This case study tests the significance of leadership, party identification, religious orientation, political economy, and sociological and demographic factors in the legislative and presidential choices of voters in the new Indonesian democracy. Data were obtained from four national opinion surveys conducted by the authors following parliamentary elections in 1999 and 2004 and the two-round presidential election in 2004. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of our data confirm the significance of leadership and party ID and the nonsignificance for the most part of other variables tested, including religious orientation, long the most popular explanation for the Indonesian case.

Saiful Mujani Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah JakartaAcross the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non-Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non-Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.

After a decade of democracy, secular political parties dominate Muslim-majority Indonesia. Explanations include a historical pattern of religious pluralism, policies of President Suharto's New Order, creative Muslim responses to those policies, a large majority of moderate Muslim voters, and ineffective voter mobilization by Islamist parties today.

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Despite the introduction of social restrictions designed to stem the spread of COVID-19, many Indonesians have continued to attend places of worship. This poses a major public health threat, as congregational prayer involves large numbers of worshippers gathering under conditions known to enable the spread of the virus. Using a nationally representative survey, we evaluated the efficacy of messages delivered from different authorities in encouraging Indonesians to worship at home. Wefi nd no consistent evidence that public health messages change Indonesians’ attitudes toward communal prayer or their willingness to forgo communal prayer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, however, looking at well-defined subpopulations—non-Muslims and supporters of the president—wefi nd suggestive evidence that messages were effective in increasing the likelihood of individuals to indicate a willingness to forgo communal prayer in the forthcomingweek. Our results suggest that public health officials should eschew blanket messaging strategies in favor of more targeted approaches.