Abstract
The 2014 presidential election marked Indonesia’s transition into a mature democratic Islamic country. Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, was inaugurated as Indonesia’s seventh president, defeated Prabowo Subianto by a margin of 53.1–46.9%, respectively. In the absence of an incumbent, voters evaluated both presidential candidates based on a mix of prospective and retrospective economic performance. This study merges data from the Village Potential Census (PODES) and the crowdsource data (Kawal Pemilu) from vote recap to investigate the existence of economic voting and the effect of socioeconomic conditions at the village level on voting behavior. Our study confirmed that economic access, conditions of infrastructure, and middle-class group played major roles in the Jokowi victory. The middle class tended to choose Jokowi, because his ideology best matched their own. Moreover, social cleavages related to religion and ethnicity are still dominant as villages with a Muslim majority tended to choose Prabowo that was associated with an Islamic representative. Unfortunately, media and black campaigns also significantly influenced voters’ decisions. This evidence provides valuable lessons learned for Indonesians in preparing for a better 2019 presidential election.
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Source: re-drawn from Downs (1957)
Source: authors
Source: modified from Baswedan (2004)
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Notes
This is possible because the Election Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum/KPU) uploaded the C1 document (a document of vote recap at the polling station level) and then Kawal Pemilu (the Election Monitoring Group) conducted a crowdsource to digitize and recapitalize the C1 document from polling station to national level, created alternative election result data beside an official data from KPU. The result from the Kawal Pemilu is only slightly different from KPU (0.14%).
Indonesia Election Tracker, Suara Indonesia (www.facebook.com/FacebookIndonesia).
Serial Tweets by @PolitikaWave, 2014.
A smear campaign is an effort to damage someone’s reputation. A black campaign or propaganda is an effort to damage someone’s reputation by spreading false or incorrect information, while a negative campaign is the process of spreading negative information about someone to worsen the public image.
Ministry of Communication and Information.
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Acknowledgements
Authors thank to Kawal Pemilu (the Indonesian Election Monitoring Group) (www.kawalpemilu.org) for allowing us to utilize the crowdsource data of the 2014 presidential election. We also thank to two anonymous referees, Vid Adrison and Dendi Ramdani for valuable comments. Authors thank to Hibah PITTA Universitas Indonesia for partly and financially support to rewrite and publish the first author’s master thesis that is submitted to Graduate Program in Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia. All remaining errors are our own.
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We declared that there is no a conflict of interest in writing this article. This article is written based on our personal interest and we received partially financial support from Hibah PITTA Universitas Indonesia.
Appendix 1
Appendix 1
Data from National Economic Survey (SUSENAS) 2011 were used to acquire the population with a middle income. SUSENAS data estimation is done with income as the dependent variable. Independent variables used are: ‘farmer entrepreneurs’ dummy, ‘industrial employers’ dummy, ‘farm workers’ dummy, and ‘industrial workers’ dummy. The regression obtained the results in Table 6.
Table 6 indicates that land-owner farmer and entrepreneur positively correlated with income level, while labor (workers in agriculture and industrial sector) negatively correlated with the level of income.
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Aji, N., Dartanto, T. Behind the Jokowi’s victory: did economic voting matter in the 2014 Indonesian presidential election?. Asia-Pac J Reg Sci 2, 115–138 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-018-0083-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-018-0083-3