Ever since the fall of Suharto' authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, analysts have struggled to understand the dynamics of the system that has taken its place. Unlike the New Order, whose centralised and static political system allowed scholars to make durable generalisations about Indonesian politics, the post-Suharto state has defied attempts to describe it in uniform and all encompassing terms. The failure to define clearly what has emerged since 1998 is reflected in the absence of a widely accepted name for the new polity. While all other political regimes in Indonesia are known by standard labels—’parliamentary democracy’ for the period between 1950 and 1957, ‘Guided Democracy’ for Sukarno' rule from 1959 to 1965 and the ‘New Order’ for Suharto' regime scholars have yet to reach consensus on a term to describe the post-authoritarian regime. While they agree that the post-1998 political system has offered more freedom than previous regimes, there is disagreement about almost everything else. Even when authors describe Indonesia as a democracy, they usually qualify the noun with a variety of adjectives, such as ‘collusive’ or ‘delegative’ (Slater 2004), ‘consolidated’ but ‘patrimonial’ (Webber 2006), ‘low quality’ (Mietzner 2009a) or ‘secular’ (Mujani and Liddle 2009).

Yet amidst the diversity of views, it is possible to identify three broad schools of thought on post-New Order Indonesia. First, a significant number of scholars have maintained that despite important institutional reforms, democratic change has been superficial, with core structures of power remaining unchanged. In this perspective, the oligarchic elites who controlled the New Order have survived the 1998 regime change and continue to use the state for rent-seeking purposes (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Boudreau 2009). Second, there are observers who believe that Indonesia has done exceptionally well in consolidating its democracy, especially from a comparative viewpoint (MacIntyre and Ramage 2008). Against the backdrop of the almost apocalyptic predictions for Indonesia in 1998, which saw the country following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, these analysts point out that leading international thinktanks now acknowledge Indonesia as a functioning electoral democracy (Freedom House 2009). Moreover, this change occurred against a trend of democratic recession in the world more generally and Southeast Asia in particular.