Authoritarian Legacies in Post-New Order Indonesia: Evidence from a New Dataset

Democratisation has fundamentally changed the formal institutional structure of Indonesian politics, but a wealth of contemporary research has demonstrated that the informal mechanisms of power and influence have survived the transition. This article uses a unique, hand-collected dataset of information on Indonesian public figures to empirically catalogue the changes and continuities in Indonesian politics since democratisation. Our results provide quantitative evidence of a substantial shift in Indonesia's political economy over the last decade and a half: the simultaneous rise of the private sector and decline of the military and the state as avenues to political influence at the national level. Our evidence also suggests that the origins of this shift pre-date democratisation itself.