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This article compares the role of brokers in mediating access to public services in India and Indonesia. Brokered state-citizen interaction is generally considered to be detrimental to democratic accountability and governance. Yet recent studies are emphasizing that brokers can also be empowering. Reconciling these contrasting assessments, I argue in this paper that the character of brokerage networks shapes the capacity of citizens to hold their politicians and bureaucrats to account. Employing over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in both India and Indonesia, I develop a comparative framework that compares brokerage networks in terms of their degree of fragmentation, institutionalization and levelling. In Indonesia the versatile and more state-centered nature of brokers networks plays into the hands of incumbents, while the fragmented and more levelled nature of India's brokerage networks strengthens democratic accountability. I use this comparison to advance the argument that the evolution of brokerage networks constitutes an important, yet little-noticed dimension of democratization processes. When citizens gain access to public services through networks that are fragmented, institutionalized and less marked by social hierarchies, politicians and bureaucrats face stronger pressures to perform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic backsliding in many world regions has prompted scholars to study how democracies can resist and push back against autocratization, and many accounts suggest that a unified, pluralist opposition is key to mobilize voters against democratic backsliding. However, pluralist ideology is not necessarily associated with higher awareness of and opposition to backsliding, as evaluations of democratic erosions are highly contingent on political context. We illustrate this point with the case of Indonesia, a country where a pluralist government coalition has deepened democratic erosion by harshly repressing an anti-pluralist Islamist opposition. Using data from a national survey, we document that Islamist Indonesians are systematically more likely than pluralist individuals to believe that democracy has worsened: Resistance to democratic erosion is thus concentrated in the most ideologically illiberal citizens. Rethinking the pluralist/anti-pluralist dichotomy has implications for how we conceptualize democratic backsliding and assess democratic resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines democratic backsliding in the spheres of regional cooperation and foreign policymaking in Southeast Asia. It argues that backsliding is limited because the space for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its member states to promote democracy has always been strongly curtailed by ideational path dependencies. These include an autocratic type of regional corporatism and the ASEAN Way as the region's established repository of cooperation norms. While ASEAN has thus largely failed to become more inclusive, democracy promotion policies of the grouping's democratically most advanced member states, Indonesia and the Philippines, are more ambiguous. Despite eroding democratic practices at home, democracy is still a pillar of Indonesia's foreign policy. By contrast, in the Philippines, the incumbent Duterte presidency increasingly securitizes foreign policy, relegating democracy to a backseat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 each launched illiberal initiatives that caused a notable decline in the country's democratic quality. These illiberal strategies concern a narrowing of electoral competitiveness, the mobilization of identity politics, and attempts at power concentration and maximization by the executive. The wide spread of anti-democratic actors in Indonesia differs from other cases of increasing illiberalism, in which executive leaders have been the main drivers. But Indonesia also stands out because the residual resources of its defective but persistent electoral democracy have mitigated the effectiveness of the authoritarian innovations, preventing (thus far) the polity's full descent into autocracy or populist illiberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their transitions to democracy, electoral politics in Indonesia and the Philippines have become heavily clientelistic, marked by high levels of vote-buying and other forms of material exchange. In both cases, the organizational form taken by clientelism is similar: political candidates build informal pyramidal structures of brokers to connect them to voters, largely operating outside national parties. In the Philippines, these structures are local machines; in Indonesia, they are ephemeral organizations known as "success teams." Yet this similarity in form masks a deeper dissimilarity: in the Philippines, machines are built on a relational clientelism in which politicians cultivate brokers for the long-term; in Indonesia, the modal pattern is short-term transactional relationships. We demonstrate this distinction by drawing on fieldwork and broker surveys conducted in both countries, and attribute it to a combination of historical legacies and electoral rules. In particular, differences in electoral institutions shape the incentives and capacities of politicians to invest in lasting machines, encouraging coordination among candidates when building campaign structures and sharing resources in the Philippines; impeding such cooperation in Indonesia. Our analysis suggests that scholars of patronage politics need to look beyond parties and to consider differences between relational and transactional varieties of clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Indonesia's President Suharto was forced to resign in 1998, the accompanying uncertainty triggered serious communal violence in five regions. As the nation's politics and economy stabilized from 2002, so did those provinces. Identity-based conflict is now the rare exception rather than the rule in democratic Indonesia. Yet puzzlingly, despite the consolidation of democracy, ethnic clashes and mob violence against religious minorities continue to occur. While such events are now far smaller than those in the first years of democratization and occur only occasionally, their persistence requires analysis given the potential for escalation and what it tells us about Indonesia's reform process. In this article I compare recent incidents with that of the initial post-authoritarian era, and find that identity-based collective violence persists because many important causes of conflict have not been removed by democratic consolidation. As found by numerous scholars, many illiberal characteristics of the authoritarian state have segued neatly into democratic Indonesia. I assert that this has left several main causes of group violence firmly in place. I further contend that the failure to remove these phenomena partly has its origins in the order of democratic reforms chosen in the years after Suharto's resignation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the effectiveness of trade unions' electoral engagement in the union-dense electoral localities of Bekasi and Tangerang in Indonesia's 2009 legislative elections. Our analysis reveals that legacies of authoritarianism, electoral rules, and union fragmentation pushed unions to pursue an ineffective electoral strategy of running union cadres on various party tickets. In Bekasi, local leaders within the Federation of Indonesian Metalworkers Unions (FSPMI) chose not to mobilize resources to support union candidates because the union's national leadership had failed to convince them of the soundness of its strategy. In Tangerang, local leaders embraced the National Workers Union's (SPN) national electoral strategy, but had inadequate membership data to conduct electoral mapping and did not provide candidates with financial and leadership support. Neither union, meanwhile, gave much consideration to the problem of translating membership to votes: survey data reveal that most members could not name union candidates, and many of those who could did not vote for them. The article argues that, despite its flaws, trade unions' strategy of engagement in the electoral arena constitutes an important step forward in the consolidation of Indonesia's democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 has introduced programmes providing free health care to the poor and approved a plan for universal social insurance. At the subnational level, in the context of far-reaching decentralization reforms, politicians have competed with each other to introduce generous local health care schemes. Taking its cue from analyses of social welfare expansion in other East Asian states, the article finds the origins of policy shift in the incentives that democracy creates for elites to design policies that appeal to broad social constituencies, and in the widening scope for engagement in policymaking that democracy allows. The article ends with a cautionary note, pointing to ways in which oligarchic power relations and the corruption they spawn still undermine health care quality, despite expansion of coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their importance to democratic consolidation, relationships between civil society activists and political parties have often been problematic following the downfall of authoritarian regimes. In challenging authoritarian rule in Malaysia, though, these forces have increased cooperation and jointly committed at the 2008 elections to local government reform. This was especially important for middle-class non-governmental organization (NGO) activists seeking a transformation in the political culture of parties. Moreover, state government victories by reformist Pakatan Rakyat (PR) coalitions included Selangor and Penang where these NGOs are concentrated. Yet while local government reform followed, NGOs and parties placed differing emphases on elections, transcending ethnic-based representation, and checks and balances on local government power. Lacking substantial social and organizational bases, NGOs were outflanked by more powerful interests inside and outside PR parties, including those aligned with ethnic-based ideologies of representation and economic development models opposed by NGOs. NGO activists also advanced various democratic and technocratic rationales for local representation, indicating a complex ideological mix underlying their reform push. The study highlights interrelated structural and ideational factors likely to more generally constrain the capacity of middle-class NGOs to play a vanguard role in democratically transforming Malaysian political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an alternative theoretical framework to account for the political transition in Indonesia in 1998. Challenging the mainstream literature, which focuses on the presumed significance of civil society, the article claims that so-called democratization in Indonesia offered a mechanism through which to reorganize the distribution of patronage within the state. The transition was caused not by assertive civil society but Suharto's excessive centralization of patronage networks, which had the effect of alienating a significant proportion of the regime elite. Against this backdrop, democratization facilitated a decentralization of previously centralized patronage networks and a redistribution of spoils within the state towards elites that had been excluded from Suharto's inner circle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article comparatively investigates the role of religious actors in the democratization processes of five 'young' democracies from the Catholic, Protestant, Christian-Orthodox and Muslim world: West Germany after World War II (1945-1969), Georgia and Ukraine post-1987/9, Mali (post-1987), and Indonesia from 1998. The analysis provides an overview of the roles religious actors played in the erosion of authoritarian rule, the transition to democracy and subsequent democratic consolidation processes, as well as de-democratization processes. Our three paired comparisons, including one in-country comparison, show that the condition which most affected the role of religious actors in all three phases of democratic transitions was the de facto autonomy they enjoyed vis-a-vis the political regime as well as the organizational form these actors took. Their aims, means, and the political significance of their theology were highly dependent on the extent to which they benefitted from de facto autonomy within the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic crisis sparked political mobilization in both Malaysia and Indonesia in the late 1990s, but with very different results. Reformism in competitive electoral authoritarian Malaysia took a largely electoral route, yielding marginal, top-down institutional change and the enhancement of democratic norms. The hegemonic electoral authoritarian regime in neighbouring Indonesia, on the other hand, was toppled by a sudden upsurge of grass-roots protest, encouraged by elite factionalism. Changes to Indonesian political institutions and personnel since then have disappointed many reformers, and mounting cynicism endangers the entrenchment of democratic political culture. The article argues that a relatively more democratic system grants more space for autonomous challengers to organize and mobilize over the long term than a less open system does. Specifically, civil society agents in the former may accumulate both social capital and its organizational-level counterpart, coalitional capital, facilitating mobilization. Such a regime, though, is better able to contain or otherwise defuse protest than is a more autocratic variant. The latter is thus more vulnerable to dramatic collapse, despite its fragmented political opposition, and faces serious hurdles in subsequent democratic consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on an important but neglected area of democracy assistance: international aid to build and strengthen independent media in transition and post-conflict societies. The purpose of such assistance is to promote democratization by facilitating the free flow of information, transparency, accountability in the government, and economic growth. The article describes the origin of media assistance, examines the focus of media programmes, and presents some of the most important policy and programmatic lessons derived from fieldwork in seven locations: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Central America, Indonesia, Russia, Sierra Leone, and Serbia. The article ends with a plea for further research by the academic community on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In fewer than eight years Indonesia, the world's most populous majority Muslim country, has made a remarkable transition from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. Against heavy odds, and despite bleak prognoses that this process and the country itself would collapse, Indonesia has meanwhile developed many attributes of a consolidated democracy. As indicated by pervasive and endemic corruption, what has emerged in Indonesia, however, is a patrimonial democracy in which the rule of law is weak and the government's effective capacity to govern is limited. Although patrimonialism has deep roots in Indonesian political history, there are none the less growing signs that in particular electoral competition will ‘improve’ Indonesian democracy and push it in a more liberal direction. A new and rare Muslim democratic star may thus be rising in the Far East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy assistance programmes have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical. This article represents part of a continuing endeavour to develop a tool for measuring civil society programme impact in the form of an advocacy scale encompassing democracy's critical components of participation, accountability and contestation. The scale is tested in the context of USAID-assisted initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia, where it demonstrates a capacity both to monitor donor assistance outcomes and to suggest future programme initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the usefulness of the literature on democratic transitions for analyzing regime changes in Indonesia. Elite relations and their roles; Discussion of the shift of roles among elites in Indonesia; Democratization in Indonesia.