Arizka Warganegara Lecturer of Governmental Science Faculty of Social and Political Science (FISIP) Unila
REGIONAL election invites several interesting academic discussions such as a variety of debates, rhetoric, as well as long discussion. The famous British magazine, The Economist, recently conducted an assessment of world democracy performance.
In one article entitled “Global Democracy Has Another Bad Year,” published on January 22, 2020, The Economist conducted an assessment of 167 countries using 60 indicator points and the range assessment numbers from 1 to 10. The result elucidates that the world democracy is divided into four categories.
However, each category has certain definitions. The Economist further divides the categories into several criteria: full democracy, flawed democracy (democracy characterized by several fundamental weaknesses), hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
Furthermore, The Economist also explained that the index measured included the election process, pluralism, government functions, political participation, democratic political culture, and civil liberties. In 2018, The Economist gave an unexpected conclusion that less than 5% of countries in the world are categorized as a full democracy, and more than one-third of the world’s countries live in authoritarian regimes, and the largest in China (The Economist, January 31, 2018).
Let us look at Indonesia. The Economist assesses Indonesia is a country with typically flawed democracy and is ranked as 64th in the world with an index of 6.48 in 2019. In the study of The Economist Intelligent Unit, it is found that there are still some fundamental characteristics that may weaken the democracy, and that is why Indonesia is considered not having a full practiced democracy (full democracy).
Quality of Local Democracy
What is going on with Indonesian democracy? In almost 22 years of reform, politics have not had a significant impact on Indonesia’s democracy development. The analysis and assessment of The Economist are very relevant to the current conditions of Indonesia’s democracy as a flawed democracy.
In the context of the electoral process, for example, our elections are substantially far from ideal, as seen from the various rising problems, whether caused by technical reasons or the content of the election itself.
Through various dialogues and discussions, for example, we find that our elections are technically complex. However, the proportional electoral system provides opportunities for each interest group to be accommodated in both the political and election process. These complications, then, impact on the level of political participation. Although there was an increasing trend in the 2019 elections, the following question is how long this trend will be.
There are indications of the increasing number in political participation. It may also be due to the increase in massive money politics. That is, in the view of grassroots, voters channel their political voice by participating in elections. This could be due to the motive behind money politics, and this needs further research.
The research collaboration between Master of Governmental Science of Unila and The General Election Commission (KPU-RI) elucidates six things that should be considered in the context of political participation: the system, administration, organizers, participants, voters, and also geography-weather.
In another part, The Economist’s study indeed remains homework to all of us. One thing that has markedly weakened our democracy today is the issue of massive money politics. This phenomenon turns out to encourage political processes based on the logic of financial power. In fact, being naive democracy is associated with capital power. Whereas philosophically, it is a process of accommodating public desires through formal mechanisms of the political system.
In this context, what can we do? Improving the democratic process requires a variety of “vaccines”, starting from increasing the welfare of citizens, political education, and internalizing the party ideology platform and developing relations between the elites and supporters. So far, the patronage democracy in Indonesia has been characterized by relations of elite, financiers, and voters that dominant in economic interests rather than other reasons.
Independent Candidates
There is one of the “vaccines” that has been tried. It is the long campaign of the medio community in 2007, which encouraged the independent candidate movement as part of the correction towards the oligarchism in the political party. In the Governor Election in 2008 through Law No. 12 of 2008, for example, Lampung once had an independent candidate for governor election at that time. However, he was unable to compete with political party candidates.
There was a disconnection between the interests of elites and civil society. However, the movement of independent candidates represented one of the concrete efforts of civil society. Movements like this must be continued as part of discovering “antivirus” from the money politics problems.
Nevertheless, why do some independent candidates shrink? Based on data from Lampung General Election Commission (KPUD), for example, from 8 regions, there were only four pairs of independent candidates in three regions who applied. Two pairs in Bandar Lampung, one pair each in Metro and East Lampung. This leads our thesis to more on the candidate’s pessimism towards the massiveness of money politics.
Indeed, this remains a hypothesis. It requires more in-depth data and research. However, the problems of the massive money politics and less independent candidates in our elections prove that our democracy is in a problematic condition at some fundamental points. In the end, we give our appreciation to The Economist Intelligent Unit, which gives us an earlier alert to argue with our democracy.
[This article is a collaboration result between Unila and Lampung Post]
