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7 - Low-Quality Democracy and Its Discontents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Donald L. Horowitz
Donald L. Horowitz
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

By the time of the 2009 elections or earlier, most close observers believed Indonesian democracy to be consolidated. By then, it seemed clear that no significant group in the country threatened the democratic order. Yet there was a price to be paid for gradualism in the creation of a constitutional democracy. The post-1998 changes did not entail complete uprooting of the personnel or the practices of the previous regime. And so there was unfinished business with respect to the armed forces, corruption, the rule of law, and ethnic and religious tolerance. As I shall point out after a review of these deficiencies, some of them have connections to fundamental aspects of the new political system. Their amelioration could actually alter the shape of that system.

THE QUALITY-OF-DEMOCRACY ISSUE

Within a few years of the democratic transition, it had become customary to refer to Indonesia as a low-quality democracy. The bill of particulars for this indictment was far-reaching. Indonesia had “an extremely weak rule of law”; a surfeit of corruption and a lack of transparency; local elites that thwarted the rights of ethnic minorities in various regions; grave defects in religious liberty and the oppression of certain religious minorities, in violation of the constitution; military leaders who openly condoned the army’s murder of a nonviolent separatist; human rights violations by the armed forces that were habitually unpunished; legislators willing to accept bribes in exchange for their support of legislation; gangsters occasionally able to win local office, with help from voter intimidation by thugs, some of them affiliated with political parties; restricted access of citizens to the political process; and generally “weak popular participation” – to name just a few commonly cited defects.

Type
Chapter
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Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia , pp. 207 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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