In this chapter I explore the effect of seat-maximizing and alternative motivations on the national electoral reforms adopted in Indonesia during the 1999-2004 legislative session. I evaluate each of the major parties’ positions on three elements of reform – an electoral threshold, the size of electoral district magnitude, and the type of list proportional representation system in use – in order to assess the importance of seat-maximizing and alternative motivations in understanding the specific reforms that were adopted. In order to do so, I situate the reform process within the broader post-transition political environment and compare party preferences to the proposal by the government and the professed interests of civil society. After assessing how individual party positions affected the exact
composition of reforms that were adopted I proceed to analyze the impact those reforms had on the 2004 election outcomes, assessing whether party expectations were met and setting the stage for the ensuring reform process that occurred in the 2004-2009 legislative session.
Based on seat maximizing hypotheses, in 1999 many initial factors in the Indonesian case did not indicate that reform would be inevitable. There was high uncertainty about future election outcomes while the opposition had just won the largest proportion of seats under the openly competitive rules established for the 1999 elections, suggesting that the opposition should have little incentive to drastically alter a system that had just propelled them into power and was already quite proportional. In general, the opposition was relatively interested in maintaining the status quo for both seat-maximizing and ideological reasons which will be discussed later in the chapter. In addition, the army, which had been extremely
114
strong under the New Order and valued the status quo that kept them in the vicinity, if not outright possession, of power and decision-making, had no desire to overhaul the system since revision might mean a reduction in their presence.
More importantly, based on the 1999 election outcomes and the large number of parties competing in (forty-eight) and gaining seats from (twenty-one) the elections, it is not obvious what seat-maximizing logic would predict in terms of what reforms would be
undertaken, if any. The system in place in 1999 was already a largely list-based proportional one, with moderately large districts based on provincial boundaries and closed nominations. Seat-maximizing logic would predict that high and rising uncertainty would lead to greater proportionality but the system already boasted a fairly high degree of proportionality such that additional proportional elements would be a) difficult to add, and b) viewed as largely unnecessary for competitors to hedge their bets for future elections.
However, the surprisingly lopsided loss by the ruling party meant that at least one powerful group had some incentive to alter the existing electoral system. In addition, the academic community and other civil society actors who unsuccessfully pushed for greater reform prior to the 1999 elections were very interested in an agenda that included electoral reform. In addition, as discussed in the previous chapter, reforms came in many areas in the early democratic period. Outside the realm of legislative election reform, the process of amending the constitution created a directly-elected executive and an upper chamber of the legislature based on the principle of regional representation. Other electoral reforms included the elimination of reserved legislative seats for the military and functional representative groups, direct election of district heads for provincial and municipal governments, and increasing political and fiscal decentralization to said provincial and
115
municipal governments. In short, reforms were occurring across most elements of electoral politics in post-New Order Indonesia, and the vast majority of the reforms were intended to strengthen vertical and horizontal accountability to some degree. The legislative election reforms followed a similar path of attempting to 1) increase democratic accountability, and 2) increase ease of voting, counting and seat allocation mechanisms. The final reform package adopted would not likely have been predicted prior to or at the beginning of the process.
In Chapter 2 I introduced a set of hypotheses predicting the determinants of electoral reform. In particular, I focused on the contrast between seat-maximizing expectations (hypothesis 1) and alternative motivations (hypothesis 2), the specific expectations that medium-sized parties would be a more important indicator of less inclusive and candidate- centric reform adoptions (hypotheses 3a & 3b) and that as medium-sized parties increasingly benefited from distortion in translation of votes into seats they would push for less inclusive reforms to cement those gains (hypothesis 4). I hypothesized that reformers in new
democracies would be likely to pursue more consensual reform processes that appeared less interested in seat maximization, but that this effect would fade in later periods of reform (hypothesis 5). Finally, I expected that ratchet effects will increase the likelihood that once less inclusive and candidate-centric reforms are adopted they will be retained or reinforced in later iterated periods (hypotheses 6a & 6b) but subject to some level of constraint.
I also hypothesized about the effects of reform on party system outcomes. I expected that more inclusive and candidate-centric reforms would increase party system fragmentation (hypotheses 7a & 7b), less inclusive reforms would produce increased disproportionality in translating votes into seats (hypothesis 8), and that both interparty and intraparty reforms
116
would produce a general increase in the amount of electoral volatility in the party system (hypothesis 9). I will investigate these expectations in the 1999-2004 period.
This chapter traces the process of reform during the 1999 to 2004 legislative session that produced the 2003 General Election Law, probing the motivations of key actors and choices they made in order to test explanations of the theoretical framework given in Chapter 2. First, I introduce the context of reform in the post-transition period, based on the party power distribution resulting from the 1999 elections and accounting for the simultaneous constitutional amendment process. Next I address the process of reform itself, focusing on the sequence of actor participation, the timing of reform negotiations and adoption relative to other political reform processes and the upcoming 2004 election schedule, and explain changes from the previous election structure in the proposed draft law and party positions about the proposed changes. I then tackle each of the reform components – electoral
threshold, district magnitude, and list structure – to assess party-level positions, strategic and seat-maximizing incentives as well as alternative arguments for or against certain reform options. I evaluate how the negotiation process affected the eventual decisions of individual parties and the legislative committees tasked with producing the General Election Law, finishing with a comparison of each element in the proposed draft law to the rules actually adopted in the final election law passed by the DPR. Finally I conclude with an evaluation of the impact of reforms on the Indonesian party system, assessing whether party expectations were met, which parties benefitted and which did not, and previewing possible scenarios for the 2004-2009 reform period based on the outcome of the 2004 elections.
117
Transitional Context of the Reform Period
In 1998, after Suharto had turned power over to his vice president, Habibie gathered a team of social scientists to aid the Ministry of Home Affairs in reviewing and, if necessary, revising various political laws, including laws on the governance of elections and political and fiscal decentralization. First on the list was to prepare three laws that would lay out the rules for the early general elections in 1999: Law Number 2 (UU2/1999) on political parties, Law Number 3 (UU3/1999) on the general elections, and Law Number 4 (UU4/1999) on the composition and status of the national and local legislatures. The political parties law needed revision in order to relax the tight controls on party formation, registration and participation that prohibited any but the three national parties – Golkar, PDI-P and PPP – from competing during the New Order. The general election law needed revision in order to set forth the districting and rules for elections to the national legislature, the People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat or DPR), and local legislatures, the Regional People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah or DPRD1, at the provincial level, and DPRD2, at the district/municipal level). The general election law also set forth rules and processes for the selection of Election Commissioners who would implement and oversee all election conduct. The composition and status law required the least revision, except where it touched upon issues related to the previous two laws. Later revisions tended to treat these three laws, along with the separate laws governing executive election and election organization, as a package of laws requiring synchronization.
The team, officially known as the Team to Revise Draft of Laws on Politics of the Ministry of Home Affairs (Tim Revisi Undang-Undang Politik di Menteri Dalam Negeri) but nicknamed for the number of its members as the Team of 7 (Tim Tujuh), included four
118
scholars who had earned Ph.D. degrees in the United States – Andi Mallarangeng and Ramlan Surbakti from Northern Illinois University, Afan Gaffar from Ohio State University and Ryaas Rasyid from the University of Hawaii. The others were Djohermansyah Djohan, Luthfi Mutty, and Anas Urbaningrum. The input from these team members introduced and debated electoral system components previously unheard of in Indonesia, such as single- member districts and a mixed electoral system. However, by the time the draft law made its way out of the Ministry to the legislature, and was subsequently passed by a legislature still controlled by Golkar (which held more than 70% of the seats), the electoral system was nearly identical to that of previous New Order era elections with the exception that interparty competition was now much more open and inclusive.
The primary difference in the 1999 election, compared with previous ones under the New Order, was that parties of basically any persuasion could register and compete in the elections; prior to 1998 only three parties were able to compete and were subject to stringent controls and intervention by the government. Now parties could create nearly any platform to submit, with nearly any name, symbol and list of nominees, none subject to government “approval” other than to abide by the rules and regulations that applied to all parties. The major holdover from the previous law governing political parties was the regional stipulation: parties could only form and compete if they possessed a nation-wide presence in terms of offices, headquarters and registration of nomination lists. This constraint, in practice, took the form of a registration barrier under which parties were required to register in at minimum ½ of the provinces, demonstrating that they had an office/headquarters in at least ½ of the municipalities in those provinces. Failure to comply would eliminate a party from
119
competition and the stipulation was retained primarily to discourage regional parties from forming in provinces with separatist elements, such as Aceh and Papua.
Otherwise the system in 1999 largely resembled the basic system under the New Order: closed-list proportional representation with provincial boundaries as the electoral districts for calculating vote-seat allocation formulae. Differences were minor, in part because the Ministry Team’s suggestions in the draft law were largely overruled by the interests of the ruling Golkar Party and military representatives who wanted to retain the existing system as much as possible. The structure of ballots, therefore, contained only party names and symbols and voters simply chose a party from the ballot; once seats were
allocated to parties on the basis of sub-provincial divisions, names were taken in order from the party nomination lists that were submitted prior to the election. Thus voters had no control over individual candidates, only over which parties received seat allocations in their province. An additional element, a past election vote threshold set by the Ministry’s team at 10% of the 1999-2004 DPR seats in order to contest the 2004 general elections, was
drastically reduced to 2% in the final law.
On June 7, 1999 Indonesians went to the polls in the first election deemed “free and fair” by the international community and election observers stationed throughout the country. In all 28 of the country’s provinces the open competition produced multiple party seat-
winners, and fears about election-related violence proved largely alarmist. Relative to elections in India or the Philippines, long held up as the regional democracy examples, almost no violence emerged prior or in response to the June elections. However, concerns were raised about the allocation process used to determine remainder seats and the political horse-trading between parties over remainder seats across provincial lines. There was
120
agreement in the international donor community that such practices, which amounted to remainder vote-pooling by parties to try and win seats that were known as Stembus Accords, should be eliminated in the revision of the election law for the future with an eye toward transparency in the allocation process.
As expected by outside observers, the PDI-P won the plurality of votes with Golkar coming in second and a range of votes spread over three other parties, the New Order PPP, Wahid’s PKB and Rais’ PAN. In total, 21 parties won at least one seat, though only six won substantial enough seat-shares to boast a relatively large fraksi, or legislative caucus. In the 1999-2004 legislative session there were five single-party fraksi (PDI-P, Golkar, PPP, PKB and PBB) and four multi-party fraksi (the largest included the PAN) composed of two to five parties each. Table 4.1 shows the seat-shares of the largest parties in the People’s
Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat or DPR). In addition to the 462 seats held by the 21 competitive parties, 60 were reserved for representatives of ABRI (the Indonesian military) and PRI (the National Police).
Table 4.1 1999-2004 Party Seat-shares
Party Seat % (Number)
PDI-P 33.12% (153) Golkar 25.97% (120) PKB 11.04% (51) PPP 12.55% (58) PAN 7.36% (34) PBB 2.81% (13) PK 1.52% (7) Others 5.63% (26)
The loss to the PDI-P, in particular the magnitude of the loss, surprised some in Golkar’s leadership who believed that the transitional conflict had largely been due to perceptions about Suharto’s corruption and mismanagement, not broader disillusionment with the party. Habibie, still in control of Golkar, began maneuvering for the presidency
121
despite the fact that many parties, such as the PAN, were not interested in supporting a Golkar led-government to head the process of reformasi for fear that little reform would actually occur.
Despite holding a plurality of the seats in the DPR, the PDI-P did not end up holding the advantage in nominating a president-vice president combination to the executive. Still operating under a de facto pseudo-parliamentary system, the president and vice president, who automatically assumed the presidency for the remainder of the fixed 5-year term if the president died or was forced to step down, were selected from among the representatives. Given the lack of a majority party, a party hoping to secure the presidency would need allies, and likely many of them. For clear reasons, neither the opposition PDI-P’s Megawati nor incumbent Golkar’s Habibie would be able to ally with each other, and it was increasingly clear that none of the Islamist parties would consider allying with Megawati to allow a female presidency. After a lengthy period of backroom deals and politicking Megawati lost in the balloting in the MPR (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, People’s Consultative Assembly) to Wahid and had to accept election as his vice president. This arrangement which lasted until Wahid was forced from the presidency amid scandal in July 2001 and Megawati assumed the office with the PPP’s Hamzah Haz, her primary opponent for the vice presidency, as her vice president.21
Following its inauguration, the DPR faced many tasks in 1999, including constitutional amendments and decentralization, which were briefly addressed in the
previous chapter.22 The constitutional amendment process required a special legislative body,
21
Haz had been one of the most vociferous opponents to a female Indonesian president, challenging Megawati for the vice presidency when even the Golkar opponent had dropped out of the race.
122
named the First Ad Hoc Committee or Panitia Ad-Hoc 1 (PAH1), which was led by representatives from the PDI-P and Golkar. The decentralization process required an additional legislative commission, one who worked with the PAH1 and also was led primarily by PDI-P and Golkar representatives. Finally, the legislative committee tasked with revising the election law drew its membership largely from the PAH1 and
decentralization commission, as the election law revisions did not really begin in the DPR until after the constitutional amendment process ended.
Procedure and Sequencing in the Reform Process
Despite the lack of a clear seat-maximizing motivation for electoral reform, there were numerous actors invested in revision of the system used in 1999. Chief among the proponents of change was Golkar whose leaders now realized that the previous system would not benefit them in future elections. Others advocating for change or revision of the existing system included academics and civil society members who worried that the problems
associated with the 1999 elections, such as the corruption associated with the Stembus Accords (trading remainder seats across district lines) and the closed-list system, would persist without electoral reform. International organizations, such as the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, were consulted or became direct advocates of reform.
Finally, the political battle over the presidency from 1999 to 2001 also had
ramifications for allocating government portfolios, although the Minister of Home Affairs under Wahid, former ABRI General Surjadi Sudirdja, was replaced by Megawati with
22 For reasons of space and theoretical focus I do not address these issues here, but the DPR also faced questions
regarding Timorese independence, the mitigation of civil conflicts in Aceh and Papua and sectarian violence in many parts of the country, all of which demanded attention of the national government and legislature from 1999 to 2004. For an excellent summary account of the different ethno-nationalist and religious conflicts that emerged during the political thaw of the early democratic period see Bertrand (2004).
123
another former ABRI General, Hari Sabarno, in August 2001.23 The core of the team preparing the Ministry’s draft election law remained constant, despite the cabinet shuffle in mid-2001, and was headed by Siti Nurbaya, a long-time New Order bureaucrat and former Golkar youth leader. Under Nurbaya the team took the approach of consulting numerous experts and academics, which directly influenced the components and content of the draft law that was eventually submitted to the DPR.24 The advice of the expert consultants, as well as the general feeling that the 1999 elections had been transitional and that reform and
change represented the “only way to move forward,”25 led to the process of revision that began, as under the New Order, with a draft from the Ministry of Home Affairs.