LESSONS FROM A NEIGHBOR: THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF

INDONESIA'S SHIFT TO THE OPEN LIST

Since making the transition to electoral democracy almost two decades ago Indonesia
has moved gradually toward adopting an electoral system that emphasizes a personal
rather than a party vote. This shift has been evident both in the executive, where indirect
elections of the president and regional heads were replaced with direct elections, and in
Indonesia's legislatures. In Indonesia's first post-Suharto national legislative election in
1999, Indonesia used closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) and, partly as a
result, the election was strongly party-centered, with campaigners emphasizing party
identities and programs. By the time of the 2014 legislative election, fully open-list
proportional representation (OLPR) was in operation, with the result that candidates
viewed their intraparty colleagues as their main competitors and concentrated on
boosting their personal rather than party votes. This dramatic alteration of electoral
dynamics in Indonesia thus strongly confirms a central point made in Chapter Three's
overview of electoral systems: CLPR fosters party-centric politics while OLPR privileges
candidates over parties.
​
Advocates of this system argued that it created a more direct form of democracy, in
which there would be clear connections of accountability between voters and elected
representatives. They were also motivated by widespread disillusionment with the
corruption of the parties and the elites that ran them. Yet in many respects, Indonesia's
transition to direct elections, especially to the open list, is a study in the unintended
consequences of electoral system reform. The transition prompted the decline of party
coherence. It also drove an increase in vote buying. Rather than improving the
representativeness of Indonesia's democracy, it weakened Indonesia's political parties
and undermined the possibilities of programmatic politics.

This chapter provides an account of electoral system changes in the Philippines's largest
Southeast Asian neighbor. It begins with a general system, proceeding background of
Indonesia's democratization and the electoral campaign patterns to analysis of the shift
to the open-list PR and its effects on of Indonesia's electoral system-most importantly the
tough rules that govern and patronage distribution. The penultimate section explains how
other features party registration-help to counteract the decline of party solidarity and the
relatively rise of personalized campaigning. As a result, Indonesia retains a robust party
system when compared to the Philippines and certain other Asian countries. Different
parts of Indonesia's institutional architecture thus push electoral competition in different
directions: whereas electoral rules push toward fragmentation and individualized
campaigning, party and candidate registration requirements enhance the role of parties.
The result is that parties survive as an important component of Indonesia's electoral
architecture, but they are increasingly reduced to the role of gatekeepers-levying fees
(sometimes quite literally) to determine who runs, but then playing relatively little role in
campaigning. The concluding section of the chapter summarizes the depth of the
damage done by Indonesia's shift to an open-list system.

POST-SUHARTO DEMOCRACY

Indonesia made a rapid transition to democracy after President Suharto's 32-year

authoritarian regime collapsed in May 1998. Political controls were loosened by
Suharto's successor, B.J. Habibie, and a vigorous multi-party system came into being.
Forty-eight parties contested the first post-Suharto legislative election in 1999, with the
five biggest parties attaining over 86 percent of the vote. Many of these new parties were
founded on the basis of longstanding political traditions and resilient social identities
(Mietzner 2013). For example, the largest party, the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia -
Perjuangan, Indonesian Democracy Party - Struggle) led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, was
the inheritor of the tradition of pluralist nationalism established by the PNI (Partai
Nasional Indonesia, Indonesian National Party) and Megawati's father, Sukarno, in the
1920s. It attained 33.7 percent of the vote. Likewise, several parties endeavored to
appeal to various sectors of the Islamic community, and did so through links with very
resilient and influential Islamic mass-based social organizations.

Democratic Indonesia inherited from the Suharto regime a system of proportional

representation (PR). Representatives to the People's Representative Council (DPR,
Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat), the national parliament, were elected from multi-member
constituencies, which could be an entire province in less populous regions, or a part of a
province in densely populated areas. Most of those in charge of Indonesia's political
reform process agreed that it was best to maintain PR, believing that this system was a
better guarantor of social peace: by preventing the winner-takes-all outcomes associated
with single-member polarization and, importantly, facilitating political representation of
key minority districts it would allow a richly multi-party system to develop avoiding
political groups. For example, in the 1999 election, about a third of the vote was captured
by Islamic parties of various stripes. Many reformers agreed that it was better to have
such groups represented inside Indonesia's democratic institutions rather than being left
to fester outside of them, and there is indeed evidence that this inclusion has promoted
moderation among the Islamic parties (Buehler 2013).

At the same time, the designers of the electoral system did not want regional or ethnic
elites to be represented by way of their own parties. They thus introduced onerous
national registration requirements for political parties, essentially foreclosing the
possibility of locally or regionally based parties. This requirement has persisted to the
present, with one exception as provided to the semi-autonomous province of Aceh in the
2005 peace accord that ended a 30-year secessionist challenge led by the Free Aceh
Movement.
The specific type of PR system that Indonesia inherited was closed list. Under this
system, citizens did not vote for individual representatives. Rather, on the ballot paper
they punched a hole in a symbol representing the party of their choice. Seats were then
allocated proportionally according to each party's relative share of the vote in the
electoral district concerned. The individuals who took these seats, however, were chosen
on the basis of their position on the candidate list determined by the party prior to the
election: if a party won one seat, its top-placed candidate would win the seat; if it got two,
the first two would be allocated seats; and so on. This system placed a great deal of
authority in the hands of the party elites who controlled the allocation of positions on the
party lists, with the result that struggles to control party branches were often fierce. It also
meant that elections were very party-focused: candidates lower down the list all had a
strong incentive to boost their party's vote and so increase their own chances of being
elected. Candidates and their parties all had an incentive to pull in the same direction.

Another inheritance from the Suharto period was a system of indirect elections of
executive government heads at the national and local levels. In the early years of
post-Suharto democracy, rather than being directly elected by the people, heads of
national and local government-the president at the national level, governors in the
provinces, and bupati (regents) or mayors respectively in rural and urban districts-were
elected by the legislature in the MPR or People's Consultative Assembly, which consisted
of the members of the area concerned. (The president was elected by a slightly different
body, the exceptions, Indonesia's fractured political map meant that no single party
enjoyed a majority national parliament plus some appointed members.) With a few rare e
trading and deal-making between parties and candidates. The most dramatic in any such
legislature. As a result, these elections necessarily involved horse- being the leader of the
party that gained by far the largest share of the popular such example occurred in
October 1999 when Megawati Sukarnoputri, despite vote in the parliamentary election,
failed to secure election as president. The MPR instead chose Abdurrahman Wahid,
whose party had secured only 12.6 percent of the popular vote.

It did not take long for dissatisfaction to begin to develop with this system, and with the
political parties more generally. This dissatisfaction drove calls for electoral system
change. It had several causes. One that stands out is the elections of executive
government heads. It was not simply that the system of indirect elections produced many
victories for candidates who were not associated with the party that had garnered the
largest number of seats in the regional legislature concerned (as with Megawati at the
national level). It also produced a profusion of vote buying within regional legislatures,
with local parliamentarians often selling their votes to candidates willing to pay them the
greatest amounts of cash, or to provide them with other benefits. In cases, the elections
of governors, bupati, and mayors degenerated into scandal and protest, with parties
splitting asunder and many shocking revelations of corrupt deal-making reported in the
press (according to one NGO, 80 percent of gubernatorial elections and 30 percent of
district head elections were affected by conflicts triggered by "money politics" in local
parliaments; see Hukumonline 2002). Many of the beneficiaries of this system were
entrenched elites-incumbent regional government heads, former bureaucrats, wealthy
businesspeople, and military officers-who had the political connections and material
resources to bribe their way into office. Many Indonesians came to believe that the
system of indirect elections of executive government heads was too easily corrupted,
and was not producing a fully democratic system in which chief executives at every level
were truly accountable to the people.

However, disappointment with these elections was just part of a much wider sense of
political disillusionment that developed during Indonesia's first decade of post-Suharto
democracy. Indonesia's political system rapidly became afflicted by widespread
corruption and rent-seeking by many political elites, including parliamentarians.
Predatory and clientelistic practices that had become entrenched during the Suharto
regime hardly seemed to decline at all; in fact, they were adapted to the free-wheeling
and fragmented political landscape of newly democratic and decentralized Indonesia. A
voluminous literature, which we do to the nature of Indonesia's democratic transition and
the entrenched influence not have space to explore here, discusses these phenomena,
mostly ascribing them of an "oligarchy" that had become established during the Suharto
years (see, for example, Hadiz 2010).
Many members of the public, as well as liberal intellectuals and reformers, observed such
developments with distaste. Among the major casualties of the increasingly sour mood
concerning official politics were Indonesia's parties and legislatures, with public trust in
both institutions declining sharply. Citizens increasingly viewed parties as being
unresponsive, out of touch, and corrupt. For critics of the parties, the closed-list system
was part of the problem, because it meant that citizens did not play a direct role in
determining their representatives; instead, it was the candidates whom party elites
placed highest on their party lists who won seats. Most of the winners were themselves
party leaders, while some were wealthy individuals who had simply purchased high
positions on a party list by bribing party officials. In response to this strong structural
position of the parties and their leaders, an anti-party mood rapidly began to develop,
especially among Indonesia's reforming intellectuals. Many of them began to use terms
like "party dictatorship" and "party oligarchy" to describe Indonesia's political system
(Tan 2002).

The closed-list system made it hard to target individual legislators who were known to be
corrupt or otherwise had poor records. Many members of the public knew little about the
individual candidates on party lists, preferring to vote for parties because they identified
with their image or their national leaders, or because they were connected to a social
milieu or socio-religious identity they felt was represented by the party. In 2004, a
coalition of NGOs ran a campaign which they called the "Don't choose rotten politicians"
movement where they identified candidates who had particularly poor records for probity
or human rights-and appealed to voters not to support them. Because voters did not vote
for individual candidates but rather for parties, the campaign had little effect.
ELECTORAL SYSTEM REFORM

This was the context underlying the shifts in Indonesia's electoral system. The first
changes, which were welcomed most enthusiastically by voters, were the transitions to
direct elections of government heads. For many Indonesian reformers—including
members of parliament—this change was a natural outcome of the post-Suharto reform
effort and a culmination of Indonesia's democratization. The shift began in 2004 with
Indonesia's first direct election for the president, and the victory in that year's
second-round vote of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a man who enjoyed popular support
but lacked a strong party base. In the following year, Indonesians began voting directly for
governors, bupati, mayors, and their deputies. In many cases, they elected popular
figures who lacked strong links to political parties and, in some cases, punished
incumbents who were particularly corrupt or incompetent (Mietzner 2006).

Over the years, some of the gloss has rubbed off the system of direct elections of
executive heads. It has become obvious that powerful local oligarchs and dynasts can
win these elections, too, by mobilizing financial resources and political networks. Some
national elites—such as former president Megawati Sukarnoputri (who lost to Yudhoyono
in 2004 and 2009) and Prabowo Subianto (who lost to Joko Widodo in 2014)—have
occasionally criticized direct elections as being too expensive and "un-Indonesian"
(because they allegedly undermine social harmony). Even so, the system continues to
enjoy popular support—as attested to in numerous opinion polls. There was a public
outcry when a coalition of parties associated with opposition to incoming President Joko
Widodo, and headed by then opposition leader Prabowo Subianto, voted in Indonesia's
national parliament in 2014 to go back to the system of election of regional heads by
legislatures. Outgoing President Yudhoyono intervened to reverse the change.

Indonesia's party leaders were not directly threatened by the transition to direct elections
of executive government heads, and they built safeguards into the new system that
preserved some role for the parties. Most obviously, candidates for executive office could
only be nominated by parties or coalitions of parties that had won a minimum proportion
of the votes or seats in the relevant legislature. Although the Constitutional Court
eventually decided that independent candidates should also be allowed to run, the
requirements for independent candidates remain onerous so that parties retain an
important gatekeeping function.
Party elites were more reluctant to embrace change in the electoral system for
legislatures, despite continuing to face considerable pressure from reform-minded
intellectuals, NGO activists, and others to extend the benefits of "direct" elections to the
legislative field (with "direct" here suggesting less orientation to parties and greater
orientation to candidates). Reform happened in 2004, but it was minimal. In that year, a
semi-open list was introduced: voters could vote either for the party of their choice or for
one of the candidates nominated by the party in that electoral district. There was a catch,
however: to be elected, the individual candidate had to win a proportion of the vote
equivalent to or greater than the entire quota necessary for the party as a whole to elect
one representative in that electoral district (for example, 10 percent of the entire vote in a
district with ten seats). If no candidate achieved such a high result, the party list
determined who got elected. In the end, only two candidates at the national level passed
this very high bar. In the lead-up to the 2009 election, the law was changed slightly again,
reducing the benchmark for individual candidates from 100 percent to 30 percent of a
vote quota. Indonesia's elected party representatives in parliament were slowly, but
surely, giving way to reformers pushing for more candidate-centric elections.

In the end, however, it was Indonesia's Constitutional Court that initiated dramatic
change. In 2009, a few months before the election, in response to a challenge to the
electoral law by two candidates who were not placed high on their party lists, a majority of
the court held that the requirement that candidates win a fixed share of a quota conflicted
with the provision of Indonesia's Constitution that based Indonesia's democracy on
"people's sovereignty." If the party list determined who would be elected, the judges
determined, then the people were not truly sovereign. They ruled that, so long as a party
received enough party and individual votes in an electoral district to elect at least one
candidate, then it should be the candidate(s) with the highest individual vote(s) who
should take the seat(s). This decision moved Indonesia to a system of fully open-list PR.

Many civil society activists, intellectuals, and reformers celebrated the decision. The new
system, its supporters claimed, would initiate a new era of accountable government by
making parliamentarians directly accountable to voters who elected them, rather than to
the party elites who placed them on party lists. But what really happened?

THE FIRST MAJOR EFFECT OF THE OPEN LIST: FROM PARTY CAMPAIGNS TO
INDIVIDUAL NETWORKS

A first major impact was on the style and organization of campaigns. Early in the
democratic transition, Indonesia's elections were strongly party-focused. Campaigns
were organized collectively by party leaders and cadres. They emphasized promoting a
party's brand, with large "color-coded" open-air election rallies, parades, and other
events where the party faithful literally hoisted the party flag. Especially in the first
post-Suharto election, there was a strong ethos of voluntarism associated with these
campaigns, with ordinary people who strongly identified with the parties contributing their
own time and effort. This party-focused campaigning was logical under the closed-list
system.

Under the open-list system, however, it conflicted with the main axis of competition,
which was now among candidates from the same party. Candidates now saw their own
party colleagues—at least those who were running for seats in the same electoral
district—as rivals, not as running mates. In 2009, the effect of this change was visible
almost immediately on the streets of Indonesia after the Constitutional Court brought
down its decision, as candidates erected billboards and posters that emphasized their
personal qualities. By the time of the 2014 legislative election, candidates had already
learned how the new system operated and they were prepared for it.

There was thus typically very little coordination of campaigns by candidates running for
the same party (unless they were running for seats at different levels—district, provincial,
national—in the same region, in which case some cooperation was possible, though
often fractious). Instead, candidates devoted their resources, time, and energy to
constructing personal campaign teams that reached down, through layers of brokers, to
voters in rural villages and urban communities. Greatly diminished was the spirit of
voluntarism so apparent in earlier years—and the party flag was now overshadowed by
candidate posters that tended to relegate party logos to the margins.
This dynamic generated a logic of electoral competition that was remarkably fractured at
the grassroots, adding to existing sources of fragmentation arising from decentralization
and other aspects of the political economy. In our extensive research fieldwork during
Indonesia's 2014 legislative election, it was easy to encounter candidates who
complained about the effects of the open-list system and believed that parties were
losing relevance in Indonesian politics. In stark contrast to previous elections, the
centrality of the personal vote put the emphasis on the personal qualities of each
individual candidate. As one Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party, PKS)
candidate in South Sumatra explained, using phrasing that is echoed nationwide and
across all parties, "voters now don't look at the party but at the figure [of the individual
candidate]."

Deemphasizing their party brand, candidates concentrated on forging personal

connections with voters, with most adopting a meet-the-people style of campaigning.
Rather than emphasizing media or large open-air party rallies, most candidates instead
participated in small-scale meetings in village and urban neighborhoods every day, often
until late at night. These gatherings tended to involve just a few dozen, at most a couple
of hundred, participants. They typically featured a small meal or snacks and plenty of
opportunities for informal interaction between the candidate and voters. Such grassroots
meetings also became a means for community members to ask for or receive individual
or collective gifts from their would-be representatives.

Of course, it could be very challenging, if not impossible, for legislative candidates to rely
exclusively on such an approach. Especially in the large national legislative campaigns, it
was not physically possible for one person to visit all communities in a constituency, or at
least to do so sufficiently regularly to be able to build the personal rapport that voters
value. Serious candidates therefore supplemented their individual efforts by forming
teams of vote brokers who did much of the one-on-one personal contacting on their
behalf.
Usually called "success teams" (tim sukses), these teams have a pyramidal structure
that will be immediately recognizable to readers familiar with clientelistic and brokerage
politics elsewhere, including in the Philippines, where vote brokers are known as liders.
Typically coordinated by a core team whose members work closely with the candidate,
the structure progresses downward (depending on the size of the constituency) through
layers of district, subdistrict, village, and polling booth coordinators, to individual team
members (often called "volunteers" or relawan) embedded in local communities. The
largest teams constructed by wealthy national legislative candidates could have 3,000 or
more members.

The base-level brokers—like the liders in the Philippines—are thus key. They are charged
with "recruiting" anywhere between five and fifty voters each, typically from among
household members, relatives, friends, neighbors, and other social intimates. These vote
brokers are supposed to deliver information about the candidate to voters, draw up lists
of individuals who are prepared to vote for the candidate, and then ensure that they
actually turn out on polling day. Often, they also deliver cash or goods to seal the deal, a
topic we return to below.

The motivations of success-team members vary, but in most cases, they are driven by
material reward. Only the wealthiest candidates pay their brokers a regular salary; more
often, candidates cover their expenses—money for fuel, food and drink, arranging
meetings, and such like—but usually generously enough that brokers can use such
payments to supplement their normal income. If their tasks include handing out cash to
voters as polling day approaches, they usually get a fee for this job too. Some candidates
also apply a bonus system: team members who exceed a minimum target of votes in
their subdistrict, village, or polling station can expect a cash reward or a gift of some kind.
Many success-team members also have longer-term goals. For instance, should the
candidate be elected and attain a reasonable number of votes in the community where
the broker was working, that broker can hope to benefit from village-level development
projects and assistance packages that their new representative will be able to direct their
way. This pattern of voter mobilization is now becoming so institutionalized in Indonesia
that one can observe the emergence of a layer of semi-professional and highly
experienced vote brokers who are able to sell their services to different parties and
candidates during election season.

Critically, these teams are usually established completely outside party structures. This is
because the party machine is itself usually a site of contestation given that multiple
candidates from a single party are contesting in each constituency. Often, the candidate
who is strongest in the local party hierarchy (typically, the chairperson of the local branch)
will be able to dominate the machine and direct it toward supporting his or her personal
campaign. In such cases, the party becomes, in effect, a personal success team. In other
cases, the local party machinery becomes riven with division as rival candidates actively
seek to gain the sympathy of different subdistrict or village branches, or of individual party
leaders and activists.

In yet other cases, local party activists simply act much like other vote brokers, selling
their services to whatever candidate can offer the best rewards—even if, sometimes, that
candidate comes from a rival party. In seeking to win enough personal votes to defeat
their intra-party rivals while avoiding expending resources unnecessarily, candidates
employ various targeting strategies. In places where the party has a solid base of
support, candidates will often work only within that base community, trying to win over
loyal party voters to their individual candidacy. Other candidates will target their own
district, subdistrict, or village and attempt to get the lion's share of their votes—thereby
exploiting hometown loyalties and promising to bring home development projects and
other benefits. Candidates also target voters by working through existing social networks
and recruiting their leaders as success-team members. For example, in parts of the
country where clan structures are strong, candidates generally integrate their success
teams into those clans. Elsewhere, candidates try to mobilize voters through networks of
community-level organizations (prayer groups, martial arts clubs, youth associations,
farmers' cooperatives, and so on), or they try to integrate formal and informal village
leaders into their teams.

One effect of this style of campaigning is that it almost entirely closes the space for
programmatic contestation. The open-list system has shifted the scale at which
legislative election campaigns occur: from the general and collective to the specific and
individual. Candidates try to build direct connections with voters and emphasize their
personal qualities, such as their openness, generosity, helpfulness, piety, honesty, and so
on. The emphasis is on the interpersonal and the immediate, leaving little room for
emphasizing grand programmatic issues such as nationwide welfare policies or
governance reforms.

To be sure, there is still scope for socio-cultural differences to play a role—thus, Islamic
party candidates are still more likely to reach down to voters using religious networks,
and to host events that are more religiously tinged. But in a world of political connections
based on personal ties, even these lines become blurred. Non-religious candidates are
able to use religious networks if they have the right personal connections with key leaders
in those networks, and vice versa (Rubaidi 2016).

By the time of the 2014 general legislative election, wider policy contestation had almost
disappeared from grassroots political campaigning (although it played a larger role in the
subsequent presidential election). Candidates frequently complained that the voters had
no real interest in party labels and programs and acknowledged that they themselves did
not emphasize such matters. Instead, they said, voters were merely interested in
"concrete" benefits.
THE SECOND MAJOR EFFECT OF THE OPEN LIST: FROM PROGRAMMATIC
POLITICS TO PATRONAGE GOODS

A second effect of the transition to the open list was thus to greatly increase
the scope and volume of patronage politics — that is, the distribution of goods and other
material benefits in exchange for support, especially vote buying.

It would be naïve, of course, to argue that the open list was the primary cause of
patronage politics in Indonesian elections. Patronage has been a feature of Indonesian
politics since the 1950s, though its form has changed greatly with each new regime. Even
in the early post-Suharto period there was plenty of patronage amidst the enthusiasm
engendered by the transition to democracy. However, given the party-focused nature of
the electoral system at that time, most of the key exchanges occurred within the parties
or inside the political elite—for example, in the form of payments to party leaders by
candidates seeking to secure a high position on a party list, or as bribes paid to
legislators to ensure their vote for one of the contenders in a gubernatorial election.

The adoption of the open list changed the locus of electoral corruption, making
interactions between individual candidates and voters an important site of material
exchange (in addition to the interactions among different levels and categories of
politicians who had been most prominent under the closed-list system). Candidates who
were trying to build their personal reputation and connections with voters faced a strong
incentive to distribute patronage. Most candidates now saw their own party colleagues as
their main competitors, and they could not therefore differentiate themselves from their
chief rivals by way of programmatic appeals or party identity. Moreover, the large number
of candidates competing individually—and working independently to construct their own
teams—doubtlessly increased the overall volume of patronage distribution at election
times.

By the time of the 2014 general election, the vast majority of candidates relied on
patronage distribution as the central component of their campaign strategy. The key
components of the campaigning style described above make most sense when placed in
this context. The small-scale meetings to bring candidates together with community
members (as described above) were typically occasions at which deals were discussed
or transacted to provide communities with either individual or collective benefits. Voters,
in turn, valued one-on-one personal connections with their representatives because they
hoped they would later be able to leverage those connections if they needed help
accessing government services. And the success team structure was all but ubiquitous
because it provided the most effective means for candidates to provide gifts of cash and
goods to voters maximizing their return in terms of votes. Thus, success teams drew up
lists of voters and repeatedly checked the voting intentions of those on the lists to ensure
that the candidate would not waste his or her cash by passing it to voters who had
committed themselves to a different candidate.
The variety of patronage encountered during the course of the 2014 election was
mind-boggling. A first, and ubiquitous, category was collective gifts. These included
donations to clubs or organizations: for example, cutlery, plates, and plastic chairs to a
women's communal savings group; uniforms and equipment to a village sports club;
tarpaulins, mats, a sound system, and a generator to a Koranic recitation group; fertilizer,
seedlings, hand tractors, goats, cows, nets, or fuel to a farmers or fishermen's
cooperative; and so on. More sizeable collective gifts included donations in cash or kind
to assist in the construction or renovation of a mosque, church, or other house of
worship, or to help build a road, a drainage canal, a bridge, a sports field, a village hall, or
some other community facility, or perhaps to connect the community to the electric grid,
or to provide public lighting, etc. Some candidates also provided services such as
ambulances, roving television shows, hearses, fire trucks, or garbage disposal for
communities.

A second category was small getting-to-know-you gifts that candidates provided to

individual voters in their first interactions with them, or through their success teams.
These gifts were typically in the form of memorabilia (key rings, calendars, T-shirts, and
the like) bearing the party logo and the candidate's image, but they are often also objects
that evoke some sort of emotional or religious meaning (including head scarves, prayer
mats, prayer robes, prayer books, and even Qurans and bibles). Basic foodstuffs and
household items-rice, cooking oil, sugar, packets of noodles, coffee, detergent,
shampoo, and so on-were also very common, though these tended to be delivered by
team members, less often by candidates. "Door prizes" at public campaign events could
range from small cash gifts and household items up to sizeable gifts like motorcycles or
trips to the minor haj (umroh).

A third category, though in practice difficult to distinguish, was vote buying: the provision
of individual cash gifts to voters to encourage them to go to the ballot box and cast a vote
for the candidate. Cash payments were typically handed over in the final week leading up
to polling day, and sometimes on the very morning of the poll (hence the name for this
practice in Indonesia: the "dawn attack" or serangan fajar). The amounts varied, from as
little as 30-50,000 rupiah, roughly $US1-3 for a "packet" of three district, province, and
national legislative candidates in parts of Central Java, to up to 300,000 or 400,000
rupiah in resource-rich parts of Sumatra or Kalimantan. Not all candidates engaged in
this practice, but in some places it was all but ubiquitous, and a tremendous amount of
organizational activity and finance-was expended to ensure it went smoothly.

Of course, we should not conclude that Indonesian legislative elections are now about
personalized patronage politics and nothing else. National party campaigns and
presidential candidates, for example, did play a role, even if mout candidates viewed
them as being secondary to their own efforts. Candidates also used many methods to
build personal connections with voters that did not involve patronage. Even so, for a large
majority of the candidates, patronage was the critical ingredient, even if they felt trapped
by voters' expectations and what they saw as the imperative to distribute material
benefits. Strikingly, many candidates explicitly condemned the open-list system, and
decried what they saw as its harmful effects on party cohesion, programmatic politics,
and relations between voters and their elected representatives. After the election, there
was something o a public outcry by many candidates and commentators that money
politics had seriously undermined the quality of Indonesian elections. Some candidates
who had not engaged in vote buying, and lost, publically regretted their decision. Most
blamed the open list for greatly increasing the volume of vote buying.

EXPLAINING THE ENDURING ROBUST QUALITIES OF THE INDONESIAN PARTY

SYSTEM

A decade ago, prior even to the advent of the fully open list, the rise of patronage and
personalized campaigning styles in Indonesia prompted the political scientist Andreas
Ufen to write about a process of "Philippinization" of Indonesian party politics. He argued
that Indonesian parties were coming to resemble the notoriously weak parties of
Indonesia's Southeast Asian neighbour, which, he wrote, were "characterised by a lack of
meaningful platforms, by the high frequency of party-switching, short-term
coalition-building, factionalism as well as numerous dissolutions and re-emergences"
(Ufen 2006, 17).

There is certainly much evidence to support Ufen's hypothesis, including the rise of
personalist, "presidentialist" parties that are formed in Indonesia with the major goal of
favoring the presidential ambitions of their founders. However, Marcus Mietzner (2013)
has countered by pointing out that, compared to many third-wave democracies, including
the Philippines, Indonesia's party system is relatively robust. He points out that the party
system is not especially fragmented, nor is the level of electoral volatility unusually high.
He also argues I many parties remain socially rooted, being "closely intertwined with
mass organizations and movements" (Mietzner 2013, 112) and that parties that remain
the single most important entry point for citizens to engage in formal politics
(Mietzner 2013, 198).

How do we reconcile the continuing relative robustness of the Indonesian party system
with the trend toward personalization and patronage that has been so clearly accelerated
by the shift to the open-list electoral system (and encouraged also four features of
Indonesia's institutional design have prevented dissolution of the by the rise of direct
elections for executive government heads)? The answer is that party system. First,
according to Indonesian law, only party nominees can stand for legislative office;
independent candidates cannot do so. Second, increasingly onerous registration
requirements for parties seeking to contest legislative elections constitute a significant
barrier to entry: parties have to show that they have functioning branches in a large
proportion of the regions that make up Indonesia before they can nominate candidates.
This makes it hard for cliques of local politicians to establish their own micro parties, as
often happens in the Philippines. Third, Indonesia's elected legislators are also prohibited
from switching parties while still holding their parliamentary seats, meaning legislators
cannot desert their own party in favor of that of a newly elected president, another
common pattern in the Philippines (instead, in Indonesia, is that parties will move en
masse to support a new president, hoping to the pattern join the government and in this
way gain access to patronage resources). Fourth, parliamentary threshold rules have
further checked the proliferation of small parties. In 2009 parties had to attain 2.5 percent
of the national vote to be represented in the national parliament, and in 2014 this
threshold rose to 3.5 percent.

In other words, even if personalization and patronage have been pushing Indonesian
parties in the direction of a Philippinized system, aspects of Indonesia's institutional
design have slowed-but not halted-this movement. Even so, the relative robustness of
Indonesia's party system in terms of formal party system institutionalization coexists with
the largely non-party organization of election campaigns and personalized patronage
politics discussed above. As a result, parties primarily play an important role as
gatekeepers in electoral competition. largely determining who can compete for elective
office. They do thus remain an important entry point for politicians seeking to participate
in formal political institutions, even if in other ways their influence is declining.

CONCLUSION

Overall, Indonesia's experience with open-list PR provides a salutary lesson about the
unintended consequences of reform. Driven by an understandable desire to enhance
vertical accountability between voters and their elected representatives, Indonesian
reformers pushed for a system in which voters rather than parties would determine which
candidates on a party list would be elected to legislatures. Ultimately, it was the country's
Constitutional Court which decided to fully open the list system, though the Court's
decision making was presumably influenced by the years of public campaigning and
lobbying that preceded the decision in 2009.

The consequences have been largely negative for Indonesia's democratic system. By
undermining the coherence of parties, the open-list system has reduced the scope for
programmatic competition in Indonesian elections, though policy. based political
contestation is exactly what Indonesia needs. At the same time, the system has greatly
increased the scope and reach of patronage politics, especially vote buying. A growing
part of the electorate has come to view elections ar primarily or at least partly-an
opportunity to extract material resources from their representatives, rather than to
choose between them on the basis of their programmatic and policy offerings. The
increased expenditure on campaigning that results from this system has in turn greatly
heightened pressures on candidates to raise finances, encouraging them to engage in
corruption. Candidates speak openly about the need to recoup the "investments" they
make in their campaigns, and their chief means of doing so is manipulating state budgets
and extracting bribes from business interests who stand to benefit. The system has thus
fuelled a vicious cycle in which electoral patronage fuels corruption which in turn erodes
the faith of Indonesian voters in their parties and elected representatives, making them
ever more susceptible to patronage politics. Throughout the country voters express a
cynical disdain for politicians, suspecting them of self-interest and corruption and stating
that elections are best viewed as a time to extract personal material benefits rather than
to hope for substantive change.

From time to time, strong support has been expressed in Indonesia for a reversion to the
closed-list system, though efforts to effect this change have for the time being receded
(national parliamentarians are, after all, those candidates who have shown they can win
under the open list, and thus have little incentive to change). Reversion to a closed-list
would tilt the incentive structure back in favor of parties and programmatic competition.
However, two electoral cycles under open-list PR have greatly expanded and deepened
patronage politics, and one more election under the same electoral rules will take place in
2019. Patronage politics have spread so widely that it would likely take many more
elections to reverse the negative consequences of Indonesia's highly problematic shift to
an open-list electoral system. Sad to say, Indonesia provides a clear example of the
unfortunate legacies that can result when ill-considered political reforms are put in place.