Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-25131-9
Ph.D.
Political Science
Northern Illinois University
2014
This research study focuses on the voters' behavior in the 2004 legislative election in Indonesia. It seeks to explain two puzzles. The first puzzle is that the outcome of the 2004 election does not register with the conventional reward-punish model of voting behavior. PDI-P, the incumbent, lost much of the vote it gained in the previous 1999 election to Golkar despite the fact that it brought relatively improved economic conditions and implemented a fiscal decentralization policy that consequently transferred economic resources from the central to local governments. The second puzzle involves partisan identity. In the 2004 election, electoral volatility is observable, but the outcome also points to an observed pattern of stable partisan identity, in particular for the Islamic parties and Golkar. The coexistence of volatility and stable partisan identity is an anomaly to the theoretical expectation of party identification. The theory of party identification expects stable partisan identity to be associated with less electoral volatility.
Asian Studies; Public administration
Social sciences;Economic resources;Elections;Golkar;Indonesia;Islamic parties;Partisan;Voter behavior