Indonesia Seven Years After Soeharto: Party System Institutionalization in a New Democracy‪.‬

It is often said, following Samuel Huntington, that it is not the first elections after the fall of an authoritarian regime that matter; instead, the path to democracy is seen to be assured only after second elections have been completed. (1) Indonesia's second post-Soeharto elections, both parliamentary and presidential, were held from April to September 2004. Furthermore, 2005-2006 is witnessing the country's first-ever direct elections for regional heads, governors, mayors, and regents. Can the country be seen finally to be firmly on the path to democracy? Is democracy now "the only game in town"? This article examines what the performance of Indonesia's political parties seven years on from former authoritarian president Soeharto's resignation can tell us about politics in the country. The parties are an important part of the political society envisioned by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan as forming one of the integral "arenas" of democratic consolidation (1996). By using the party system institutionalization framework first developed by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully in Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (1995), the article analyses the degree to which the Indonesian party system can be seen to be institutionalized, thus contributing to, as Mainwaring and Scully found in Latin America (or not, in the case of less institutionalized systems), democratization, and stable governance. (2)