Page 18 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Understanding Democratic Consolidation 3

to reversal as the country struggled to launch democratic reforms. The roots of the
New Order’s authoritarianism, moreover, ran deep, and most of the mechanisms that
had enabled the executive to concentrate political and economic power were still in
place—mechanisms that for decades had restricted media freedom, checked opposing
centers of power, and thereby blocked the circulation of leadership. In retrospect, the
country’s democratic transition was far more precarious than many realized.
Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Indonesia’s democratization has per-
sisted, twice passing Samuel Huntington’s benchmark of two consecutive elections
for assessing a transition’s long-term viability. After two fitful decades of change,
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Indonesia now offers some lessons, as the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation,
for more recent democratic transitions, notably the Arab Spring of 2011–13. While
myriad forces can promote or impede democratization, Indonesia’s experience indi-
cates that a transition’s consolidation or reversal depends, to a surprising extent, on
the role of the media—a set of actors whose freedom is widely recognized as a defining
attribute of modern democracies but whose centrality in checking reversal remains
only partly understood.

Actors versus Factors
Following the succession of transitions starting in the 1970s that Samuel Hun-
tington terms democratization’s “third wave,” a vast literature has emerged address-
ing the question of why some democratic transitions succeed and others founder, why
some lead to “democratic consolidation” while others either fail outright or settle into
a state of pseudodemocracy that often masks an atavistic authoritarianism. Within
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this literature, studies of transitions tend to focus on two broad themes: actors and
factors.
Taking the latter approach, analysts such as Huntington and Robert Dahl have
sought to explain the origins and outcomes of transitions with a series of factors
of varying complexity, including global economic trends, levels of modernization, or
geopolitical forces. Without discounting their value, others, such as Juan Linz, have
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critiqued factor-based analyses as overly static, focusing on the “social, economic, and
cultural correlates of stable regimes in a given moment of time, [rather] than on the
dynamic processes of crisis, breakdown, and re-equilibration of existing regimes or
the consolidation of new ones.” Such studies also tend toward an almost teleological
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portrayal of democratization as a phenomenon that, once in motion, will continue of
its own accord unless blocked by hostile forces or unfavorable circumstances.
Those who focus on actors, by contrast, look at the interplay of political leaders
and social sectors in a process that leads to either reversal or consolidation, depend-
ing on the resources and strategies these actors employ. In the aftermath of the Cold
War, residual elements from authoritarian regimes, whether military or civilian, have
been persistent sources of resistance to democratization. Similarly, in Indonesia after
Suharto, reversal was not an abstraction but a process promoted by actors determined
to avoid accounting for past derelictions and to preserve privileges, whether political
office, government contracts, or protected markets. These actors formed a disparate
alliance of regime cronies, incumbent officials, and military leaders who coalesced
around the Golkar party, which had dominated parliament under Suharto and pre-
served much of its influence after his fall.
Within this democratization literature, the military, as the sole actor with the raw
coercive power to lead a reversal, merits the close attention it has received. Indeed,