Indonesia: Transition and Prospects for Democracy

... Democracy in Indonesia: Transition and Prospects Introduction Indonesia has been classified into the "second", "third" and even "fourth waves" (Chadwick, 2006) of democracy. Its transition is not clean-cut since there were periods of semi-democracy before the authoritarian rule of Suharto, lasting 32 years. Nevertheless, to simplify matters, I chose to focus on the most recent period of democracy: 1999 onwards. The first part of this essay explains Indonesia's transition to democracy in the framework of Huntington's article "How Countries Democratise" (1991b) in so far as there are similar actors and structures. Huntington (1991b) describes three kinds of transitions; Indonesia's transition to democracy can be classified as a transplacement (Haryadi, 2002 & Tanuredjo, 2007), although it is not an archetypal case. As for the definition of democracy, there is some debate as to whether Indonesia is fully democratized or still democratizing. I stick to Dahl's (1978) definition of democracy: civil freedoms, public participation,

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