ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Indonesia’s democratic progress, two decades after the collapse of the Soeharto regime. It begins by briefly surveying the course of Indonesia’s democratization, paying particular attention to two core ingredients of its democratic success: the wide public legitimacy accorded to elections and the strength of its civil society. The chapter argues that while some of these shortcomings reflect changes in Indonesian society and broad global trends of democratic stagnation, most can be traced to the negotiated, gradual process of regime transition that occurred after the fall of Soeharto in 1998. Indonesia’s democratic progress was all the more remarkable given that it was so unexpected. The crisis that enveloped the authoritarian Soeharto regime in 1997–98 came suddenly. In terms of institutional structures, for example, the military is largely unreformed. To be sure, the military no longer plays a central role in government leadership as it did under Soeharto.
