The Politics of Indonesia

Indonesia is the world’s third-most populous democracy, a Muslim-majority nation, and one of Asia’s emerging economic giants. Indonesia transitioned from over 3 decades of stable authoritarian rule at the end of the 1990s to become one of the region’s, indeed the world’s, most dynamic and competitive democracies. At the same time, reform was wide-reaching but not deep, and democratic practice in Indonesia has long been characterized by entrenched problems of clientelism, elite capture, and unequal representation. For much of the postauthoritarian era, scholars viewed these structural challenges as constitutive of Indonesia’s low-quality but overall stable democratic system. However, since 2014 international and domestic observers began identifying more direct and proximate threats to Indonesia’s democratic survival, including the shrinking of civic space and erosion of human rights protections, as well as the partisan manipulation of state institutions by incumbent politicians seeking to extend and entrench their power. Indonesia’s political trajectory from successful third-wave transition to imperiled democracy makes it an ideal case for testing and contributing to political science debates about conceptualizing and measuring democratic regression and resilience.