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This paper will look at the direct elections of regents and governors in Indonesia and ask weather the dynamics discovered are expression for a rise of subnational authoritarianism or for a deepening democratization. Concretely, the paper will look at two families that have become powerful at the local level in recent years in the context of democratization and decentralization, the Chasan Sochib family in Banten province and the Yasin Limpo family in South Sulawesi province. The accounts of the two families' rise to power confirm that there is a real possibility for local strongmen to emerge in Indonesia. However, the fact that the two families' power has different roots shows that the dynamics around subnational authoritarianism in post-New Order politics are complex. Current local political dynamics are characterized by the interplay of both authoritarian and democratizing forces. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, has embarked on a perilous democratization, precipitated by the resignation of the country’s long-time authoritarian ruler, Suharto, in May 1998. Competitive elections have been held; media licenses have been liberalized; the army’s visibility in politics has been curtailed; decentralization has taken place and human rights talk has flourished. Yet, these very same processes have engendered dynamics antithetical to democratization: a politicization of ascriptive and territorial-based identities; extensive regional violence, and a concomitant crisis of some one million internally displaced persons. For one, these contradictory yet arguably complimentary processes illustrate the limitations of the democratic transition literature that overly focuses on national level processes, formal institutions and overt political actors. Analyses restricted to the strategic bargaining among the capital-situated elite crucially overlook the ways in which power is distributed throughout the polity. Consider decentralization. While correctly theorized as an imperative to the democratic empowerment of regional government and local populations, decentralization is often cast in an idealized light. There is little acknowledgment of its dark side--for instance, pernicious nativism. Seen as the means to arrest coercive New Order centralization, decentralization has nonetheless engendered several instances of ethnic and/or religious cleansing. My paper, which provides a grass-roots analysis of five cases of such cleansings, depicts decentralization, at best, as a double-edged sword that has progressive and injurious consequences. I then briefly interrogate post-cleansing environments, where an evident politics of coercion and intimidation has gained momentum. Local ethnic elites, backed by the organizations and/or native son militias that were instrumental in the expulsion of the non-indigenous migrants, have taken control. Their men now sit in the lucrative district executive position and staff district bureaucracies. Companies, international and national alike, are urged to pay substantial ‘district’ fees to operate and local journalists who have reported the corruption have been beaten or in some cases, have disappeared. Murderers from the proper ethnic group either walk out the police station’s back door or corruptible judges set defendants free. Quasi-illegal smuggling of goods and natural resources have skyrocketed. These multi-functional patronage networks have taken their cue from the infamous networks that Suharto culled over three decades, through which he ran the country. In the incipient post-Suharto state, Indonesia is experiencing a decentralization of authoritarianism, belying the façade of democratic strides made at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indonesia, the transition from a party- to a candidate-centred electoral system is to a large extent part of the comprehensive decentralization: Since 2004 the president and vice-president have been elected directly, and as of 2005, local direct elections (pilkada) include mayors, district chiefs and governors. The paper analyses the impact of pilkada on party organization. The professionalized, commercialized, and candidate-centred campaigning during pilkada enhances the fragmentation of party organization and the autonomy of candidates from political parties. Political parties do not have a decisive impact on the financing and the contents of the campaigns. Nevertheless, local and regional party branches demand a say in candidate selection. The whole configuration has become much more intricate than before, with growing tensions within party apparatuses. They were forced to allow a more decentralized organization, but some of them have (re)centralized internal decision-making in recent years. The party central office and the party in public office are often hardly distinguishable from one another, and the party on the ground is relatively weak. The organization of parties has become more complex because consultancy and candidacies are increasingly outsourced. Moreover, all these results have to be put into perspective against the backdrop of parties' different organizational legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the campaign advertisement focused on the politics of identity in Indonesia. It mentions that competitive election leads to the politicization of ethnic identity and instability or conflict. It states that the Indonesian literature is focused on the trend towards secularism by parties, candidates, and voters.

Ethnic grievances, socio-economic cleavages, past conflicts, and other macro-level factors associated frequently with political violence cannot explain subnational and cross-national variation in geographic and temporal paterns of coercive campaigning and post-election violence. Why do so many democracies-old and new, diverse and homogenous-experience election violence, often long after founding elections? Why does it occur in some electoral districts and not others? I develop a common set of explanations for this unique form of political violence, proposing why, where, how, and when parties and candidates risk reprisals, punishment, and reputational costs to influence elections through "undue influence." Considering the array of available non-coercive strategies, such as negative campaigning, vote buying, and boycotting available to politicians, to name a few, the choice to use violence or to allow supporters to do so is a rare and, often, conscious choice. I aim to expand understanding of this phenomenon. First, drawing on historical case studies of particularly acute eruptions of election violence, I describe the enigmatic historical and contemporary paterns of election violence that contemporary explanations, which focus primarily on recent episodes, tend to overlook. It is study of these cases, as well as preliminary, theory-building research trips to observe both rounds of Indonesia's 2004 presidential elections, on which I base my theory, while the collection of data and tests of this theory will be carried out independently and separately from this presentation of theory, hypotheses, and empirical expectations to minimize bias and report transparently and honestly when the empirical results are inconsistent with my initial propositions. While the theory shaped the research design and data collection, no data has been analyzed before full articulation of the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]