Indonesia at a Crossroads: Decentralisation and Citizen Participation

The paper proposes to examine the effect of political decentralization, a common democratic innovation, on citizen participation in Indonesia. After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the country underwent a transition from authoritarianism. A program transferring greater decisional autonomy to regional authorities was designed and quickly implemented. It is often qualified as a political «big bang». Almost two decades later, Indonesia is becoming a consolidated democracy; a remarkable feature considering that in Southeast Asia most regimes are non-democratic. What is the role of decentralization reforms in this transformative success? Theoretically, the literature on Indonesia focuses on political competition attributing positive impact at the regional level with increasing pluralism and negative impact at the national level with more electoral fraud. Hence, results are mitigated. Yet, citizen participation remains understudied and it may help to understand contradictory results about political competition. I argue that citizens are engaged politically with local non-elected actors while being relatively disinterested by traditional elected representatives in the capital. Hence, the case of Indonesia can contribute to the debate on how political competition and citizen participation work together in the study of democratic innovation. Furthermore, countries with a huge population need democratic innovation in order to make democracy works. Among others, the number of conflicting public demands often saturates political channels. Citizen’s voice tends to never reach the capital increasing political dissatisfaction. Decentralization reforms become central in overcoming this problem. Therefore, the case of Indonesia is informative methodologically because its demography implies that decentralization and the quality of democracy may be intimately related but potentially contingent. Ultimately, the goal is to evaluate whether decentralization reforms can be a legitimate criteria to measure the quality of democracy, at least for countries similar to Indonesia in terms of size.