Restructuring Electoral Democracy

The revision of the Election Law currently being drafted by Commission II of the DPR is not merely a routine legislative agenda. It is a moment to reorganise the foundations of Indonesia’s electoral democracy, which over the past decade has been filled with patchwork repairs, judicial corrections, and institutional experiments that are not yet fully mature. With at least 10 major issues being mapped out, this revision should not stop at technical responses to Constitutional Court (MK) decisions, but should serve as an entry point to comprehensively re-formulate the architecture of the national election system. It is at this point that the debate on the parliamentary threshold finds its relevance. Since it was first introduced, the threshold has always been defended in the name of simplifying the party system. From a governability perspective, simplification does have its rationale. However, Indonesia’s democracy has not yet fully completed the stage of institutionalising representation. In the phase of maturing democracy, overly aggressive party simplification can actually close off channels for articulating fluid and diverse social groups. This dilemma must be addressed by the lawmakers in the revision of the Election Law: between the need for governmental efficiency and the interest in maintaining political representation. A high threshold is indeed functional for efficient parliament, but it has the potential to diminish the diversity of political aspirations. Conversely, a threshold that is too low gives birth to excessive fragmentation. In this context, what is needed is not just a compromise number, but a design based on research into electoral effects, distribution of wasted votes, and the quality of representation. Currently, the lawmakers are caught between the tension of two democracy paradigms: governability democracy and inclusive representative democracy. Indonesia cannot simply imitate the German or Turkish models with their high thresholds, because our socio-political structure is far more pluralistic and political parties remain the main instruments for aggregating local, religious, and ideological identities. Therefore, the revision of the Election Law must position the threshold as a proportional system engineering instrument, not a tool for political exclusion. The second issue, which is no less complex, is the ambivalence of the MK’s decision regarding the separation of national and local elections.