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Prabowo Subianto's victory in Indonesia's 2024 presidential elections was decisive, and it is widely accepted that incumbent President Joko Widodo's de facto endorsement of him played a significant role in this outcome. But the motivations of Widodo (commonly known as "Jokowi") for picking his former adversary as his heir, and the reasons for his determination to get Prabowo elected in a landslide, remain poorly understood. This article demonstrates that Jokowi selected Prabowo after other options had fallen through, and that he made his choice with full awareness of the risks and uncertainties involved. By implication, he also tolerated the danger a Prabowo presidency could pose to Indonesian democracy. Tempted by Prabowo's offer to make Jokowi's son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, his vice-presidential candidate, Jokowi went all-in and mobilized state resources to secure their triumph. Based on interviews with key actors, this article delivers a detailed picture of the factors that made Prabowo president-and that gave Jokowi few guarantees of continued influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing body of scholarship analyzing the conditions under which incumbent presidents can launch successful attempts to evade existing term limits. It has generally been found that if presidents use multi-strategy approaches, the probability of their success is high. Failure of term limit evasion, on the other hand, is typically ascribed to opposition by judges or to popular disapproval. The case of Indonesia, presented in this article, challenges some of these assumptions. We show that President Widodo's attempts to achieve a revision of term limit regulations or to delay the next elections failed despite a determined multi-strategy approach, and they did so primarily because of sustained elite opposition, including from his own party. Judges played no role, and popular rejection was relevant only insofar as it aligned with elite attitudes. Widodo's failed term evasion attempts, then, highlight two contradictory trends in Indonesia's contemporary democracy: they demonstrated both the erosion of democratic culture that made the initiative possible and the continued resilience of democracy that ultimately thwarted the plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines business performance and crisis‐mitigation strategies among micro, small, and medium‐sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We utilise a new primary dataset based on administrative records, survey data, and follow‐up interviews with merchants using the digital application GoFood, an on‐demand cooked food delivery service. Three empirical findings emerge: first, the overall employment size of women‐owned businesses shrank more than men‐owned businesses after the onset of the pandemic; second, women were more likely than men to cut personal expenditures and use government assistance as crisis‐mitigation strategies; and third, competition increased sharply as new merchants entered the platform, with the service areas of both incumbents and entrants shrinking over time. These results have implications for policies on womenʼs entrepreneurship, the uptake of business development services, and financing programs for MSMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 Indonesian general election provides an interesting platform to study coattail effects considering the fact that the presidential elections were held concurrently with the three levels of the legislative offices including the national, provincial, as well as regency and city. Moreover, the multi-party system practiced in the country allows the influence of the party's position on several aspects of the coalition including the origin, old and new members, as well as new parties. Therefore, this study estimates the presidential coattail effect on the 2019 election by analyzing the relationship between presidential candidates and party vote share at three tiers of legislative elections. It also indicates the different effects of each party at every level of the legislative election with a decreasing trend from national to provincial, regency and city. The results showed several critical points which include (1) the presidential coattail effect occurs differently for parties at each level of the legislative election but most of them experienced decreasing trend from upper to lower level, (2) incumbency is not a guarantee that the coattail effect occurs equally among all members of the incumbent coalition, (3) origin party in the incumbent and competing coalitions experienced different level of effect, (4) party's history or track records in the coalition might influence the coattail effect, and (5) the presidential coattail effect is critical for the new party to gain support, specifically when it has no prominent figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined the political capital owned by Minangkabau nomads from the Legislative Candidates for the Indonesian Parliament in the 2019 Legislative Election. Minangkabau is one of the institutionalized ethnic groups with migration tradition that is identical to the matrilineal kinship system in Indonesia. Migration is a valuable asset used by this ethnic group to support Parliament legislative contestations, in the 2019 Legislative Election. This is a qualitative descriptive research with data collection through interviews and documentation. The results showed that FadliZon and Jon Erizalare two Minangkabau nomads who managed their political campaignadequately to win the 2019 Legislative Election with significant votes in their respective constituencies. Furthermore, party support, ownership of political positions in the form of capacity and experience as incumbents, enabled them to achieve victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Advances the study of incumbents' politics and their effects on transitions. • Identifies multiple contradictions that permeate the socio-technical systems. • Provides concepts for analysing incumbents' responses under pluralistic contexts. • Highlights the role of short-term political compromises in maintaining legitimacy. Studying the role of incumbents is central to understanding transformation dynamics. Existing studies have largely focused on incumbent firms, their corporate, technological, and political strategies within a given sector. Whilst insightful, viewing incumbency as a more open concept could allow research to better examine the blurred boundaries across sectors and between sectors and the polity. The plurality of relationship could also result in more tensions and legitimacy problems for incumbents. We ask how can incumbency maintain legitimacy under such pluralistic context? We conceptualise ways contradiction may be managed through political responses and tested our hypothesis in a case study of an urban water initiative in Indonesia. Crisis events, governance messiness, social conflicts, and cognitive contestations are identified as important and interrelated contradictions, which have deep roots in the broader polity. Incumbents also appear skilled at placating tension using piecemeal compromises to survive multiple legitimacy problems, thereby undercutting overall transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We present findings from eight nationally representative surveys conducted during the 2019 Indonesian presidential campaign, in which we measured voters' reported belief in prominent pieces of misinformation. Younger, bettereducated, and wealthier voters were more likely to believe the misinformation. These results are true for stories about both the incumbent (Joko Widodo) and the challenger (Prabowo Subianto). These findings represent a significant departure from results in Western Europe and North America, where a surge in misinformation has disproportionately targeted older and less educated voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for the importance of studying incumbency advantages in a developing democracy. Incumbency advantages are a well-known institutional feature of electoral systems in consolidated democracies, and indirectly provide a test of democratic accountability. With free and fair elections, incumbency advantage should attenuate when governments underperform. Our research tests whether this is the case in a newer democracy such as Indonesia. Specifically, we study local voting for district heads and city mayors in the 2015 Indonesian elections. We find that incumbents win a majority of the time when they run, but their re-election rates are lower than witnessed in many well-established democracies. While term limits and strategic political arrangements are an important aspect of incumbent politician turnover in Indonesia, our findings suggest that something akin to democratic accountability is also likely taking place. In addition, we find that incumbent local leaders with a stronger parochial focus, measured as spending in their district, fare better at the ballot box. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative incumbent turnover rates are an important indicator for the quality of a democracy. Low turnover rates may indicate the presence of oligarchic structures while high turnover rates may be a sign of political instability. Yet, there is little research on incumbent turnover in new democracies. This article will suggest ways to address this gap in the literature by looking at Indonesia. The country is not only the third largest democracy in the world but also a relatively new democracy that has only conducted four elections since 1998. The lack of studies on incumbent turnover in new democracies is mirrored in the literature on Indonesia. The vast scholarship on democratization in Indonesia that has emerged over the past twenty years has yet to harness the insights to be gained from examining legislative incumbent turnover rates. The goal of this article is twofold. One, to present for the first time a systematic and comprehensive account of incumbent turnover rates in Indonesia across all election cycles since 1998. Two, to sketch an agenda for future research on incumbent turnover in Indonesia and other new democracies and facilitate such research by making publicly available an original dataset on incumbent turnover in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article develops an explanation for why democratisation processes sometimes fail to foster effective civil service reform. Using ethnographic fieldwork on the evolving relationship between civil servants and politicians in Lampung, a rural backwater in the southern tip in Sumatra, this paper attributes the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic reform measures in Indonesia to the way in which elections trigger competition over control over state resources. I argue that a merit‐based bureaucracy is particularly difficult to institute when a local bureaucracy enjoys strong discretionary control over the distribution of state resources. During Suharto's authoritarian regime, this control rested largely in the hands of bureaucrats. This authoritarian legacy generates strong incentives for politicians to prefer loyal bureaucrats over capable ones. Politicians need to use bureaucratic appointments as a means to obtain campaign support and to develop control over state resources. In developing these arguments, this paper offers an approach to incorporate informal and clientelistic dimensions of politics more explicitly into analyses of processes of bureaucratic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vote buying and patronage distribution have become widespread in Indonesian elections. Yet, it is also evident that some candidates use programmatic strategies to compete. Drawing on the case of the 2017 election in Kulon Progo district, Yogyakarta Special Region, and using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this article seeks to explain why the incumbent opted out of vote buying and similar clientelistic strategies and why voters supported his programmatic approach. We show that the incumbent prepared vote buying as a fallback strategy but did not activate it. He was able to make this choice because he faced little competition and had invested politically in programmatic policies, though he was also assisted by his ability to manipulate his proximity with the Yogyakarta Sultanate for electoral purposes. This article shows that Indonesian voters can be highly appreciative of programmatic approaches, rather than simply being the "ballot-sellers" they are often assumed to be in the literature on money politics and patronage. In this case, moreover, programmatic success produced a less competitive election that in turn created the possibility for the incumbent candidate to opt out of clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines brokerage activity and "vote buying" in the 2017 Pati district election, where the incumbent seeking re-election was the only candidate on the ballot. Although running unopposed, Indonesian election laws still require unopposed candidates to win the majority of votes cast in order to win. Despite facing a weak opposition that was under-funded and largely limited to the use of social media, the unopposed incumbent in Pati nonetheless built a large and expensive campaign organization and vigorously campaigned for votes. Some of the incumbent's supporters gave money directly to voters in the days before the election. Our study finds that a complex interaction between strategic political considerations and cultural factors explains the apparent paradox of why a popular and unopposed incumbent who was virtually assured victory would engage in an active campaign similar in size and scope to one found in a regular election involving multiple candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains a new trend in Indonesian local politics: the rise of uncontested elections. We explore this trend by way of detailed examinations of two such elections in February 2017: the district head election in Pati, Central Java; and the mayoral election in fayapura, Papua. In doing so, we consider explanations that have been advanced elsewhere, including those that focus on "scare-off effects" and incumbency advantages. Though such approaches are relevant, we show that there was a contrast between our two cases: in Pad, the strength of the incumbent and his wealthy running mate dissuaded rival candidates and parties from competing: in fayapura, two other candidates wanted to run, and even secured backing from local party branches, but their candidacies were annulled after legal challenges. If the first pathway showed a process of broad-based elite bargaining producing a "win-win solution", in fayapura the pathway involved a zero-sum-game contest between rival elites. Despite these differences, in both cases there was competition between local elites, but it happened prior to the election. Overall, we argue the rise of uncontested elections points to growing elite entrenchment in local politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of money politics in regional general election needs a special attention, especially when an incumbent become a candidate in the election. Being nominated as a candidate in the election, incumbents have an opportunity and a tendency to politicize local government budget to support their political objective to be re-elected. Grant expenditure and social aid expenditure are the most probable parts of local government budget that could be utilized by the incumbent. Therefore, this study is focused to analyze data of grant expenditures and social-aid expenditures of local government budgets from fiscal year 2009 to 2010, the period of the most frequent of regional general election that ever been held in Indonesia. The objective of this study is to investigate whether incumbents utilize local government budgets in their re-nomination in the regional election. To achieve the objective, this study test whether: (1) significant differences exist in grant expenditure and social aid expenditure of incumbent local government budgets before and during the process of the regional election; (2) significant differences exist in grant expenditure and social aid expenditure between incumbent local government budgets and non-incumbents local government budgets. The data were analyzed using paired sample t-test, independent sample t-test, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and Mann-Whitney test with a = 5%. The results show that incumbent candidates tend to utilize local government budgets in their renomination in the regional election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the 1999 and 2009 elections the proportion of national female legislators in Indonesia, the world''s largest Muslim majority democracy, more than doubled. While this substantial increase may partly be explained by the recent imposition of a gender quota and placement mandate that have forced parties to increase the number of female candidates, quotas cannot fully explain the strong performance of women in the 2009 elections. First, many parties placed women higher on their lists than the laws required; second, voters appeared to over vote for women in some districts. Although incumbency''s typical effect is to inhibit female electoral success by advantaging traditional (male) competitors, I argue that women benefited largely from an alternative effect: female incumbency can improve female candidate placement and electability by demonstrating female capacity and capability. Female newcomers benefited strongly from the presence of female incumbents in their own and bordering districts, thus suggesting a positive diffusion effect of female incumbency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 2011, a number of trends in Indonesian politics became clearer. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has not become a more reformist and risk-taking president in his second term, contrary to the hopes of many, but has rather become more cautious, aloof and regal in style. He is irked by criticism and dislikes any disturbance to the authority of his rule. The political elite, often in concert with the SBY government, pushed through a range of democratically regressive measures, including allowing politicians to be appointed to the Elections Commission. The malaise within the party system deepened, with less than a quarter of the electorate professing any party affiliation. Most Islamic parties slid closer to the political periphery, and the largest one, PKS, was beset by controversy. Government and community responses to a brutal attack on the Ahmadiyah sect in early 2011 showed the limits of Indonesia's much lauded religious tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]