Inequality and Democratic Support in Indonesia

Inequality and Democratic
Support in Indonesia
Burhanuddin Muhtadi and Eve Warburton
Abstract
Indonesia is a country of significant inequalities, but we know little about
how Indonesians feel about the gap between rich and poor. Comparative
research suggests that negative perceptions of inequality can erode public
support for democratic institutions. Using survey data, we explore the
relationship between inequality and support for democracy in Indonesia.
We find Indonesians are divided in their beliefs about income distribution.
Delivered by Ingenta to IP: 130.56.64.29 on: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 22:34:26
But this variation is not determined by actual levels of inequality around

the country, nor by people’s own economic situation; instead, political
preferences and partisan biases are what matter most. Beliefs about
Copyright (c) Pacific Affairs. All rights reserved.
inequality in Indonesia have become increasingly partisan over the course

of the Jokowi presidency: supporters of the political opposition are far more
likely to view the income gap as unfair, while supporters of the incumbent
president tend to disagree—but they disagree much more when prompted
by partisan cues. We also find that Indonesians who believe socio-economic
inequality is unjust are more likely to hold negative attitudes toward
democracy. We trace both trends back to populist campaigns and the
increasingly polarized ideological competition that marked the country’s
recent elections. The shift toward more partisan politics in contemporary
Indonesia has, we argue, consequences for how voters perceive inequality
and how they feel about the democratic status quo.
Keywords: Inequality, public opinion, polarization, democratic support,

partisanship, Indonesia
DOI: 10.5509/202093131
____________________
Burhanuddin Muhtadi is a senior lecturer in the faculty of social and political sciences, State Islamic
University, Jakarta. He is also an executive director of Indonesian Political Indicator and director of
public affairs at the Indonesian Survey Institute (Lembaga Survei Indonesia, LSI). His most recent
book is Vote Buying in Indonesia: The Mechanics of Electoral Bribery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Email:
burhanuddin.muhtadi@uinjkt.ac.id.
Eve Warburton is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of
Singapore. Email: arieaw@nus.edu.sg.
Acknowledgement: The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as participants at the
SEAREG Southeast Asia Meeting (December 11–13, 2018, Yale-NUS, Singapore) for their valuable
and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
© Pacific Affairs: Volume 93, No. 1 March 2020 31

Pacific Affairs: Volume 93, No. 1 – March 2020
1. Introduction
Indonesia has become an increasingly unequal country over the past two
decades. From the early 2000s, the Gini coefficient, which measures the
income gap between rich and poor, has climbed steadily from 0.3 in 2000
to 0.42 in 2014, making it the fastest-growing Gini in Southeast Asia.1 Wealth
concentration has also increased. In 2016, for example, the richest 1 percent
of Indonesians controlled over 49 percent of the country’s wealth.2 Indonesia
has more billionaires per capita than either China or India, and that number
is growing faster than anywhere else in the world.3
We know very little about how Indonesians have responded to these
changing patterns of economic distribution. Citizens’ reactions to inequality
can have critical consequences for a country’s democracy. Cross-national
studies show that persistent and high economic inequality can undermine,
erode, and even reverse a democratic government.4 In their recent study of
democratic backsliding in the United States, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest the
health of a democracy can even “hinge” upon problems of wealth
distribution.5 The effect of inequality on democracy, according to some
scholars, “passes through individual attitudes and perceptions,”6 because

negative perceptions erode trust in democratic institutions, reduce political
participation, and make voters vulnerable to anti-democratic appeals. There
are signs such dynamics are at play in Indonesia. As the income gap has
widened, political entrepreneurs and populist figures have made wealth
disparities a central theme in their electoral campaigns, often blaming
inequality on privileged minorities and the political status quo.7
____________________
1
World Bank, “A Perceived Divide: How Indonesians Perceive Inequality and What They Want
Done about It,” (The World Bank, November 2015), http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/
en/16261460705088179/Indonesias-Rising-Divide-English.pdf.
2
Luke Gibson, “Towards a More Equal Indonesia,” (Oxfam, February 2017), https://www.
oxfam.org/en/research/towards-more-equal-indonesia.
3
Edward Aspinall, “Inequality and Democracy in Indonesia,” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia
(blog), 2015, https://kyotoreview.org/issue-17/inequality-and-democracy-in-indonesia/.
4
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daron Acemoglu et al., “Democracy, Redistribution,
and Inequality,” in Handbook of Income Distribution, eds. Anthony B. Atkinson and François
Bourguignon, vol. 2 (North Holland: Elsevier, 2015), 1885–1966; Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond,
and Marc F. Plattner, Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2012); Stephan Haggard
and Robert R. Kaufman, “Inequality and Regime Change: Democratic Transitions and the Stability
of Democratic Rule,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 3 (2012): 495–516; Brian D. Cramer
and Robert R. Kaufman, “Views of Economic Inequality in Latin America,” Comparative Political
Studies 44, no. 9 (2011): 1206–1237
5
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2018),
229–230.
6
Cramer and Kaufman, “Views of Economic Inequality in Latin America,” 1209.
7
Edward Aspinall, “Oligarchic Populism: Prabowo Subianto’s Challenge to Indonesian
Democracy,” Indonesia (2015): 1–28; Vedi R. Hadiz, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Marcus Mietzner, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, and Rizka
Halida, “Entrepreneurs of Grievance: Drivers and Effects of Indonesia’s Islamist Mobilization” Bijdragen
32
Inequality and Democratic Support in Indonesia
Against this backdrop, we set out to address three under-examined

questions about the Indonesian case. First, do most Indonesians feel that
income distribution is fair or unfair? Second, what causes Indonesians to
hold different views about income distribution: is it where they live, their
own economic situation, or do people’s political or ideological orientations
matter more? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are different perceptions
of distributive fairness associated with either support for, or hostility toward,
the democratic status quo?
To address these questions, we leverage data from several nationally
representative surveys conducted between 2014 and 2019. We find, first, that
Indonesians are almost evenly divided in their beliefs about the fairness of
income distribution. Second, this variation is not based on actual levels of
inequality around the country. At the provincial level, we find no correlation
between living in highly unequal regions and holding negative views about
income inequality. Individuals’ social class, on the other hand, and
perceptions of their own economic situation, have direct and significant

effects upon those beliefs, with less wealthy Indonesians more likely to express
negative views.
However, political factors matter more. Negative beliefs about the state
of inequality reflect partisan biases: supporters of Prabowo Subianto, the
chief opponent of current President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) in the last two
presidential elections, are far more likely to view income distribution as
unfair. This association increased over the course of the Jokowi presidency
(2014 to present). We use a survey experiment to further interrogate this
finding, and we show that Jokowi loyalists respond significantly to partisan
signals: they express positive beliefs about the income gap in much larger
numbers when prompted to do so by political party and leader cues. These
results suggest that views about inequality are driven in large part by partisan
loyalties, and provide new empirical evidence that competition between
Prabowo and Jokowi has polarized the Indonesian electorate to the extent
that political loyalties shape people’s perceptions about the nature of
economic distribution.
Finally, in answer to our third question, we find that people’s perceptions
of inequality have large and negative effects on their satisfaction with
democracy, and on their trust in democratic institutions like the parliament
and the courts. We suggest two potential mechanisms by which people’s
perceptions of inequality can harm Indonesia’s democracy. First, while
Prabowo narrowly lost two presidential elections, his near victory demonstrates
the popular traction of an illiberal brand of populist politics that politicizes
____________________
Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 174,
nos. 2–3 (2018): 159–187; Eve Warburton and Liam Gammon, “Class Dismissed? Economic Fairness
and Identity Politics in Indonesia,” New Mandala (blog), 5 May 2017, http://www.newmandala.org/
economic-injustice-identity-politics-indonesia/.
33
and exploits latent grievances about economic distribution, which can

translate into resentment toward the democratic status quo. Second, our
findings also indicate significant polarization amongst Indonesians along
partisan lines. Lessons from other countries tell us that partisan polarization
on fundamental problems like economic distribution can create a setting
condusive to democratic regression.8
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the second section
characterizes the comparative literature on inequality and democracy, and
demonstrates the value of an approach that studies citizens’ perceptions and
beliefs. A third section sets up the Indonesian case. Sections 4 and 5 address
the first and second research questions respectively: how do Indonesians
perceive income inequality, and why do those perceptions vary? Section 6
presents the results of the survey experiment, and reveals that partisan biases
define how people see economic distribution. The final section then explores
the question of whether Indonesians’ views about inequality affect their
democratic attitudes. The conclusion considers what these results might

mean for the quality and stability of democracy in Indonesia.
2. Inequality and Democracy: Why Perceptions Matter

The relationship between economic distribution and democratic government
has long preoccupied political scientists and economists. While much
comparative work suggests that inequality is, overall, bad for democracy,
analysts have found alternative causal pathways through which economic
disparities lead to the erosion of democratic norms and institutions.9 Some
scholars argue that the threat lies primarily within the political elite. For
example, Christian Houle finds that high inequality makes democratic
consolidation difficult, and increases the likelihood of democratic
backsliding.10 He argues that sharp wealth disparities make democracy less
appealing to the elite: “inequality mainly affects democratic breakdowns by
increasing the cost of redistribution to the elites,” and these elites then
undermine democratic institutions in order to curtail popular demand for
redistribution.
Others argue that inequality affects voters’, not elites’, preferences and
behaviour, which in turn has consequences for the quality of democracy.
Studies in this vein have found that national-level inequality depresses public
____________________
Milan W. Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019): 20–32.
8
Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Nancy Bermeo,
9
“Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy (II): Does Electoral Democracy Boost Economic Equality?”
Journal of Democracy 20, no. 4 (2012): 21–35; Christian Houle, “Inequality and Democracy: Why
Inequality Harms Consolidation but Does Not Affect Democratization,” World Politics 61, no. 4 (2009):
589–622; Bela Greskovits, “Social Responses to Neoliberal Reforms in Eastern Europe in the 1990s,”
in Inequality, Democracy, and Economic Development, ed. Manus Midlarsky (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
10
Houle, “Inequality and Democracy.”
34
political engagement and participation, particularly amongst poorer

citizens,11 and reduces democratic support.12 Krieckhaus et al., for example,
find evidence for what they call the “performance” theory, whereby high
levels of inequality reduce democratic support because citizens evaluate
democracy based—at least in part—on the nature and fairness of distributive
outcomes.13
But objective inequality can matter less than how people perceive inequality.
Studies have shown that people experience inequality differently, and their
responses to, and perceptions of, economic distribution can be contingent
on a range of factors that have little to do with actual levels of income or
wealth disparity in their society.14 People’s sense of their own economic
position in their community, their professional networks, access to
information, and their ideological orientation can all shape how people feel
about income distribution. So, while measures such as the Gini are important,
so too are measures of citizens’ attitudes, because inequality affects
democratic erosion in part through individuals’ beliefs about distributive

fairness.
For example, Matthew Loveless finds that when people view levels of
income inequality in negative terms, they are more likely to support and
demand democratic participation in order to achieve better redistributive
outcomes.15 Many other studies come to less sanguine conclusions, however,
and instead connect perceptions of inequality to the erosion of popular
democratic support and trust in democratic institutions.16 Ronald Inglehart
and Pippa Norris, for example, suggest that inequality feeds social resentment
amongst the working class and the poor, making them “susceptible to anti-
establishment, nativist, and xenophobic … populist movements.”17 The effect
is particularly pernicious when perceptions of economic injustice intersect
with identity-based groups, and discontent becomes framed in sectarian
terms. The immense popularity and electoral success of illiberal figures—such
as Trump in America, Duterte in the Philippines, and Bolsonaro in Brazil—
____________________
11
Frederick Solt, “Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement,” American Journal
of Political Science 52, no. 1 (2008): 48–60; See also Micheal Ritter and Frederick Solt, “Economic
Inequality and Campaign Participation,” Social Science Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2019): 678–688.
12
Terry Lynn Karl, “Economic Inequality and Democratic Instability,” Journal of Democracy 11,
no. 1 (2000): 149–156; Jonathan Krieckhaus et al., “Economic Inequality and Democratic Support,” The
Journal of Politics 76, no. 1 (2014): 139–151.
13
Krieckhaus et al., “Economic Inequality and Democratic Support.”
14
15
Matthew Loveless, “Inequality and Support for Political Engagement in New Democracies,”
Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 6 (2016): 1003–1019.
16
Cramer and Kaufman, “Views of Economic Inequality in Latin America”; Woo Jin Kang,
“Inequality, the Welfare System and Satisfaction with Democracy in South Korea,” International Political
Science Review 35 no. 5 (2015): 493–509; Sonja Zmerli and Juan Carlos Castillo, “Income Inequality,
Distributive Fairness and Political Trust in Latin America,” Social Science Research 52 (July 2015):
179–192.
17
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic
Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash,” Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Working Paper Series (2016), 2.
35
together with the growing popularity of right-wing parties in Europe, point

to how politicians can mobilize latent feelings of economic grievance and
fear amongst segments of the population, and rally voters to support
undemocratic agendas.18
These arguments have direct relevance for the Indonesian case where,
against the backdrop of rising inequality, an upswing in populist, identity-
based politics has contributed to the erosion of democratic norms and
institutions in recent years.19 Yet there is a dearth of research on how
Indonesians see the inequalities that exist around them, and on the
connections between those perceptions and democratic attitudes. Our
objective is to fill this lacuna, and provide new insight into the political effects
of inequality in Indonesia. In doing so, we add a new and important empirical
case study to the growing comparative literature on inequality, popular
opinion, and democracy.
3. Inequality in Indonesia
Over the last two decades, Indonesia’s economy has grown at an impressive
speed, averaging 5.5 percent between 2003 and 2017.20 Poverty also declined
steadily over the same period, yet inequality reached historic levels. Some
studies use consumption data to estimate inequality. For example, in 2015,
the World Bank released a comprehensive report on Indonesia’s “rising
divide,” which revealed that between 2003 and 2010, consumption levels of
the richest 10 percent grew at over 6 percent annually, while consumption
grew at just 2 percent for the poorest 40 percent of Indonesians.21 The World
Bank argued that the benefits of two decades of sustained economic growth
had flowed almost entirely to the richest 20 percent.22
Other studies rely on the Gini coeffient, which measures inequality in the
distribution of income or wealth. The overall trend of the past two decades
has been a steady rise in Indonesia’s Gini, with a dip in 2007 and 2008, and
then a tapering off since 2015 (figure 1). The cause of the incremental
reduction in recent years remains a subject of debate. According to Booth
____________________
18
Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy
28, no. 1 (2017): 5–15; Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump and the Populist Parties: The
Silent Revolution in Reverse,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (2017): 443–454.
19
Eve Warburton and Edward Aspinall, “Explaining Indonesia’s Democratic Regression:
Structure, Agency and Popular Opinion,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 41, no. 2 (2019): 255–285.
20
Roland Rajah, “Indonesia’s Economy: Between Growth and Stability” (Lowy Institute for
International Policy, 2018), https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/indonesia-economy-between-
growth-and-stability.
21
World Bank, “Indonesia’s Rising Divide” (World Bank, 2016), http://pubdocs.worldbank.
org/en/16261460705088179/Indonesias-Rising-Divide-English.pdf.
22
Data used to estimate household consumption probably underestimate inequality, because
higher-class Indonesians generally respond less to household surveys, and are thought to under-report
their actual consumption patterns. Anne Booth, Raden Muhamad Purnagunawan, and Elan Satriawan,
“Towards a Healthy Indonesia?” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 55, no. 2: 133–155, 137.
36
et al, “the reasons (for the decline) are not entirely clear, but it is possible
that social protection programs may have contributed.”23 The improvement
in the Gini also coincided with the end of the resources boom, which led to
a reduction in the incomes of wealthy Indonesians who had benefitted from
remarkably high palm oil and coal prices.24
Figure 1
Indonesia’s National Gini Ratio
0.43
0.41
0.39
0.37
0.35
0.33
0.31
0.29
0.27
0.25
99
00
01
02
05
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
Source: Indonesia Statistics Agency (BPS): https://www.bps.go.id/

dynamictable/2017/04/26/1116/gini-ratio-provinsi-2002-2018.html, accessed 2019.
Still, the magnitude of the decrease in the Gini is relatively small in

comparison to an overall increase over the past two decades. In fact, many
economists believe that reporting problems in national household surveys
mean that measures of both wealth and income disparity likely underestimate
real levels of inequality in Indonesia.25 Economists and policy analysts both
within and outside of Indonesia have therefore become increasingly
preoccupied with explaining and managing distributive disparities.26
____________________
23
Booth, Purnagunawan, and Satriawan, “Towards a Healthy Indonesia?”, 139.
24
Anna Rahmawaty, “Potential Commodities boom: Harmful for Income Inequality,” The Jakarta
Post 6 June 2017, available at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2017/06/06/potential-
commodities-boom-harmful-for-income-inequality.html.
25
World Bank, “Indonesia’s Rising Divide,” 7; Suryahadi, “Is Higher Inequality the New Normal
for Indonesia?”
26
Nindias Nur Khalika, “Lingkaran Setan Ketimpangan Sosial di Indonesia” [The evil cycle of
37
Beyond the work of economists, scholars of Indonesia’s democracy have

deliberated the political causes and consequences of such profound material
inequality. They have done so primarily within the framework of the oligarchy
debates. The oligarchy thesis claims that wealthy politico-economic elites
have captured and control Indonesia’s political and financial institutions,
leaving little possibility for real popular representation or participation by
lower-class citizens.27 On the other side, there are scholars who maintain
that, while oligarchs play a major role in Indonesia’s democratic institutions,
elections are still fiercely competitive. Electoral competition, they argue, has
opened space for meaningful participation and, despite immense socio-
economic disparity, popular forces and poorer citizens can and do affect
political and policy outcomes.28 This body of scholarship points to cases
where politicians and their parties have designed responsive policy
interventions—from health-care programs, to minimum wage deals, to free
education—all of which are designed to lift people out of poverty, reduce
inequalities of opportunity and, of course, attract electoral support.

Missing from these debates, however, is a discussion of how Indonesian
citizens themselves view the inequalities that exist around them, and whether
those views might have political dimensions or implications. Scholars in the
pluralist tradition, such as William Liddle, Saiful Mujani, and Thomas
Pepinsky, have made an immense contribution to our knowledge of public
opinion and democracy in Indonesia,29 but they have yet to look explicitly
at the relationship between perceptions of inequality and democratic support.
As a result, we still have little sense of what the wider population of Indonesian
voters actually believes about inequality, and the potential implications of
those beliefs.
____________________
social inequality in Indonesia] Tirto.id (26 February 2018), available at: https://tirto.id/lingkaran-
setan-ketimpangan-sosial-di-indonesia-cFhB; Hilmi Rahman, “Potret Pertumbuhan Ekonomi
Kesenjangan dan Kemiskinan di Indoneisa Dalam Tinjauan Ekonomi Politik Pembangunan” [Portrait
of economic development, inequality and poverty in Indonesia from a development political economy
view], Jurnal Ilmu dan Budaya 40, no. 55 (2017): 6305–6328 ; Nila Warda et al., “Dinamika Ketimpangan
dan Penghidupan di Perdesaan Indonesia, 2006–2016” [Dynamics of inequality and livelihoods in
Indonesian villages, 2006–2016], SMERU Research Institute and Tifa Foundation Working Paper
(November 2018), available at: http://www.smeru.or.id/sites/default/files/publication/
wptifa1ketimpangandesa_id.pdf; Faisal Basri, “Ketimpangan: Lapisan Pendapatan Terbawah
Tampaknya Masih Tertekan” [Inequality: the bottom income layer appears still under pressure] (blog)
(22 February 2017), https://faisalbasri.com/2017/02/22/ketimpangan-kelompok-pedapatan-lapisan-
bawah-tampaknya-masih-tertekan/.
27
Jeffrey A. Winters, “Oligarchy and Democracy in Indonesia,” Indonesia 96, no. 1 (2013):
11–33; Vedi R. Hadiz and Richard Robison, “The Political Economy of Oligarchy and the
Reorganization of Power in Indonesia,” Indonesia 96, no. 1 (2013): 35–57.
28
Muhammad Mahsun, “Peasants and Politics: Achievements and Limits of Popular Agency in
Batang, Central Java,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 39, no. 3 (2017): 470–490; Amalinda Savirani and
Edward Aspinall, “Adversarial Linkages: The Urban Poor and Electoral Politics in Jakarta,” Journal of
Current Southeast Asian Affairs 36, no. 3 (2018): 3–34; Teri L. Caraway, Michele Ford, and Oanh K.
Nguyen, “Politicizing the Minimum Wage: Wage Councils, Worker Mobilization, and Local Elections
in Indonesia,” Politics & Society 47, no. 2 (2019): 251–276.
29
Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani, “Testing Islam’s Political Advantage.”
38
One important exception is the World Bank’s study on Indonesia’s

“perceived divide,”30 which used survey data collected in 2014 to examine
whether Indonesians thought their economy was unequal, whether it was a
problem, and what kind of distributive policies should be implemented to
address wealth disparities. The report found that most people did indeed
view their society as deeply unequal, and most also felt things were getting
worse rather than better. Yet, unsurprisingly, the World Bank’s report was
geared heavily toward identifying acceptable social and economic policy
interventions. There was no attempt to explore why people’s views about
inequality vary and whether those views have political bases or consequences.
This is a critical gap in our understanding of economic distribution in
Indonesia. Not only has objective inequality worsened, but problems of
distributional justice have become more politically salient as well. Since the
presidential elections of 2014, political leaders have shown an increasing
willingness to craft divisive narratives about the nature of inequality and
wealth distribution. That year, Prabowo Subianto, a former military general

of the New Order, ran for president. His bid presented a “classic authoritarian
populist challenge” to Indonesia’s status quo politics.31 He dismissed Western

democracy as unsuitable for Indonesia and blamed the country’s economic
woes on exploitation by unnamed foreign agents. He also resurrected old
narratives of pribumi32 economic grievance, which suggested that poor Muslim
masses were dominated by a greedy, non-pribumi or ethnic Chinese elite.33
Prabowo was not new to Indonesia’s political scene. Indeed, he had mobilized
this same narrative since 2009 when he ran for vice president, alongside
Megawati Sukarnoputri. But it was not until 2014, when he vied for the
presidency in a tight two-horse race against Jokowi, that his populist appeals
had real traction with the Indonesian electorate.
Prabowo lost narrowly to Jokowi in 2014. But in the years that followed,
inequality became increasingly politicized in both national and local politics.34
Fringe Islamic figures and mainstream politicians began to craft ethnically-
charged narratives about the nature of inequality and wealth distribution,
again suggesting that Chinese Indonesian privilege hurt the economic
prospects of “indigenous” Muslims.35 The most extreme case occurred in
2016–2017 during Jakarta’s gubernatorial election, when a coalition of Islamist
____________________
30
World Bank, “A Perceived Divide.”
31
Aspinall, “Oligarchic Populism: Prabowo Subianto’s Challenge to Indonesian Democracy,” 1.
32
This term refers to native-born and usually Muslim Indonesians. Historically it has often been
used to differentiate between the Muslim population and those Indonesians with ethnic Chinese
heritage, who are often Christian or Buddhist.
33
Liam Gammon, “Prabowo’s Dog-Whistling,” New Mandala (blog), 12 June 2014, http://www.
newmandala.org/prabowos-dog-whistling/.
34
Afif Koes, “Pakar UGM: Kampanye Prabowo-Sandi Bawa Sentimen Kelas Ke Jateng,” Gatra,
20 December 2018, https://www.gatra.com/detail/news/373944/pilkada-pilpres/Pakar-UGM-
Kampanye-Prabowo-Sandi-Bawa-Sentimen-Kelas-ke-Jateng.
35
Warburton and Gammon, “Class Dismissed?”
39
groups and mainstream Islamic organizations, along with high-profile

politicians, mounted a campaign against Jakarta’s Christian Chinese governor,
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok), claiming that Christians should not hold
leadership positions in a majority Muslim country. References to pribumi
economic grievances were an important feature of the anti-Ahok discourse.36
That discourse was leveraged again, though in less explicit terms, when
Prabowo ran against Jokowi for a second time in the 2019 presidential elections.
Against this backdrop, we set out to examine what Indonesians actually
believe about economic distribution in their country. We situate our study
within the growing comparative literature that suggests, as Loveless puts it,
“how individuals see reality—rather than what reality itself is—exerts a strong
and independent effect on many political attitudes (and potential types of
behaviour).”37 We want to know how Indonesians perceive inequality, why
those perceptions vary, and, where possible, we want to understand how
those beliefs might have changed over time. Our goal is to provide an
empirical study of the factors—socio-economic, geographic, or political—that

determine Indonesians’ varied views about economic inequality and, in turn,
whether those views are linked to people’s democratic attitudes.
4. How Do Indonesians View Inequality?

To measure and explain Indonesians’ attitudes toward income inequality,
we draw upon the 2016 Asia Barometer survey and two original nationally
representative surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, which we designed and
implemented in partnership with Indikator Politik Indonesia, one of
Indonesia’s leading independent public opinion research institutes.38 Field
observations for the two original surveys were carried out simultaneously in
all regions between the 1st and 6th of September 2018, and between the
11th and 16th of May 2019. Using a questionnaire, the interviews were
conducted face-to-face by our interviewers on a randomly selected sample
of 1,210 voting-age adults, who were selected with multistage random
sampling, proportionally distributed over the 34 provinces. 39
____________________
36
For a range of analyses on the role that inequality played in this electoral campaign, see:
“Ketimpangan Sosial Berselimut SARA” [Social inequality wrapped in SARA], Pinter Politik (blog), 4
June 2017, https://pinterpolitik.com/ketika-domba-pegang-senjata-1/; Ian Wilson, “Jakarta: inequality
and the poverty of elite pluralism,” New Mandala (blog), 19 April 2017, https://www.newmandala.
org/jakarta-inequality-poverty-elite-pluralism/; Vedi R. Hadiz, “Indonesia’s Year of Democratic
Setbacks: Towards a New Phase of Deepening Illiberalism?” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 53,
no. 3 (2017): 261–278.
37
Loveless, “Inequality and Support for Political Engagement in New Democracies,” 1004.
38
One of the authors, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, is the executive director of Indikator Politik, and
oversees the design and implementation of all of the institute’s surveys. As a result, Dr. Muhtadi was
able to insert a series of questions on inequality in several of Indikator’s nationally representative
surveys.
39
Based on this sample size, the estimated margin of error is ± 2.9 percent at a 95 percent
confidence level, assuming a simple random sampling design. With regard to our sampling scheme,
40
There are many ways to capture perceptions of inequality, but we agree

with Brian Cramer and Robert Kaufman that “perceptions of unfairness
provide a reasonable first approximation of how people judge the existing
distribution.” 40 So, to examine Indonesians’ beliefs about economic
distribution, we choose a question that has been widely used in comparative
surveys and the comparative literature: “How fair or unfair is the level of
income inequality in Indonesia today?” with answers ranging from, “very
fair, fair, unfair, very unfair, and don’t know, don’t understand or didn’t
answer.” This question also gets asked regularly in Global Barometer surveys,
and for the first time it was asked in Indonesia with the 2016 Asian Barometer
survey. We track changes in attitudes since 2016 and present the results in
figure 2. In early 2016 a majority of Indonesians felt income distribution was
unfair (53.2 percent). Just over two years later, in 2018, Indonesians were
Figure 2
How Fair is the Level of Income Inequality in Indonesia Today?

60

50

40

30
20

10

0
2016 2018 2019
Very Fair/Fair Very Unfair/Unfair DK/DU /DA
Source: Asian Barometer survey (2016); authors’ original surveys (2018, 2019).
____________________
the population was initially grouped based on the population of each province across Indonesia. The
second stratification is conducted on the population proportion based on gender. The third
stratification is classification which is based on the area of domicile: urban and rural. It must be noted,
however, the rural-urban proportion varies by province. Accordingly, the number of rural-urban
respondents was selected in proportion to the size of the population in each province based on the
primary sampling unit, i.e., the desa (rural villages—the smallest administrative unit) or kelurahan
(urban villages, wards). From each of these primary sampling units, we further selected at random
five neighbourhoods, then two households per neighbourhood and one person per household.
Overall, ten respondents were selected for each village. This means that the sample was highly
representative of the adult Indonesian population in terms of a demographic composition—age,
gender, provinces, urban-rural, religions, and ethnicity—based on the 2010 census.
40
41
almost equally divided on this question, and then by 2019 a slim majority
felt income distribution was fair.
What might explain these shifts? One simple answer is that people’s
assessments of inequality are based on what they see around them, or in
other words the “objective” nature of the income gap. In 2016, for example,
Indonesia was indeed more unequal than in 2019 when measured in terms
of the Gini coefficient. From 2015 to 2019, Indonesia’s Gini coefficient
improved slightly, from 0.4 to 0.38. This shift could explain the increasing
proportion of people who feel income distribution is fair. But it does not
help us to understand why the public remains so divided, with just over 50
percent believing distribution is fair, and 45 percent disagreeing.
Differences in public perceptions might be a function of where people
live. Across Indonesia’s diverse archipelago, economic indicators and levels
of inequality vary widely from region to region, and so people who see the
income gap as unfair might be living in parts of the country that suffer
particularly high income inequality. Figure 3 presents levels of inequality in

each province, or cluster of provinces, in 2018 according to the Indonesian
Statistics Agency (BPS),41 alongside the proportion of respondents who felt

inequality levels were unfair in December of the same year. This additional
survey, also conducted by Indikator Politik, oversampled in several provinces,
which allows us to make these provincial comparisons.42
We find an inverted relationship between actual income gaps and negative
perceptions of inequality. Specifically, people in provinces with lower than
average inequality, like North Sumatra, Aceh, and West Sumatra, tend to be
more likely to see inequality as unfair, and those living in places with the
highest income inequality, like East and Central Java, are more likely to see
income distribution as fair. West Java is an outlier with higher than average
inequality and a majority of respondents perceiving current levels to be
unfair. These figures offer a first indication that in Indonesia, like in other
parts of the world, “inequality as it actually exists” does not directly correlate
with people’s perceptions of the problem.43
5. Why Do Views About Inequality Vary?

In order to try and understand why Indonesians hold such different beliefs
about income distribution, and why patterns of public opinion have changed
in recent years, we conduct a series of regressions that can provide a first
____________________
41
“Rasio Gini Menurut Provinsi” (Badan Pusat Statistik, 2018), https://data.go.id/dataset/
rasio-gini.
42
The survey over-sampled in Aceh, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Jambi, South Sumatra,
Jakarta, West Java, East Java, and Banten.
43
Matthew Loveless and Stephen Whitefield, “Being Unequal and Seeing Inequality: Explaining
the Political Significance of Social Inequality in New Market Democracies,” European Journal of Political
Research 50, no. 2 (2011): 239.
42
Figure 3
Perceptions Versus Reality
42
West Java
40
Banten DKI Jakarta

Provincial Gini 2018
38 East Java Central Java
Basis 1 Basis 2
36 South Sumatra
34
Sumatera Other Aceh

Jambi
32 North Sumatra West Sumatra
30
20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70
Inequality is Unfair (%)
Note: Some provinces have been grouped together because the sample size in the
survey was too small to make reliable generalizations about every single province.
Sumatera Other (Riau, Riau Islands, Bengkulu, Lampung, Bangka Belitung); Basis 01
Other (Yogyakarta, Bali, Nusa Tenggara Timor, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan,
East Kalimantan, North Kalimantan, North Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, Gorontalo, West
Sulawesi, Maluku, Papua and West Papua); Basis 02 Other (South Kalimantan, West
Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi, North Maluku).
Source: Provincial Gini data is from the Indonesian Statistics Agency (BPS), “Rasio Gini
Menurut Provinsi,” Badan Pusat Statistik, 2018, https://data.go.id/dataset/rasio-gini;
survey data is taken from authors’ original national survey, 2018.
estimate of the effects of demographic, socio-economic, and political factors.

Our dependent variable remains perceptions of inequality, as measured by
the question of whether income distribution is fair or unfair. We also ask a
question about changes in the trajectory of inequality over the preceding
five years, a question first posed by the World Bank in their 2014 survey.
We include a range of socio-economic independent variables. One intuitive
assumption is that people are exposed to different kinds of “signals” about
inequality in their everyday life, primarily through interactions that are
determined by their social class: income, education, or perhaps their
profession.44 For example, individuals who fall within lower income brackets
might be most sensitive to and dissatisfied with levels of inequality because
they sit at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. To explore this relationship,
we use levels of education and income in our model as proxies for social
class.
____________________
44
Bastiaan T. Rutjens and Mark J. Brandt, Belief Systems and the Perception of Reality (Routledge,
2018).
43
People’s own sense of where they sit within society’s economic hierarchy
might also shape their perceptions of inequality. So, respondents were
prompted to place their household within one of five categories, where five
was the poorest, and one was the wealthiest. We hypothesize that people who
see themselves sitting in the bottom economic categories will be more likely
to see income distribution as unfair. We also add a measure for people’s
general view of the national economy, based on the question, “How is the
national economy at present compared to one year ago?” to get a sense of
whether perceptions of economic injustice are informed by, or simply reflect,
general views about the state of the economy.
A third factor, and the one we are most interested in, is how people’s
different political beliefs might drive variation in their perceptions of
economic distribution. From this perspective, people’s attitudes toward
inequality emerge less from their objective or perceived socio-economic
situation, and more from their pre-existing ideological beliefs and partisan
loyalties. Studies of Europe and Latin America, for example, have found that
people who identify as left-wing are more likely to see wealth disparity as
unjust, compared with those who hold more conservative and right-wing
political views.45
Unlike in Latin America and many Western democracies, however,
Indonesia’s politics are not organized along a traditional left-right cleavage.
Instead, politics are structured around a religious divide: proponents of
political Islam advocate for a larger role for Islam in public life, whereas
pluralists have a more secular and progressive ideological orientation. There
are reasons, however, to believe that this cleavage might act in ways similar
to the left-right divide when it comes to the specific question of economic
distribution. As Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani explain, “[a]cross the Muslim
world, Islamic parties tap into economic grievances to win popular support
… [and] popular Islamic political movements [also] frequently emerge in
response to economic grievances … .”46 In Indonesia specifically, as recent
work by Vedi Hadiz emphasizes, the leaders of Islamic organizations and
political figures from Islamic parties speak frequently about distributive
justice and, in particular, the economic plight of the ummah.47 As discussed
earlier, the more conservative and extremist Islamic groups were also active
in the sectarian campaign against Jakarta’s Chinese Christian governor, Ahok,
in 2016 and 2017. That campaign not only claimed Muslims must not be
governed by a non-Muslim leader, it also tried to mobilize Indonesians’ sense
of economic frustration by framing inequality in ethno-religious terms
____________________
45
Cramer and Kaufman, “Views of Economic Inequality in Latin America”; Christopher J.
Anderson and Matthew M. Singer, “The Sensitive Left and the Impervious Right: Multilevel Models
and the Politics of Inequality, Ideology, and Legitimacy in Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 41,
no. 4–5 (2008): 564–599.
46
Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani, “Testing Islam’s Political Advantage.”
47
Hadiz, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East.
44
and—either explicitly or implicitly—blaming Indonesia’s growing income

gap on the country’s wealthy ethnic Chinese minority.
So, to capture whether ideological differences might affect perceptions
of inequality, we divide respondents into two groups. One group consists of
those who support the conservative Islamic parties that have conventionally
been viewed as representing “political Islam”: Prosperous Justice Party (Partai
Keadilan Sejatera, PKS), National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional,
PAN), United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP),
Table 1
Linear Regression Analysis of Individual Determinants of
Attitudes to Income Distribution
(1) (2) (3) (3) (4)

2016 2018 2019 2014 2018

Perceptions of fairness Perceptions of changes

of inequality in inequality
Controls
Age -0.002 -0.002 -0.001 -0.001 -0.004
(0.002) (0.002) (0.001) (0.002) (0.002)
Religion (Islam) 0.186** 0.107 0.004 0.135 -0.106
(0.081) (0.074) (0.065) (0.071) (0.103)
Region (Java) 0.017 0.101** 0.017 -0.122*** 0.204***
(0.049) (0.047) (0.042) (0.042) (0.066)
Socio-economic
Income -0.014 0.019*** -0.012** 0.007 0.020**
(0.008) (0.007) (0.006) (0.007) (0.01)
Education 0.002 -0.030*** -0.017 -0.021** -0.034**
(0.012) (0.01) (0.009) (0.01) (0.015)
Economic
0.051*** 0.052** 0.175*** 0.100***
self-placement
(0.015) (0.022) (0.03) (0.031)
National
economic 0.075*** 0.060** 0.145***
conditions
(0.026) (0.027) (0.038)
45
Politics
Support for
-0.036 -0.057 -0.034 0.002 -0.1
political Islam
(0.064) (0.065) (0.055) (0.055) (0.091)
Satisfaction with
0.106** 0.164*** 0.193***
Jokowi
(0.042) (0.037) (0.052)
Support for
-0.075 -0.190*** -0.288*** 0.032 -0.395***
Prabowo
(0.054) (0.052) (0.044) (0.041) (0.074)
Political interest 0.143*** 0.057** 0.053
(0.038) (0.025) (0.036)
(Constant) 1.273 1.555 2.846 2.178 2.035

Adjusted R2 0.071 0.145 0.071 0.020 0.198
Standard errors in parentheses; *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05.

Source: World Bank survey on inequality in Indonesia (2014); Asian Barometer survey
(2016); authors’ original national survey (2018, 2019).
Coding: perception of fairness of inequality: very unfair (1) to very fair (4); perception of
changes in inequality: much more unequal (1) to much more equal (5); age: continuous
variable in respondent’s age in years; religion: Islam (1) and non-Muslim (0); region:
living on Java (1) or other (0); economic self-placement: bottom level (1) to the top level
(5); income: continuous variable which reports the respondent’s gross household income
per month coded from 1 to 12, where 1 indicates income per month under IDR 200,000
and 12 indicates over IDR 4,000,000; education: 1-10, where 1 indicates never attended
school and 10 indicates bachelor’s degree or higher; national economic conditions: five-
point scale ranging from much worse (1) to much better (5); support for political Islam:
(0) = support (or voted for 2019) for nationalist-pluralist parties and (1) = support (or
voted for 2019) for PKS, PAN, PPP, and PBB; satisfaction with Jokowi: very unsatisfied (1)
to very satisfied (4); support for Prabowo: (1) for those who supported Prabowo-Hatta
(2014), Prabowo (2016), or Prabowo-Sandi (2018, 2019), and then (0) for those who
supported Jokowi-Jusuf Kalla (2014), Jokowi (2016), or Jokowi-Ma’ruf (2018, 2019) (for
2019 data indicates which candidate they voted for in April presidential elections); political
interest: not interested at all (1) to very interested (4).
46
and Crescent Star Party (Partai Bulan Bintang) PBB. In the other group are
those Indonesians who vote for the more pluralist parties: Golkar, Indonesian
Democratic Party-Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan, PDI-P),
National Democratic Party (NasDem), Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat,
PD), and Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), together with the
Islamic party, National Awakening Party (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa, PKB),
which is associated with the traditionalist Islamic organization Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU), long considered the most pluralist of Indonesia’s Islamic
organizations.
There are also compelling reasons to believe that assessments of wealth
distribution in Indonesia might be formed along a leader-based, rather than
a party-based political cleavage. President Jokowi’s chief opponent in the
last two presidential elections (2014, 2019), Prabowo Subianto, made wealth
distribution a central component of his political narrative and critique of
the Jokowi administration. We hypothesize, therefore, that Indonesians who
are unsatisfied with the Jokowi government in general, and who support
Prabowo, are the most likely to express negative beliefs about levels of
inequality.
We also include a measure for people’s level of political interest, because
people who are more engaged politically and who seek out information
about the state of politics and economics, will have more information and
thus be more sensitive to income inequality and feel current levels are unjust.
The results confirm some, but not all, of the hypotheses we set out to test.
As table 1 illustrates, income and education have inconsistent effects on
perceptions of inequality. How people perceive their economic situation, on
the other hand, has a consistent, positive, and significant impact on
Indonesians’ beliefs about income inequality. If Indonesians believe they are
sitting at the lower end of the socio-economic hierarchy, they are more likely
to see the income gap as unfair, and they are much more likely to see that
gap as getting worse rather than better. People’s positive views of the national
economy also have a large, consistent and significant effect on people’s views
about inequality.
Ultimately, however, politics matter most, and political variables are playing
an increasing role in influencing people’s perceptions of inequality. More
specifically, we find that approval of Jokowi’s performance in office has a
large and positive effect upon people’s belief that income distribution is fair
in 2016. But the effect is larger in 2018. Presidential choice has no significant
effect on respondents’ perception of the trajectory of inequality over the
preceding five years in 2014, or on their beliefs about the fairness of inequality
in 2016; however, support for Prabowo has a significant, large, and negative
effect in 2018 for both questions. And by 2019, voting for Prabowo or Jokowi
was the largest determinant of an individual’s perception of inequality: being
a Prabowo voter made that individual much more likely to see the income
gap as unfair.
47
Why did people’s perceptions of the fairness of inequality become more

partisan between 2014 and 2019? One reason might be that in January 2016,
when the Asia Barometer first asked the question about the fairness of income
distribution, the Islamist movement against Ahok had yet to surface, and
Prabowo was still keeping a relatively low profile. Indeed, the fact that
“political interest” (or the level of a person’s engagement with political
issues), rather than support for Jokowi or Prabowo, had the largest effect on
individuals’ assessment of inequality in 2016 seems to confirm that this was
a time when inequality was not a salient or partisan political issue. By the
time the September 2018 survey was conducted, however, Indonesia had
been rocked by the divisive anti-Ahok campaign, and Prabowo had been
formally nominated as a candidate for the 2019 presidential race. By 2019,
in the aftermath of two intensely polarizing election campaigns, presidential
choice was the largest determinant of how a person viewed the nature of the
income gap.
6. Teasing Out Partisan Effects

Our regression model assumes that support for Prabowo or Jokowi shapes
how people view income distribution. But it is also possible that Prabowo is
attracting a constituency who had a prior sense of economic deprivation,
and that he has tapped into dissatisfaction with, and anger at, the gap between
rich and poor. Or, by the same token, those who support Jokowi may do so
because they are broadly satisfied with the economy and his government’s
distributive policies. In other words, it could be the case that perceptions of
inequality motivate people’s political preferences, rather than the reverse.
While simple regressions can offer a first estimate of effects on our dependent
variable, this tool cannot help tease out the direction of the causal arrow.
We thus supplement our analysis with a randomized list experiment
conducted in early December 2018 in order to gain more leverage over the
effect of partisan biases.
We use an experimental method common to studies of partisanship,
where scholars try to isolate the impact that parties and political leadership
have on how citizens view critical policy problems and how they form their
policy preferences.48 We divided our 1,220 respondents into three random
groups: one control group and two treatment groups. The control group
was told simply that some people hold a particular opinion on inequality,
whereas “others” support the opposing view. The control group received
the following information:
____________________
48
Stephen P. Nicholson, “Polarizing Cues,” American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 1 (2012):
52–66; Martin Bisgaard and Rune Slothuus, “Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan
Perceptual Gaps,” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 2 (2018): 456–469.
48
Recently, the issue of economic inequality has been hotly debated in the
public sphere. I am going to read you some opinions on this matter:
A. Some people believe that levels of income inequality in Indonesia at

the moment are unfair and should be made more equal.
B. On the other hand, some people believe that current levels of income
inequality are already better than previously and we don’t need to be
too concerned.
Of these two opinions, which is closest to your own?

Opinion A ; Opinion B; Don’t know/Didn’t answer
The first treatment group was shown a party cue with the two party labels
attached to each position: Opinion A for Gerindra, Prabowo’s political party,
and Opinion B for PDI-P, the party to which Jokowi belongs. In the second
treatment group, respondents were provided a leader cue, with Jokowi
supporting Opinion B and Prabowo holding Opinion A. In order to look at
how a preference for Jokowi or Prabowo affects voters’ opinions on inequality,

we organize respondents in each group according to their preferred
presidential candidate.49 We present a comparison of responses across groups
(figure 4).
The control group, in which respondents are not prompted by party or
leader cues, shows remarkably clear differences in the opinions of Jokowi
and Prabowo supporters. Of those Indonesians who stated they would vote
for Prabowo in the forthcoming presidential elections, 79 percent chose A
(inequality is unfair), far higher than Jokowi supporters in the control group.
Only 16.1 percent of Prabowo supporters in the control group chose B
(inequality has improved). Such a result suggests that Prabowo may indeed
be attracting voters who have a pre-existing grievance about patterns of
economic distribution. Yet, this remarkably high support for option A also
hints at the possibility that, for Prabowo loyalists, inequality is already a deeply
partisan issue. Inequality has become such a central feature of Prabowo’s
campaigns since 2009 that partisans are likely to echo his electoral message
even without political cues. Amongst Jokowi supporters, on the other hand,
respondents were more divided in the control group: 54.9 percent chose
option B and 37 percent chose option A.
When party and leader cues are introduced, we find very little movement
in the (already very high) numbers of Prabowo supporters who chose A.
Indeed, the difference in responses between Prabowo supporters in the
control group and in the treated groups is not statistically significant at the
____________________
49
Appendix A displays the number of Jokowi partisans, Prabowo partisans, and non-partisan
respondents in each group, and includes the significant tests for each experiment.
49
Figure 4
Survey experiment results
(1) Jokowi-Ma'Ruf Supporters

100.0
80.0
60.0
40.0
20.0
0.0
Control Party Cue Leader Cue
Opinion A Opinion B
(2) Prabowo-Sandi Supporters

100.0
80.0
60.0
40.0
20.0
0.0
Control Party Cue Leader Cue
Opinion A Opinion B
Source: authors’ original survey, December 2018.
95 percent level. Jokowi supporters, on the other hand, responded

enthusiastically to political cues. They rejected the notion that income
distribution is unfair in much larger numbers when prompted by either a
cue from the president’s party, PDI-P (63.6 percent), or from the president
himself (76.2 percent). The difference between the control and treatment
groups is both large and statistically significant.
These results reinforce the findings from our earlier regression analysis
by illustrating that perceptions of inequality in Indonesia are deeply
polarized, and appear in large part to be an expression of partisan bias. While
Prabowo voters overwhelmingly see income distribution as unfair, supporters
of President Jokowi are likely to overlook or reject problems of income
inequality when prompted to do so by political cues. This finding helps
50
explain why people living in more unequal parts of Java felt inequality levels
were fair—East and Central Java are Jokowi strongholds (figure 3). The
experiment provides insight into how popular opinion has changed in recent
years against the backdrop of a slowly improving Gini since 2015. Over this
period, inequality has improved, but it has also become a more partisan
problem. While Jokowi supporters are more likely to see income distribution
in a positive light, especially when exposed to partisan prompts, Prabowo
supporters overwhelmingly see patterns of economic distribution as unfair.
7. Do Perceptions of Inequality Affect Indonesians’ Attitudes to

Democracy?
Having established the political bases of Indonesians’ beliefs about inequality,
in this final section we explore whether negative perceptions of economic
distribution might then have implications for how people feel about the
democratic status quo. To recall, in the comparative literature on inequality,

many studies show that high levels of inequality have negative effects upon
democratic consolidation and quality.50 However, as Cramer and Kaufman

point out in their instructive analysis of this problem, “these effects pass
through individual attitudes and perceptions; and although this connection
is often acknowledged theoretically, it is rarely examined empirically.”51
So, we set out to empirically examine this individual-level effect in
Indonesia, a country where historically high levels of income inequality have
been accompanied by a rise in illiberal and populist politics. Given the results
outlined in the previous section, the more specific question for the
Indonesian context is whether, in the current polarized political atmosphere,
negative beliefs about inequality are associated with negative beliefs about
the democratic status quo.
To examine this relationship, in our 2018 national survey we asked a series
of common questions about support for democratic systems. We asked first
if people were satisfied with how democracy was working in their country, to
which 70 percent stated they were “very satisfied” or “fairly satisfied,” 26
percent were “unsatisfied” or “very unsatisfied,” and around 4 percent did
not know or did not want to answer. Second, we asked whether people agreed
that democracy is the best form of government over other forms of
government. In 2018, 71 percent chose democracy, 11 percent said the
regime type made no difference, and 6 percent said that authoritarian
government is sometimes acceptable (and the rest did not answer). The
____________________
50
See for example, Haggard and Kaufman, “Inequality and Regime Change”; Fukuyama,
Diamond, and Plattner, Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy; Cramer and Kaufman, “Views of Economic
Inequality in Latin America”; Bermeo, “Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy (II)”; Houle, “Inequality
and Democracy.”
51
51
Table 2
Linear Regression Analysis of Democratic Preferences and Trust in 201857
Satisfaction Favours democracy
Trust in
with over other Trust in DPR
courts
democracy regimes(logistic)
Controls
0.000 -0.003 0.000 0.001

Age
(0.002) (0.008) (0.002) (0.002)
-0.045 -0.007 0.218** 0.091
Religion (Islam)
(0.067) (0.341) (0.097) (0.089)
-0.062 -0.126 -0.223*** -0.067
Region (Java)
(0.043) (0.212) (0.062) (0.057)
Socio-economic
-0.014** -0.040 -0.031*** -0.035***

Income
(0.006) (0.030) (0.009) (0.008)
-0.017 0.041 -0.058*** -0.029**

Education
(0.009) (0.047) (0.014) (0.013)
Economic 0.004 -0.113 -0.015 0.004
self-placement (0.020) (0.101) (0.029) (0.027)
Politics
Perceived fairness
0.162*** 0.166 0.184*** 0.223***
of income
(0.034) (0.168) (0.049) (0.045)
distribution
Support for 0.069 0.125 0.089 -0.014
political Islam (0.060) (0.297) (0.086) (0.080)
Satisfaction with 0.229*** 0.378*** 0.201*** 0.188***
Jokowi (0.034) (0.163) (0.049) (0.045)
Support for -0.081 0.106 0.124 0.013
Prabowo (0.048) (0.234) (0.069) (0.064)
1.859***
-0.389 2.126*** 2.161***
(Constant) (0.177)
(0.851) (0.255) (0.236)
Pseudo-R2
Adjusted R2 0.169 0.120 0.115
0.030
Standard errors in parentheses; *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05
Source: authors’ original survey
Note: Satisfaction with democracy is coded on a scale from (1) very unsatisfied to (4)
very satisfied; preferred government system is a dummy variable coded as follows: (0) =
under some circumstances, for our country an authoritarian government can be
preferable to a democratic one, and whatever system of government we adopt, a
52
distribution of responses to these questions has been relatively stable in

recent years, and these figures for 2018 do not represent a dramatic shift in
patterns of democratic preferences in Indonesia.
We also asked respondents how much they trusted a range of institutions,
including the parliament, political parties, the electoral commission, the
courts, and the corruption eradication commission. For reasons of space
and efficiency, we use responses to two institutions that we believe capture
the principle of checks and balances that are a core feature of democratic
government: the parliament and the courts. We found 72 percent of
respondents said that they trusted or very much trusted the courts, and 59
percent said they trusted or very much trusted the parliament. Overall, this
set of questions indicates that a core of around 30 to 40 percent of the
Indonesian population lacks trust in, and is unsatisfied with, democratic
institutions.
What factors predict this population’s ambivalence toward democracy?
To estimate the relationship between perceptions of inequality and attitudes

to democracy, we perform a series of regressions using the same variables as
before, but now with democratic attitudes as the outcome of interest, and
perception of inequality as one of our independent variables. The results
are displayed in table 2. We find that perceived fairness of income distribution
has a significant and large effect on individuals’ satisfaction with democratic
government, and their trust in democratic institutions, though not on
people’s preferred regime type. Holding all other factors constant, belief
about the fairness of income distribution is one of the strongest predictors
of trust in democratic institutions: those who believe inequality is unfair are
less likely to trust the institutions intended to represent the public interest
and to provide equal access to legal redress. But we also find that approval
of the president has a large—in general the largest—effect on democratic
attitudes. In sum, the less someone approves of the president, and the more
someone believes income distribution is unfair, the more likely they are to
be dissatisfied with, and express distrust toward, democratic institutions. In
the following concluding section, we turn to how such beliefs might constitute
a threat to Indonesia’s democracy.
____________________
(Table 2 Note continued)

democratic or a non-democratic regime makes no difference; then (1) = although
democracy is not perfect, it is still the best form of government. - Trust is coded on a
scale, from (1) does not trust at all to (4) very much trusts. We performed a series of
collinearity tests for these regressions and found nothing to suggest these results are
compromised by collinearity between independent variables. These tests can be
accessed in Appendix B.
53
8. Conclusion
Studies of democratic backsliding in other country contexts suggest that
negative perceptions of economic distribution, and feelings of economic
injustice, can erode public trust in democratic institutions and undermine
citizens’ commitment to democratic government. This in turn leaves citizens
open to undemocratic appeals and divisive, populist campaigns. Like other
studies of popular opinion in Indonesia, our results also confirm that
satisfaction with democracy in Indonesia varies with how people feel about
the performance of the incumbent.52 Indeed, we found that approval of
Jokowi had the largest effect on individuals’ satisfaction with democracy and
trust in parliament. But even while holding constant support for the
incumbent, our study suggested that in contemporary Indonesia, people
who feel income distribution is unfair are indeed more likely to be dissatisfied
with democracy and to distrust democratic institutions.
On the one hand, these findings lend support to “performance” theories

about how stark material inequalities can produce disappointment with the
democratic status quo. But our analysis also pointed out that perceptions of
inequality in Indonesia have partisan foundations, and voters’ beliefs about

patterns of distribution do not necessarily reflect actual patterns of inequality.
In other words, support for either the incumbent or the opposition colours
how Indonesians feel about distributive fairness. And to the extent that
perceptions of inequality are largely a function of political partisanship, then
the effect that such perceptions have upon satisfaction with and trust in
democracy must also be understood as having a strong partisan dimension.
While a majority of Indonesians continue to trust democratic institutions
and prefer democracy over other forms of government, for a large minority
of Indonesians, negative beliefs about inequality have become an expression
of partisan opposition to the Jokowi government, and those beliefs are also
highly associated with discontent toward the democratic political order.
To what extent, then, should we see inequality, or popular perceptions of
inequality, as a threat to Indonesia’s democratic quality? We are hesitant to
draw strong conclusions about the causal link between attitudes to inequality
and Indonesia’s current moment of democratic decline. The causal chain is
long and complex, and moves from believing inequality is unfair, to blaming
incumbent elites and losing faith in the democratic status quo, to taking
undemocratic actions.53 Our analysis of public opinion in Indonesia is not
designed to make such a causal claim. However, based on our findings, and
on the conclusions of other research in this field, we suggest two potential
ways in which citizens’ attitudes to inequality might affect democratic
outcomes in Indonesia.
____________________
Mujani, Liddle, and Ambardi, Voting Behaviour in Indonesia since Democratization.

52
Cramer and Kaufman, “Views of Economic Inequality in Latin America.”

53
54
First, while Prabowo lost Indonesia’s two most recent presidential elections,
his sustained popularity points to how latent grievances about economic
distribution can be readily mobilized and made salient by charismatic and
populist actors with undemocratic agendas, especially when such actors dress
those grievances in a religious garb. Our survey experiment revealed the
extent to which Prabowo’s supporters were unified in their belief that levels
of inequality in Indonesia were unjust. A serious threat to Indonesia’s
democracy lies in the potential of other undemocratic actors to politicize
such grievances and mobilize this constituency into the future.
Second, partisan polarization creates opportunities for democratic
regression. Competition between Jokowi and Prabowo has mobilized an old
divide between different religio-cultural communities in Indonesia, and
levels of polarization between the two camps have deepened in recent years,
leading to a more divided political landscape in which policy problems are
viewed through an increasingly partisan lens.54 The degree of partisan division
between Jokowi and Prabowo voters that we uncovered on this question of

inequality was striking. Internationally, polarization is increasingly viewed as
a precursor to democratic backsliding, because deep societal divisions “erode

an electorate’s ability to resist authoritarianism.”55 More specifically, as Svolik
argues, each side in a political conflict becomes more and more willing to
accept the erosion of democratic norms and institutions if they believe such
erosion helps to contain their political enemies and ensures their leader or
party remains in power. Scholars of Indonesia’s politics argue that Jokowi
loyalists have supported several illiberal interventions against opposition
actors precisely for this reason.56 Our study shows that Indonesians’ beliefs
about inequality are shaped largely by partisan biases, and shift in response
to partisan cues. These findings reveal an electorate that is now polarized
on how they see a fundamental problem of distributive justice, and such
polarization makes Indonesia vulnerable, we believe, to further democratic
backsliding.
State Islamic University, Jakarta, Indonesia

National University of Singapore, Singapore, December 2019
____________________
54
Diego Fossati, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, and Eve Warburton, “Follow the Leader: Personalities,
Policy and Partisanship in Indonesia,” New Mandala (15 July 2019), https://www.newmandala.org/
follow-the-leader-personalities-policy-and-partisanship-in-indonesia/.
55
Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy,” 31.
56
Thomas Power, “Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline,” Bulletin
of Indonesian Economic Studies 54, no. 3 (2018), 307–338; Marcus Mietzner, “Fighting Illiberalism with
Illiberalism: Islamist Populism and Democratic Deconsolidation in Indonesia,” Pacific Affairs 91, no.
2 (2018): 261–282.
55
Appendix A
Experiment
Survey Experiment Groups
Party Cue Leader Cue

Partisanship Control
(PDIP/Gerindra) (Jokowi/Prabowo)
Joko Widodo and

227 213 212
Ma’ruf Amin
Prabowo Subianto
135 145 137
and Sandiaga Uno
DK/DA/Won’t vote 55 37 49
Experiment Significance Tests

Jokowi-Ma’ruf Partisans
Opinion A Difference t-Statistics P-Value
Control to Party Cue 12.941 3.016 0.003

Control to Leader Cue 21.887 5.350 0.000
Opinion B
Control to Party Cue -8.641 -1.869 0.062

Control to Leader Cue -21.277 -4.76 0.000
Prabowo-Sandi Partisans
Opinion A Difference t-Statistics P-Value

Control to Leader Cue -1.229 -0.253 0.801
Opinion B

Control to Leader Cue 3.384 0.797 0.426
56
Appendix B
Collinearity Tests
Dependent Variable: Democratic Satisfaction

Unstandardized Coeff. Standardized Coeff. Collinearity Statistics
B Std. Error Beta t Sig. Tolerance VIF
Controls
Age 0.000 0.002 -0.002 -0.055 0.956 0.893 1.120
Religion (Islam) -0.045 0.067 0.026 0.665 0.506 0.765 1.308
Region (Java) -0.062 0.043 0.053 1.449 0.148 0.839 1.192
Sosioeconomics
Income -0.014 0.006 -0.086 -2.238 0.026 0.767 1.303
Education -0.017 0.009 -0.074 -1.848 0.065 0.715 1.399
Economic self-placement 0.004 0.020 0.007 0.197 0.844 0.874 1.144
Politics
Perceived fairness of income
0.162 0.034 0.174 4.793 0.000 0.860 1.163
distribution
Support for political Islam 0.069 0.060 0.041 1.153 0.249 0.907 1.102
Satisfaction with Jokowi 0.229 0.034 0.274 6.782 0.000 0.696 1.436
Support for Prabowo -0.081 0.048 -0.069 -1.702 0.089 0.697 1.435
(Constant) 1.859 0.177 10.503 0.000

Adjusted R2 0.169
57
Appendix B (continued)
58
Collinearity Tests
Dependent Variable: Trust in DPR

Unstandardized Coeff. Standardized Coeff. Collinearity Statistics
B Std. Error Beta t Sig. Tolerance VIF
Controls
Age 0.001 0.002 0.016 0.042 0.659 0.891 1.123
Religion (Islam) 0.091 0.089 0.040 1.014 0.311 0.763 1.311
Region (Java) -0.067 0.057 -0.044 -1.166 0.244 0.839 1.192
Socioeconomics
Income -0.035 0.008 -0.137 -4.242 0.000 0.765 1.306
Education -0.029 0.013 -0.094 -2.298 0.022 0.711 1.407
Economic self-placement 0.004 0.027 0.005 0.132 0.895 0.874 1.144
Politics
Perceived fairness of
0.223 0.045 0.183 4.922 0.000 0.859 1.164
income distribution
Support for political Islam -0.014 0.080 -0.007 -0.181 0.857 0.910 1.099
Satisfaction with Jokowi 0.188 0.045 0.173 4.204 0.000 0.699 1.431
Support for Prabowo 0.013 0.064 0.008 0.203 0.839 0.696 1.438
(Constant) 2.161 0.236 9.150 0.000

Adjusted R2 0.115

Inequality and Democratic Support in Indonesia

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Inequality and Democratic Support in Indonesia

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Inequality and Democratic

But this variation is not determined by actual levels of inequality around

inequality in Indonesia have become increasingly partisan over the course

Keywords: Inequality, public opinion, polarization, democratic support,

© Pacific Affairs: Volume 93, No. 1 March 2020 31

scholars, “passes through individual attitudes and perceptions,”6 because

Against this backdrop, we set out to address three under-examined

perceptions of their own economic situation, have direct and significant

and exploits latent grievances about economic distribution, which can

democratic attitudes. The conclusion considers what these results might

2. Inequality and Democracy: Why Perceptions Matter

political engagement and participation, particularly amongst poorer

democratic erosion in part through individuals’ beliefs about distributive

together with the growing popularity of right-wing parties in Europe, point

Source: Indonesia Statistics Agency (BPS): https://www.bps.go.id/

Still, the magnitude of the decrease in the Gini is relatively small in

Beyond the work of economists, scholars of Indonesia’s democracy have

inequalities of opportunity and, of course, attract electoral support.

One important exception is the World Bank’s study on Indonesia’s

wealth distribution. That year, Prabowo Subianto, a former military general

populist challenge” to Indonesia’s status quo politics.31 He dismissed Western

groups and mainstream Islamic organizations, along with high-profile

empirical study of the factors—socio-economic, geographic, or political—that

whether those views are linked to people’s democratic attitudes.

4. How Do Indonesians View Inequality?

There are many ways to capture perceptions of inequality, but we agree

How Fair is the Level of Income Inequality in Indonesia Today?

Very Fair/Fair Very Unfair/Unfair DK/DU /DA

particularly high income inequality. Figure 3 presents levels of inequality in

Statistics Agency (BPS),41 alongside the proportion of respondents who felt

5. Why Do Views About Inequality Vary?

Banten DKI Jakarta

38 East Java Central Java

Sumatera Other Aceh

Inequality is Unfair (%)

estimate of the effects of demographic, socio-economic, and political factors.

and—either explicitly or implicitly—blaming Indonesia’s growing income

(1) (2) (3) (3) (4)

2016 2018 2019 2014 2018

Perceptions of fairness Perceptions of changes

(Constant) 1.273 1.555 2.846 2.178 2.035

Standard errors in parentheses; *** p < 0.01; ** p < 0.05.

Why did people’s perceptions of the fairness of inequality become more

6. Teasing Out Partisan Effects

A. Some people believe that levels of income inequality in Indonesia at

Of these two opinions, which is closest to your own?

how a preference for Jokowi or Prabowo affects voters’ opinions on inequality,

(1) Jokowi-Ma'Ruf Supporters

(2) Prabowo-Sandi Supporters

Source: authors’ original survey, December 2018.

95 percent level. Jokowi supporters, on the other hand, responded

7. Do Perceptions of Inequality Affect Indonesians’ Attitudes to

democratic status quo. To recall, in the comparative literature on inequality,

democratic consolidation and quality.50 However, as Cramer and Kaufman

0.000 -0.003 0.000 0.001

-0.014** -0.040 -0.031*** -0.035***

-0.017 0.041 -0.058*** -0.029**

distribution of responses to these questions has been relatively stable in

To estimate the relationship between perceptions of inequality and attitudes

(Table 2 Note continued)

On the one hand, these findings lend support to “performance” theories

inequality in Indonesia have partisan foundations, and voters’ beliefs about

Mujani, Liddle, and Ambardi, Voting Behaviour in Indonesia since Democratization.

Standard errors in parentheses; * p < 0.01; p < 0.05.

-0.014 -0.040 -0.031* -0.035***

-0.017 0.041 -0.058* -0.029