00074918.2015.1061930

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in

Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-Roots Up

Philips Vermonte

To cite this article: Philips Vermonte (2015) The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-Roots Up, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:2, 313-315, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2015.1061930

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1061930

Published online: 24 Aug 2015.

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Book Reviews 313

Soeharto, at his residence, set up a chance for Dwi to meet Liem, and at the same time chose Djuhar Sutanto, another Hokchia supplier to the military, from among several candidates to be one of Liem’s partners. This story vividly epitomises Soeharto’s level of micromanagement in establishing his regime.

The book thus does not merely enrich the Salim group’s history; it also uses the Salim group as a lens through which to examine Indonesia’s political econ -omy. It describes, in particular, the dynamism of privilege allocation. We learn, for example, that antagonism lay behind a well-known duopoly of clove imports: Soeharto’s right-hand military man Soedjono Hoemardani had recommended that Liem take on the import rights, whereas the then trade minister, Soemitro Djojohadikusumo, had pushed for Soeharto’s half-brother Probosutedjo to do so. In response to this division, Soeharto gave the import rights to both. During his presidency, Soeharto would carefully allocate privileges among many can-didates, but it was Liem who developed the largest business group from these privileges. According to Liem, he also sometimes gave Soeharto advice on, for instance, which industries were the most promising. If such a two-way relation-ship did exist, it would suggest that Soeharto was open to incorporating the ideas of those he trusted in speciic ields, while he stood at the top of the authoritarian hierarchy.

In meticulously following the Salim group’s revival in the post-Soeharto era, the authors show that conglomerates created by the regime can stay alive, and even grow, without Soeharto, if they have their own resources. There is no broader pic -ture here of changes in the group’s assets, sales, or ownership struc-ture, but this omission does not reduce the value of the book. The fruit of the authors’ enthu -siasm over many years is without doubt an important contribution to historical research in Indonesian and Asian political economics.

Yuri Sato

Institute of Developing Economies, Chiba

The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-Roots Up. By Ulla Fionna. Amsterdam:

Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Pp. 252. Paperback: €49.95.

Political scientists have long agreed that the political party is the backbone of electoral democracy. Given that Indonesia is in the 17th year of the post-Soeharto period, the role of political parties in consolidating the country’s democracy is worth pondering. This book is probably the irst detailed and systematic account of how Indonesia’s political parties have operated since 1999. In a wider context, the book contributes to our understanding of how political parties institutionalise in a country moving from authoritarianism to democracy.

The book provides a thorough account of the history of political-party devel -opment in Indonesia, from the liberal democracy of the 1950s, to the New Order, to the post-Soeharto period. The author focuses on how Indonesia’s political par -ties have performed in ive areas (party organisation, party activi-ties, recruitment

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314 Book Reviews

approaches, party membership dynamics, and intra-party careers) by examin -ing local branches of four large parties: Golkar; the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI–P); the National Mandate Party (PAN); and the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS).

Fionna argues that, by Western theories, these four parties have progressed in all ive areas—and, in particular, that they have been able to establish local pres -ences, as demonstrated by ‘the mere existence of their branch organizations and the frequent activities the majority of them hold’ (p. 187). Furthermore, she argues that parties in the post-Soeharto period have more genuine local presences than parties in the 1950s and during the New Order. She inds that the later parties have tended to decentralise, or give their local branches more responsibility for recruitment: more responsibility for local branches has meant more creative free -dom at the local level to conduct different activities to attract voters.

Here lies the problem. Drawn largely from the experience of established democracies, Western theories on political parties maintain that the party plat-form should be the basis for attracting voters. Yet, as Fionna acknowledges, par -ties in post-Soeharto Indonesia still rely heavily on the charisma of their leaders, since voters in general remain unattached to any party. This, Fionna notes, is the opposite of the approach taken by parties in the 1950s, when ideologies were the main attraction for voters.

What is the source of this tendency to decentralise party management to local branches? Did it emerge by design or because a lack of central-ofice monitoring (p. 190) gave branch leaders a lot of room to manoeuvre? If the latter, the tendency is actually a symptom of a lack of institutionalisation, not, as the book seems to

argue, the result of a recent trend of institutionalisation.

Party oligarchs seem to dominate Indonesia’s political parties, but Fionna calls for more attention to be given to the branch leaders who run the party every day at the grass roots. This book inspired an extensive, local-level study by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta, which held struc -tured, face-to-face interviews with more than 2,000 leaders of PDI–P, PAN, the Democratic Party, and Gerindra in 514 districts and cities across the country, ask -ing questions similar to those in this book. CSIS’s ind-ings more or less agree with Fionna’s, in that there have been variations in the levels of institutionalisation among parties in post-Soeharto Indonesia. Fionna’s research inds that younger parties (in her case, PKS and PAN) are more creative, more focused, and ‘more institutionalized’ in conducting recruitment activities than older parties, which tend to rely on their reputations to attract voters.

Most political parties in Indonesia are relatively new; what differentiates them is their leadership structures. Gerindra, founded in 2008 by former special-forces commander Prabowo Subianto, is younger than PKS or PAN. NasDem is even younger, having been founded in 2011 by media tycoon Surya Paloh. Both Gerinda and NasDem hold a substantial number of seats in the current House of Representatives, relecting their success in the 2014 election. Yet both are less democratic than the other parties, and the associations of their powerful ‘owners’ with the political practices of the New Order government cannot be discounted.

Party institutionalisation will remain a central theme in the study of party poli-tics in Indonesia. This book is therefore important in that it adds to our under -standing of the opportunities and challenges faced by Indonesia’s political parties

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Book Reviews 315

in institutionalising during the country’s transition to democracy. It is to be hoped that Fionna’s book, from the ideographic political research tradition, prompts other, more nomothetic studies.

Philips Vermonte

Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta

The Evolving Sphere of Food Security. Edited by Rosamond L. Naylor.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 394. Hardback: A$119.95.

This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of food security. The editor, Rosamond Naylor, of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), has arranged the book around two key questions: How do the challenges of achieving food security change as an economy develops, and how do policies in one country affect outcomes in other countries?

Naylor’s introduction offers a bird’s-eye view of the various dimensions of malnutrition. It presents a bewildering range of statistics, such as the observa -tion that almost a third of the global popula-tion suffers from micronutrient dei -ciency. Naylor lirts with linear, evolutionary models of development beloved by earlier generations of scholars but perhaps now viewed with less favour, par -ticularly by non-economists whose disciplines problematise a teleological vision. Nonetheless, Naylor’s introduction brings out highly pertinent observations. For instance, it evokes James Scott’s description of high modernist schemes in noting that too many large-scale schemes fail; Naylor suggests that policymakers search instead for localised solutions that would provide pathways for upward mobility and ind ways to scale up such successes.

Naylor draws on available research to conclude that broad-based economic growth may not necessarily provide the very food insecure with a means out of desperate poverty traps, especially if there are wide disparities in income and assets. Any such generalisations of course risk running up against the work of specialists versed in the speciicities of particular cases. For instance, Naylor sees oil palm as a driver of pro-poor growth in Indonesia. She concludes elsewhere, however, that growth can occur overall even while it worsens outcomes for small-holders unable to intensify their crop production. Sadly, this is the fate of too many very poor landowners in the oil-palm districts of Indonesia who, unable to access inputs and high-quality planting materials, risk being left behind because of the limited demand for labour on neighbouring plantation estates.

BIES readers will perhaps be most interested in Walter Falcon’s chapter, ‘Food

Security for the Poorest Billion: Policy Lessons from Indonesia’, in which the author sets out his experience working on improving the country’s food secu -rity during the Soeharto period. He offers an insider’s account of the remarkable growth in rice production. He also reminds us of how Indonesia used state rev-enues from oil exports in the 1970s and 1980s to improve rural infrastructure and rice production, reducing food poverty more effectively than many other coun-tries. Along the way he provides insights into key policy debates, such as whether