Masyumi .39 - .53 Masyumi .42 Not significant .27 PPP NU - .41 .43 While these figures are consistent with the “dealignment” hypothesis, it is important to note that the empirical regularities observed by King, although now less pronounced, are still present. PDI-P vote is still significantly correlated with historical support for secularist parties (especially with nationalism), support for traditionalist Islam still correlates strongly with PKB vote, and correlations between past and present support for modernist Islamic parties are still significant. In fact, if we compare continuities with the past across the two electoral cycles of 2009 and 2014, we see that correlation coefficients are either stable or increasing. Coefficients for PDI-P and PKI-PSI-PNI votes are virtually unchanged between 2009 and 2014, and all Islamic parties for which data are available show stronger correlations in 2014. A possible explanation for this surprising finding is that continuities with the past may be contingent on electoral performance. Islamic parties gathered less than 26% of total votes in 2009, but did better in 2014, with a combined 31.4% of the vote share. The major beneficiary of this advance was the PKB, a party that more than doubled its support between 2009 and 2014. Indeed, the coefficient for the correlation between NU and PKB votes increases markedly from .48 in 2009 to .59 in 2014. Similarly, coefficients for all modernist Islamic parties are substantially higher in 2014 than in 2009. Such temporal variation is evidence that aliran affiliations are not necessarily bound to disappear and be replaced by other drivers of voting behavior, since they may consolidate as much as erode over time. Furthermore, it suggests that aliran streams may be associated not only with continuities with