Indonesian National Election Project
Principal Investigators: William Liddle;
Saiful Mujani, Indonesian Survey Institute, Freedom Institute
After more than four decades years of authoritarian rule,
Indonesia held democratic legislative elections in 1999.
Elections were held again in 2004, including Indonesia’s
first direct election of a president and vice-president.
In both cases, a team led by Liddle and Mujani surveyed
Indonesian voters to see why they made the choices they
did.
The surveys were designed to assess the relative impact
on Indonesian voters’ choices of six sociological
and psychological factors:
• Religious beliefs and affiliations.
• Ethnic and regional loyalties.
• Social class and economic interest.
• Attachment to national party leaders.
• Attentiveness to local opinion leaders.
• Partisanship or party identification.
Previous scholars have pointed to religious orientation
as the primary determinant of voting behavior. Because
most people in Indonesia are Muslim, it was thought that
voters would choose a candidate based on whether the form
of Islam they practiced was animistic, conservative, modernist,
or priyayi (aligned with Hinduism).
Liddle and Mujani’s surveys did not find this to
be the case. Instead, they found that the strongest determinants
of Indonesian voting behavior were attachment to party
leaders and party identification.
Voter attachment to
leaders is likely driven by the rapid spread of television
in recent years and the current atmosphere of press freedom,
the survey found. The importance of party identification
may be a result of voter familiarity with the three parties
allowed to operate during the previous authoritarian regime
of Suharto.
Results of this survey will feed into the larger Comparative
National Elections Project. They also help us to understand
politics in the world’s largest Muslim nation, currently
at the center of the worldwide struggle against terrorism.
The creation and strengthening of democratic institutions
in Indonesia is crucial to resolving these conflicts.
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