Page 28 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Understanding Democratic Consolidation 13

opinion, more than patronage or electoral manipulation, decide the fate of political
careers.
Admittedly, scandals can erupt from false accusations or other misinformation
often exacerbated by partisan motivations. They may be particularly dangerous in the
fragile early days of a democratic transition. In Egypt after the Arab Spring of 2011,
contending forces responded to biased voices by trying to silence oppositional media.
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A key difference in Indonesia’s transition, detailed in chapter 4 , was the commitment
by journalists’ associations to establish professional standards, averting crackdowns
and quelling anger at critical coverage.
The potential for backlash against unwelcome aspects of media freedom returns
us to Przeworski’s element of indeterminacy, that is, the promise that there will be
future opportunities to compete. Using his model, I argue that democratic consolida-
tion requires that contenders develop faith in this indeterminacy not only of elec-
tions but also of the smaller, intervening contests that play out in the court of public
opinion—faith that a media nightmare for one faction one week could just as easily
be followed by a triumph the next. More broadly, confidence in the indeterminacy of
media-influenced shifts in the balance of power can mitigate fears of the unpredict-
able effects of a free media. The alternative to contest- and scandal-oriented media,
moreover, is not necessarily a better-informed citizenry. It may instead be a depoliti-
cized, disenfranchised public that simply watches politicians act—perhaps with deco-
rum but also, as many an authoritarian regime has shown, with little transparency
and even less accountability. Another alternative could be the devolution of a nation’s
public sphere into praetorianism, a development that, at least in China, appears to be
compatible with continued authoritarianism.
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In its own transition, Indonesia’s experience indicates that the media are criti-
cal in institutionalizing the uncertainty of democratic contestation not in spite of
their preoccupation with horse-race coverage, conflict, and scandal, but in many ways
because of it, particularly in breaking up collusion and the concentration of power.
Within the country’s newly constituted public sphere, the right to report freely on
stories of scandal and partisan conflict that influence the secondary contests between
elections transformed the print and electronic media into a parallel arena of electoral
politics. From 1999 to 2004, as recounted in chapters 6 and 7 , candidates rose and fell
and rose again in often spectacular dramas played out on a public stage. The inability
of individual players or parties to control these battles constituted a significant depar-
ture from the past.
Over the following decade, 2004 to 2014, intraelite contestation produced a con-
tinuing cycle of revenge via revelation that served to constrain the forces of authoritar-
ian reversal. During this period under the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono,
discussed in chapter 8 , a succession of megascandals showed the ability of the media,
in collaboration with civil society forces, to challenge the ruling party, block elite
collusion, and facilitate yet another change of government. In the 2014 presidential
election, a full fifteen years after Suharto’s fall, the forces of reversal coalesced around
his son-in-law and regime enforcer, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Prabowo Subianto, in
an explicit antidemocracy campaign, playing upon nostalgia for the New Order in a
desperate, determined effort to defeat a populist candidate. Through an alliance of
media and civil society activists, the opposition blocked this bid for authoritarian
reversal and elected the country’s first nonelite president, illustrating the paramount
importance of such synergies between media and public in maintaining momentum
toward democratic consolidation.