Political differentiation key to reforms

By Aleksius Jemadu

BANDUNG (JP): Many political analysts would agree with Mochtar Pabottingi, a senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, who suggested that the Indonesian political system really needs reforms after decades of obsession with state-led political stability.

Mochtar argued that there was a danger in the government's insistence to resist change since such an attitude could lead to a "bloody" conflict between those seeking to maintain the status quo and groups who wanted to see change. It was also argued that democracy was political rationality par excellence (The Jakarta Post, Nov. 26, 1997).

If building a political system capable of bridging the will of the people and the process of governance can be viewed as an important goal of democracy, then the empowerment of the legislative body would be a conditio sine qua non.

Moreover, the present position of our legislative body seems to be subordinated to the domination of the executive power. It is equally important to note that it is always the executive power which takes the initiative in producing new laws.

In some cases decrees that were created by the executive power turned out to be in contradiction to higher legal norms. The domination of the executive power has led to frequent violation of the hierarchy of legal norms.

The most critical aim of empowering the legislative body is how to increase its capacity to cope with people's demands and to communicate those demands with the executive power. The establishment of modern political institutions is one thing. How these political institutions function properly and interact creatively is quite another thing.

Therefore, it can be argued that the weak position of the legislative body is not only related to the quality of this political institution, but also to the level of political differentiation in our political system.

In his description of political aspects of modernization, James Coleman (1968) developed a model which makes a link between three concepts: differentiation, equality and capacity.

Differentiation can be understood as "the process of progressive separation and specialization of roles and institutional spheres in the political system".

The differentiation process will produce greater functional specialization, more structural complexity, and a higher degree of interdependence of political institutions.

The second key concept is equality which is viewed by Coleman as the ethos of political modernization. This concept includes a notion of universal adult citizenship, the prevalence of universalistic legal notes in the government's relations with the citizenry, the predominance of achievement criteria in the recruitment and allocation of political and administrative roles, and popular involvement in the political system.

According to Coleman the growth of political capacity of the system is very much determined by the extent to which the principles of differentiation and equality have been practiced.

A political system can be said to have a high capacity if it can increase the scope of several political functions.

These include scale of political community, efficacy of the implementation of political decisions, penetrative power of central government institutions, comprehensive aggregation of interests by political associations, institutionalization of political organization and procedure, problem solving capabilities, ability to sustain new political demand and organization.

By using this model we can make a critical assessment over the capacity of our legislative body.

As regards the role of the People's House of Representatives (DPR) there have been a lot of complaints that it cannot perform its functions in an effective way.

Certain members of the House do have the courage to criticize government policies but the House as a whole remains very much embedded in the pervasive dominance of an undemocratic political culture which endorses paternalistic behavior and self-imposed restriction.

Instead of undertaking a serious debate on a critical policy issue, consensus is generally believed to be the best way in decision-making. Risk aversion seems to be a dominant pattern of behavior among members of parliament.

Open opposition to policies or active criticism of decisions being imposed from the ruling power are seen as socially incorrect and politically unethical.

It would be no exaggeration to suggest that as long as such feudalistic behavior prevails, there can never be any empowerment of the legislative body.

Dealing with the current crisis that hits the overall structure of our national economy will not be an easy task for the government. The executive branch of the government needs a proactive and critical parliament so that the executive officials might not pursue ill-designed policies.

Many big problems in this country could have been avoided had the parliament been allowed to be more critical over certain government policies.

It is high time now to reconsider whether or not there is a constitutionally acceptable justification for the recalling of DPR members who opposed government standard policies in certain areas.

Fear of being recalled could discourage members of parliament from using their constitutionally-sanctioned rights to control the performance of the executive power.

It is worth noting that in this era of globalization the government's capacity to cope with global challenges is limited. Therefore, the government needs a capable and reliable legislative counterpart in order to prevent the nation from falling into political and economic fiasco.

Without such structural differentiation Indonesian democracy would appear to be going nowhere.

The writer is the director of Parahyangan Center for International Studies at UNPAR, Bandung. He holds a Ph.D in social sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium.