Elite Reconciliation and Democratization through Strength: Evidence from 1998 Indonesia

Tyler Rongxuan Chen, University of Michigan

“Democratization through strength” represents a frequently overlooked pathway by which authoritarian regimes actively transit from non-democratic rule in response to economic crises. The existing literature has not adequately acknowledged this “regime change without elite change” pattern, as previous research tends to conflate elite responses to immediate shocks arising from crises with their confidence in enduring self-led democratization, informed by their knowledge of long-term development achievements. In this study, I propose an all-encompassing analytical framework, arguing that a comprehensive understanding of elite choices in the face of economic crises necessitates examining how they synthesize their prior knowledge of inherent strength with their contextualized perceptions of crisis-induced threats to generate posterior information. Elites can make collective decisions on whether to democratize regimes or not, based on their shared posterior beliefs communicated through elite networks. To exemplify this framework, I utilize the empirical case of Indonesia’s 1998 transition from the New Order regime based on intensive archival analysis on newspaper reports and autobiographies of politicians. Concurrently, as a corollary of my theoretical propositions, I endeavor to challenge the prevailing belief that Indonesia’s case represents democratization through weakness. Contrarily, I demonstrate that, while elites encountered considerable pressure during the 1998 economic crisis, their decision to abandon the New Order was not solely a reaction to mitigate potential threats but also a manifestation of their confidence in weathering this self-led transition. This argument contravenes current narratives asserting that the internal weakness of the New Order regime primarily contributed to the transition, thereby exemplifying the importance of contextualizing the political consequences of economic crises within a more extensive temporal framework.

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 Presented in Session 40. Political Elites