There is widespread agreement that compared to most other states in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s central government has offered a poor response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The government of President Joko Widodo initially ignored the threat, and when it did react, the crisis policies were piecemeal and confusing. But what explains this outcome? It would be easy to attribute Indonesia’s response to its lower middle-income status or its democratic governance structures that lack strong repressive capacity. With countries poorer and more democratic than Indonesia performing better, however, this explanation is unsatisfactory. Going beyond simple development and regime categories, this article proposes that Indonesia’s COVID-19 response was the result of its specific process of democratic decline in the last decade. This backsliding produced intensifying populist anti-scientism, religious conservatism, religio-political polarisation, corruption and clientelism, as well as assertiveness among anti-democratic actors. Ultimately, these segmental factors combined into a toxic mix that severely constrained Indonesia’s ability to effectively respond to a massive external shock such as COVID-19.
This article compares Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto period. It explores the question of why the party system of the 1950s collapsed quickly, while that of the contemporary polity appears stable. Challenging established assumptions that party systems fail if their individual parties are weakly institutionalised, I submit that the fundamental difference between the party politics of the 1950s and today's democratic system is related to the character of inter-party competition in both periods. While inter-party contestation in the 1950s took place at the far ends of the politico-ideological spectrum, the competition between parties in the contemporary democracy exhibits centripetal tendencies, stabilising the political system as a whole.
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