Indonesia’s Generation Gap: Youth Preferences in a Declining Democracy

• In Event: Are We Seeing a Generational Shift in Southeast Asian Politics?

Abstract

Indonesia’s democratic quality has declined steadily over recent years. There has been little popular resistance to this trend, with only a minority of civil society groups and prominent journalists sounding the alarm. Instead, for the last decade, polls have suggested broad public satisfaction with how democracy is functioning despite strong evidence of regression across a range of indicators – from rights protections, to anti-corruption efforts, to the erosion of checks and balances on executive power. But quite suddenly, in late 2019 and 2020, a wave of pro-democracy protest swept across the country in response to a series of deeply regressive bills proposed by the legislature. Tens of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets for days on end, claiming that the achievements of Reformasi — the movement that brought an end to authoritarianism in 1998 — were being “corrupted” and undermined by political elites. Young people, and in particular student organisations, were at the forefront of these demonstrations, just as they had been two decades earlier during Reformasi.

Are Indonesia’s youth emerging once again as a democratic force? Does the younger generation of Indonesian voters — those who grew up in the post-authoritarian era — hold particularly liberal or democratic preferences when compared to the older generations that were raised under authoritarianism? How do Indonesia’s youth understand their democratic system, what are their political priorities, and what forms of political representation do they seek? To answer these questions, this paper leverages a mix of opinion polling data combined with interviews with youth organisations and students activists. Our objective is to provide a novel and thorough picture of the generational differences that colour public support for democracy in Indonesia, and to suggest how those differences matter in substantive ways for the country’s democratic trajectory.

Authors

• Burhanuddin Muhtadi, State Islamic University

• Eve Warburton, National University of Singapore