Cartel Politics: Contrary to a Competitive Party System

In his book Uncovering Cartel Politics, Kuskridho Ambardi explains that since the reform, parties in Indonesia have formed a cartel-like party system. The evidence that Kuskridho has collected shows that there are five characteristics of cartels in the party system in Indonesia, namely, (1) the loss of the role of party ideology as a determining factor in the behavior of party coalitions, (2) a permissive attitude in forming coalitions, 3) the absence of opposition, (4 ) election results have almost no influence in determining the behavior of political parties and (5) the strong tendency of parties to act collectively as a group. These five characteristics, especially the fifth, contradict the general nature of competitive party systems.

The party's interest in maintaining collective survival requires them to form cartels. Thus, their survival is determined by the common interest to maintain various existing financial sources, especially those from the government. At this point, the party's financial source in question is government money obtained by the party through rent-seeking (rent-seeking).

Opinions about party cartelization in Indonesia have been expressed by Slater (2004) who offers a somewhat similar idea, namely that Indonesian democracy suffers from what he calls the accountability trap. This trap arises because political parties fail to carry out the checks and balances monitoring function at the government level. Furthermore, he said, the party cartel was able to seize the economic rents owned by the ministers through its control over the cabinet.

The party system according to Sartori (1976) is an interaction system that originates from competition between parties. different. Sartori classifies party systems into four types, one party, two parties, moderate pluralism and extreme pluralism. In many ways, Sartori's typology improves on traditional classifications which generally revolve around two-party and multi-party systems. Multi-party is described in four types to facilitate the character of the party system in Indonesia, namely moderate pluralism, extreme pluralism, limited but polarized pluralism and polarized pluralism. Sartori's typology assumes that there is only one arena of political competition, where election results will determine party action in the legislative arena.

When a party wins a seat in parliament, it is very likely that the party will take action based on its ideological choices and the interests it represents in parliament. If a party needs a coalition, it will join parties that share the same ideology. However, when speaking in the real world, as soon as the election ends the parties show a completely different type of interaction, the ideological distance between them disappears and the competition stops once the election is over.

Robert Dahl (1996), identified various arenas of political competition, namely elections, parliament, bureaucracy, local government, and so on. Various contemporary studies on this issue also confirm Dahl's thesis. Muller and Strom (1999), describe the dilemma that is always faced by political parties in making various decisions involving conflicting goals. In order to maintain the electoral support obtained in elections, a party may sacrifice one of the goals of a political party by choosing to remain loyal to the policy choices that were formulated from the start or choosing to get a position in the cabinet but can no longer adhere to its policy or ideological choices. This dilemma arises when a party needs a coalition partner to form a government, but the potential partners do not share the same ideology. This dilemma is a choice between staying committed or getting a position. In this dilemma situation a party changes its behavior in order to achieve different goals.

Cartelization is the opposition of competition. Competition begins when parties struggle to articulate different collective interests and ends when they give up their defense of these collective interests. In this case, competition can be contrasted with cooperation or cartelization, a more specific form of cooperation. Thus, inter-party competition can be defined as a situation where parties assert their various political differences in order to articulate the collective interests of the social group they are trying to represent. The differences can be ideological or policy.

On the other hand, cartelization can be seen as an opponent of competition, and can be defined as a situation where political parties give up their ideological and programmatic differences in favor of something else. And this situation is possible, according to Katz and Mair (1995), because all major parties have the same interest, namely maintaining their collective survival. Ideological boundaries are no longer a determinant of party behavior. As a result the opposition is unrecognizable.

Instead of representing diverse collective interests, in a cartelized party system, most political parties tend to serve their own interests as relatively autonomous groups. As stated by Katz and Mair (1995), a cartelized party system is also marked by the separation of party leaders from their constituents and the marginalization of opponents within the party. If an ideology represents one type of collective interest in society, a polarized ideology reflects the opposing movements of ideologically competing parties. On the other hand, a cartelized party system is indicated by the blurring or loss of the party's ideological position.

The concepts of competition and cartelization discuss differences in collective interests in a society. Two available approaches can help us trace the substance of the collective interests, namely the sociological and tabula rasa approaches. The first approach, as Lipset and Rokkan believe, is that the formation of party systems and political parties can be well understood through a social lens by looking at the dynamics of social cleavage, as well as the political tensions or conflicts that follow. The essence of this argument is that the character of a party system has been determined long beforehand because the social bases of the opposition have long been formed.

The second concept, commonly known as the tabula rasa approach. If the sociological approach talks about the substance of the conflict, this approach talks about the process. By emphasizing process, this approach suggests that voters and politicians do not automatically know what their interests are. Through a long learning process, politicians and voters from time to time try to formulate and then articulate their interests. If the first approach gives us the idea that the formation of a party system does not occur in a social, political or historical vacuum, then the second approach directs us to the dynamics of the formation of a party system and the importance of actors in the formation of that party system. One way to connect the logic of the two approaches is to include the role of political parties in the formation of the party system.

By focusing on the actions and choices made by parties, we can treat various cleavages as raw materials, with which cleavage parties build the image of strategically crafting their campaign content (Sartori, 1976). Competition between parties thus manifests itself in the form of competing collective interests in the election arena.

Ideology-based coalition theory put forward by de Swan (1973), emphasizes the importance of party ideology in forming coalitions. Electoral links can also be of another nature. He appeared solely to win the political battle. Therefore, the selection of coalition partners is determined by the number of votes acquired in the election or the number of parliamentary seats.

Likewise, we can say that competition between parties stops when electoral links do not materialize. This means that both ideology-based coalition theory and minimal winning coalition theory fail to predict the form of coalition that will emerge after elections, namely in the arena of legislative government. Instead, in both arenas various parties build a coalition that embraces all parties. The formation of this type of coalition itself marks some of the characteristics of a non-competitive party system or a cartel-based party system. First, party ideology becomes a non-factor in determining party behavior. Second, in forming a coalition, parties are promiscuous or permissive. Third, the opposition cannot be identified. Fourth, election results have minimal or no impact in shaping party behavior. All of these features are in common with a cartelized party system with one important additional feature. Parties tend to act as a group.

According to Katz and Mair, cartelization arises from a situation where political parties are increasingly dependent on the state in terms of meeting their financial needs. This dependence is caused by a sharp decline in the ability to mobilize party finances through membership dues. The receding of the traditional base of financial resources then brought the party closer to the state and away from society. And their reliance on state subsidies through a process of subversion ultimately determines the survival of the party and triggers the emergence of a type of cartel.

The emergence and continuation of the cartel stems from the need for parties to secure their access to these non-budgetary funds. At this point, there are two possibilities. First, the party can do it individually and secondly collectively. However, since various parties are involved in similar rent-seeking which is illegal activity they are in a similar situation. They live and experience political and economic fate as a group. Once one member of the group uncovers certain illegal rent-seeking, political shocks are very likely to be created. Therefore, the cartel must be kept together. Thus, the need to maintain shared survival explains the nature of the resulting party system, namely a cartelized party system. Party ideology and programs are thus only secondary.

Bibliography

Dahl, R. 1966. Patterns of Opposition : In Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. Ed R. Dahl. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Sartori, G. 1976. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.