The Meaning of Democracy and Democratic Consolidation in Indonesia

Democracy is often conceptualized as a system of government that combines high levels of electoral competition with liberal principles such as limits to executive power and provisions for individual rights. Yet empirical research shows that multiple conceptions of democracy exist across the world, and the citizens of different countries often have widely differing views or expectations of democracy (Chu & Huang, 2010; Norris, 2011; Ferrín & Kriesi, 2016).Public conceptions of democracy are worthy of scholarly attention because they are closely intertwined with notions of democratic legitimacy. When democracies fail to meet public expectations, citizens grow increasingly disillusioned with democracy as a form of government, and they may become more receptive to authoritarian messages (Magalhães, 2014). However, as the existing scholarship focuses predominantly on conceptions of democracy as an outcome rather than as an explanatory factor, it hasoften overlooked the implications of conceptions of democracy. How do people’s understandings of democracy shape the ways they evaluate its performance in their country? How do those understandings affect public support for democracy as a system of government? How are those basic understandings associated with political behavior?The project I propose will address these questions through a study focused on Indonesia, a rising economic and political power in the Asia-Pacific region, and as the third-largest democracy in the world. To investigate which ideas of democracy now prevail in the Indonesian political discourse and how those ideas have evolved over time, I will carry out a qualitative content analysis of texts produced by prominent Indonesian political figures in various historical periods. To study the structure of conceptions of democracy in the mass public, and how they relate to various attitudinal constructs such as satisfaction with democracy and political Islam, I will survey a large, representative sample of the Indonesian population, and conduct a series of face-to-face interviews.The proposed project will deliver three main contributions to the global discourse on democracy. First, the project will shed light on the links between popular understandings of democracy, evaluations of democratic performance, and political legitimacy. Second, the project will develop a new method to study public conceptions of democracy, with a conceptual framework that considers people’s views on democracy in terms of the electoral, liberal, deliberative, participatory, and egalitarian dimensions of democratic practice. Third, the project will contribute to our understanding of Indonesia, a country in which democratic institutions show signs of both resilience and vulnerability.