Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023. US$125.00, cloth; US$37.00, paper; US$24.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501772658.
Thirty-five years ago, a prominent political scientist, Juan Linz, published a seminal article titled “The Perils of Presidentialism” (Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1, 1990). Linz essentially argues that the presidential system is inferior to the parliamentary system in producing a stable democracy. Since then, many scholars have challenged Linz’s argument, including Djayadi Hanan (Making Presidentialism Work: Legislative and Executive Interaction in Indonesian Democracy, Ohio State University, 2012); Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power (Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems, Oxford University Press, 2018), and most recently, Marcus Mietzner in The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and Its Limits in Democratic Indonesia. These scholars generally argue that presidentialism in a multiparty system, through formal and informal institutions, can also produce a stable democracy.
The Coalitions Presidents Make develops what Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power call “the presidential toolbox”—including legislative, cabinet, partisan, budget, and informal (or exchange of favours)—to gain political support for stability in multiparty presidential systems. While they focus exclusively on how presidents apply these tools to their legislative counterparts, Mietzner for his part argues that the presidential toolbox can also be deployed to gain the support of non-party actors who can potentially disrupt the government’s stability. These non-party actors are the military, the police, the bureaucracy, local governments, oligarchs, and Muslim organizations. Mietzner also adds that, in addition to these five tools, Indonesian presidents also have a sixth tool to tame potential disruptors, namely instruments of coercion, which emerged because of the inclusion of the police in the presidents’ expanded coalitions.
The book consists of 11 chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Mietzner opens his empirical analysis by introducing the institution of the presidency in Indonesia, including its historical journey, the constitutional powers of the president, and the experiences and motivations that compelled President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) and President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to build large coalitions. After analyzing how Indonesian presidents exercised the presidential toolbox for their “traditional audience”—i.e., the political parties and the legislature—Mietzner discusses in detail how Indonesian presidents, especially SBY and Jokowi, negotiated and deployed the five tools in the toolbox in six chapters dedicated specifically to the six non-party actors.
The Coalitions Presidents Make is a book that comprehensively guides readers to understand how Indonesian presidents have defied theoretical predictions that multiparty presidential systems are inherently unstable. More importantly, the book also reveals the mechanisms by which these stabilization efforts come at the cost of eroding the pillars to achieve a liberal democracy. In other words, Mietzner successfully demonstrates that coalition presidentialism is a double-edged sword for democracy. In doing so, Mietzner provides a more precise explanation based on previous scholars’ work, including why Indonesia has been able to survive as an electoral democracy but has never achieved liberal democratic status, how oligarchy continues to influence the country’s democracy, and how cartelization operates beyond the legislative arena. Moreover, this book helps its readers make sense of the current political situation in Indonesia, where President Prabowo Subianto takes coalitional presidentialism to a whole new level, including by appointing 48 ministers and 56 deputy ministers in his Red and White Cabinet.
Another strength of The Coalitions Presidents Make is the richness of the data Mietzner collected to support his empirical analysis. Mietzner—one of the most prominent political scientists researching Indonesian politics for more than 25 years—was able to conduct interviews with key actors, including interviewing SBY and Jokowi, enabling him to understand the causes of their anxiety and their logic in exercising coalitional presidentialism. However, Mietzner did not take these key actors’ statements at face value. Instead, he extrapolated the interview data with multiple data points to accurately analyze the drivers at play and how the presidents and aides exercised coalitional presidentialism. Hence, Mietzner’s analysis produces a dynamic picture of how the presidents’ coalitions were negotiated and renegotiated with different key actors.
One aspect missing from this book is an analysis of how Indonesian presidents exercised coalitional presidentialism on pro-democracy activists and volunteer groups (colloquially known as relawan), which were also one of the pillars supporting SBY’s and Jokowi’s presidencies. Mietzner only discusses the role of activists and social and political minorities briefly in the concluding part of this book (244). It is important to note that they were also non-party actors whose critical voices could threaten the stability of the government. The activists also played a crucial role in projecting an image of the two presidents as pro-democratic, at least at the beginning of their respective terms in office. The volunteers played a vital role in creating Jokowi’s image as the “man of the people” and were used to counter critical societal voices. The activists and volunteer group elites, subsequently, were rewarded with key portfolios in political parties, the cabinet, or state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SBY, for example, recruited former activists such as Rachland Nasidik and Andi Arief into the Democratic Party. Jokowi recruited figures like Fadjroel Rachman, Nezar Patria, Budi Arie Setiadi, Abdee Slank, and Ulin Yusron to his cabinet or as SOE commissioners. These examples indicate that presidents considered them important actors who supported presidential legitimacy and could threaten political stability if they were excluded from the government. In short, Indonesian presidents also deploy tools from coalitional presidentialism’s toolbox to buy support and tame potential threats from civil society. In turn, the co-optation of activists and volunteer groups has also contributed to the weakening of civil society movements and the democratic decline in Indonesia.
Despite this minor catch, The Coalitions Presidents Make is a must-read for scholars of comparative politics and Asian studies, especially those who study democratic backsliding in the region. Mietzner helps the reader understand why government stability resulting from a democratic process may produce unintended consequences that run against the original intents of democratization. This book is also recommended for policymakers and pro-democracy activists who are often fixated on formal institutional engineering to strengthen democracy but lose sight of the informal institutions that may arise as political actors react to the formal institutions produced by such engineering.
Yoes C. Kenawas
Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Jakarta