00074918.2014.896274

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

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Constitutional Change and Democracy in

Indonesia.Party Politics in Southeast Asia:

Clientelism and Electoral Competition in

Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines

Thomas B. Pepinsky

To cite this article: Thomas B. Pepinsky (2014) Constitutional Change and Democracy in

Indonesia.Party Politics in Southeast Asia: Clientelism and Electoral Competition in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 50:1, 135-138, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2014.896274

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.896274

Published online: 24 Mar 2014.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia. By Donald L. Horowitz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xviii + 342. Paperback: $29.99.

Party Politics in Southeast Asia: Clientelism and Electoral Competition in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Edited by Dirk Tomsa and Andreas

Ufen. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xix + 228. Paperback: $135.00.

Donald L. Horowitz’s Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia and Dirk Tomsa and Andreas Ufen’s Party Politics in Southeast Asia are two recent contribu-tions to the contemporary literature on democracy in Southeast Asia. Alone, each

is a ine book, but reading them together brings to the forefront several key ana

-lytical points about political conlict and institutional engineering in Indonesia. For Horowitz, the deining feature of Indonesia’s democratic transition is that

political insiders held over from the New Order regime directed Indonesia’s constitutional reforms, and did so gradually. This makes Indonesia an unlikely success story from the perspective of those who would favour a more thorough-going political revolution. In contrast to a ‘one shot’ or ‘big bang’ model of con-stitutional reform, perhaps preceded by prolonged and painful debate about who would be empowered to be part of the reform process, Indonesia’s insiders held democratic elections to establish the legitimacy (however tenuous) of their posi-tions, and only then set about reforming the constitution.

The narrative touches on many inluential actors from this group of insiders. Among them, the one whose actions emerge as the most inluential is B. J. Habibie,

whose policy reforms right after Soeharto’s resignation allowed the 1999 elections to be minimally democratic. This is implicitly a portrayal of Habibie as the most critical pahlawan demokrasi [champion of democracy], for had the elections of 1999 not been democratic, then insiders would not have been able to direct the consti-tutional reform process as successfully as they did.

Against this backdrop of insider-dominated reform, a recurrent theme for Horowitz is that insiders wrote rules in a way that they thought would

bene-it them. As a result, Indonesia’s new democratic instbene-itutions were endogenous

to the complex negotiations, debates, proposals, and counterproposals of those insiders who had positioned themselves to craft them. However, these insiders suffered from imperfect foresight. They made errors and miscalculations, and sometimes crafted laws that no one group or faction or party actually supported, as demonstrated most clearly by the ‘Nigeria meets France’ formula for direct presidential elections (see, especially, pp. 153–54). Insiders also wrestled with the weight of Indonesian history, which they interpreted as offering strong lessons about the dangers of excessive fractionalism and excessive executive power. The resulting story is one in which process, choice, and history were decisive. Change any piece of the puzzle, and it could have been otherwise.

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136 Book Reviews

In this sense, Horowitz’s observation that Indonesia displayed few of the pre-conditions for democracy (pp. 16–20) rejects structuralist or historicist perspectives on the determinants of democratisation and democratic consolidation. It is

unfor-tunate that we do not ind more emphasis on Dankwart Rustow’s dynamic model

of transition, which shares many of the features of Horowitz’s account: ‘There must be a conscious adoption of democratic rules, but they must not be so much

believed in as applied, irst perhaps from necessity and gradually from habit. The

very operation of these rules will enlarge the area of consensus step-by-step as democracy moves down its crowded agenda’ (Rustow 1970, 363). Moreover, Rus-tow’s emphasis on national unity as the sole background condition for democracy is also consistent with the perspective that Habibie saved Indonesia by letting East Timor go (see, for example, Liddle and Mujani 2013, 24). This is a nice complement to Horowitz’s evaluation of Habibie’s critical reforms to party competition.

Some of Horowitz’s most interesting discussions are about political conlict.

He writes that there was ‘no serious split’ among the authoritarian ruling elite (pp. 8–9). I disagree (Pepinsky 2009). However, another way to frame Horowitz’s observation about elite splits, one consistent with the broader thrust of this argu-ment, is that whatever splits existed within the ruling elite, the true genius of the reform process was its ability to contain them in true Rustovian fashion. After all, analysts of the late New Order spilled a great deal of ink debating incipient fac-tionalism in the 1990s: in particular, technocrats versus nationalists in economic policy, and Islamists versus nationalists in the military. Both these political splits may have proven important, given the weight of the economic and political crisis facing Indonesia in the spring and summer of 1998. Reading Horowitz, I am even more amazed at the success of the reform process in containing them.

Horowitz also argues that parties relected social cleavages at the moment of

transition (p. 10). Of course, this was more true in 1999 than it is in 2014, but

from the perspective of party competition the strong showing from Golkar is anomalous. What cleavage did Golkar represent? This question of cleavage poli -tics reappears throughout the manuscript. Horowitz repeatedly describes a cleav-age between Muslims and non-Muslims, but he carefully notes how a dizzying array of alignments and realignments and local variants undermined the political import of these cleavages at the national level—even prior to democratisation. Another way of reading Indonesian politics is that these are not political cleavages, at least not as conceptualised by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), but simply differences among Indonesians, which can be described and located but do not generically translate into a template for political action by enough people to have consistent effects on national politics.

Horowitz’s discussion of ‘norms of consensus’ (pp. 74–78) among Indonesia’s democratic establishment is also interesting, given his emphasis on the complexity

of political conlict. Others may follow Slater (2004) and from the outset label this

‘collusion’ between New Order insiders and a quiescent opposition, but Horow-itz considers the cartel-like behaviour displayed by parties in the 2000s to be a partial consequence of the norms of consensus that emerged during the height of the transition (pp. 279–91). This is a distinctive perspective, but one consistent with an overall evaluation of Indonesian democracy as coming with both costs

and beneits.

Some readers will certainly take issue with Horowitz’s portrayal of Indone-sia’s constitutional reforms as one path towards successful democratisation, but

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careful readers will note that on balance Constitutional Change is quite measured in its evaluation of the state of Indonesian democracy. In some cases, though, a more critical voice would have been illuminating, as in the discussion of the rule of law (pp. 233–41). ‘Frail’ is indeed a good word to describe the rule of law in Indonesia, but the real worry is that bribery and corruption are so widespread as to render irrelevant the use of formal politics to roll back judicial independence. Why bother with a political or constitutional crisis when you can just buy a judge when you need a decision? These frailties notwithstanding, establishing the rule of law in a post-authoritarian setting is hard, and it is remarkable that Indonesia’s courts are even a tiny bit independent. Horowitz is no doubt correct that ‘the rule of law may be the last piece to fall into place’ (p. 246).

Despite the richness of the narrative and the careful reading of the evidence, I would have preferred to learn more about Horowitz’s own role in the process of constitutional reform as something more than just an observer. It would make

for compelling reading in its own right, but it would also invite relection on how

engaged scholars can help to make history in real time and then write the history of that history.

Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia is a complex and fascinating book that should become an essential reference for scholars of party competition and institutional development in Indonesia. In contrast, Tomsa and Ufen’s Party Politics in Southeast Asia is thematically narrower—by design. But it does pick up on some of Horowitz’s themes in its contributors’ treatments of Indonesia, espe-cially the process of institutional engineering. (In what follows, I focus on the vol-ume’s treatments of contemporary Indonesian politics.) Jae Hyeok Shin’s chapter on the origins of electoral rules parallels Horowitz’s emphasis on the deliberate choices of incumbent politicians in complex and information-poor environments. Tomsa’s chapter provides a useful extension to this perspective. Whereas Tomsa discusses the uneven impact of institutional engineering on the shapes of par-ties and party systems, Horowitz’s analysis suggests that this may be precisely because those very parties affected by new laws were the ones implementing

them. Horowitz focuses on cleavages and conlict in understanding party com -petition, whereas Tomsa’s conceptual overview of party ideal types—and the

distance between ideal types and real parties—leshes out more fully the parties

themselves as they actually operate.

Ufen’s chapter, on cleavages, takes a similar perspective to Horowitz on

politi-cal conlict. Like Horowitz, Ufen portrays Indonesia’s cleavages as awakening in 1999 after three decades of hibernation. Yet the strength of Golkar compli

-cates Ufen’s account of the axis of political conlict after democratisation in simi

-lar ways as it does Horowitz’s: Golkar just does not it neatly into any cleavage

structure drawn from the 1950s. Yet Ufen also emphasises the growing dealign-ment since 1999 of Indonesian political parties with respect to the pre–New Order

cleavage structure. This relects a growing consensus that social cleavages simply

do not resonate in a way that they once did, with important consequences for interparty competition. Paige Johnson Tan’s analysis of anti-party attitudes adds additional nuance: at the same time that the partisan salience of social cleavages is eroding, voters in Indonesia are becoming more and more alienated from parties. Hamayotsu offers a more focused analysis of two Islamic parties—the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS)—to highlight that the quality of party organisations affects their electoral fortunes. This approach,

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138 Book Reviews

too, emphasises that a focus on cleavage politics is insuficient to understand

trends in Indonesian party politics after 1999.

In all, Party Politics in Southeast Asia is another important contribution to the emerging literature on electoral competition across Southeast Asia, and its treat-ment of Indonesia provides useful conceptual insights and empirical data with which to make sense of recent developments in party politics. Together, the two works reviewed here have broader theoretical implications for how to think about political institutions, both in Indonesia and, more broadly, across emerging democracies. First, institutions are contested: powerful actors attempt to shape the

rules of the political arena to it their own perception of their interests. Second,

the rules of the political arena are consequential: the minutiae of electoral system design have large implications for democratic political competition, even when we allow that they are themselves subject to contestation. Third, these struggles are disembedded: democratic politics cannot be reduced to competition among soci-etal actors; it instead requires an autonomous role for the political process itself. Finally, that process can prove more important than what initially appear to be insurmountable historical or structural constraints on what is politically possible.

Thomas B. Pepinsky

Cornell University

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.896274

Liddle, R. William, and Saiful Mujani. 2013. ‘Indonesian Democracy from Transition to Consolidation’. In Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, edited by Mirjam Kunkler and Alfred Stepan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. 1967. ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments’. In Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. New York: Free Press.

Pepinsky, Thomas B. 2009. Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indo-nesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rustow, Dankwart A. 1970. ‘Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model’.

Com-parative Politics 2 (3): 337–63.

Slater, Dan. 2004. ‘Indonesia’s Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power after Democratic Transition’. Indonesia 78: 61–92.

Commodities and Colonialism: The Story of Big Sugar in Indonesia, 1880–1942. By

G. Roger Knight. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xi + 291. Hardback: €112/$146.

G. Roger Knight and Java sugar belong together. Since the early 1980s, Knight has

published article upon article on Java’s sugar industry, mainly between 1830 and 1942. Indeed, any article on Java sugar published during the last 30 years is bound to be from his hand (with a few exceptions). His readers have been waiting for

him to synthesise this work, and now, inally, their patience has been rewarded.

Commodities and Colonialism unfolds over eight chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion). The book deals with the high or late colonial period, 1880 to 1942, during which the production of (cane) sugar in Java—the ‘Indonesia’ in the title is misleading—was almost constantly increasing, except for in the early 1930s (owing to the severe economic depression of those years). Sugar exports in Java