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Localised impacts on Islamist political mobilisation in Indonesia: Evidence from three sub-provincial units
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2023
Abstract
What explains the regionally varying electoral outcomes of Islamist parties in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy? By employing a three-stage approach inspired by Evan Lieberman's nested analysis, this article aims to gain a better understanding of how adaptability to local political contexts matters in determining the vote share of the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) at the sub-provincial level. It uncovers that PKS’ electoral mobilisation in non-Javanese regions depends more on whether the party leverages a strong predisposition towards personal votes underpinned by pre-existing clientelistic ties. In contrast, the PKS support base in Java tends to be embedded in specific milieus shaped by deep-seated sociocultural cleavages. The findings thus not only demonstrate the limitations of programmatic, institutionalised parties like PKS in the Indonesian context, but also resonate with a larger body of broader literature on politics in the Muslim world, indicating strategic considerations of local political conditions as an important factor in electoral support for political Islam.
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2023
Footnotes
Previous versions of this article were presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Asia Pacific Workshop, Penang, 2019, and the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Summer Online Meeting, 2020. I would first like to thank Jamie S. Davidson for his insights and invaluable academic guidance. I am also grateful to Subhasish Ray, Risa Toha, Bilveer Singh, Diego Fossati, Jeremy Menchik, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors are mine alone. This research was funded by the Graduate Research Support Scheme from the National University of Singapore, and supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5C2A01093243).
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