When Electoral Lawmakers Choose Silence

In a democracy, public attention usually focuses on the laws enacted by the state. Political debates, constitutional challenges, and civil society criticism generally centre on the content of a regulation. However, threats to democracy do not always arise from laws that are made. They can also emerge when laws that should be made are never formed. This is what Titi Anggraini demonstrates in her book, Legislative Inaction in Electoral Law: Causes, Impacts, and Institutional Solutions. In other words, in a democracy, not making law can be an exercise of power just as significant as making law. The idea may sound simple, but its implications are fundamental. Legislative power has often been understood through the legal products it generates, yet the decision not to amend a law, not to follow up on policy evaluations, or not to respond to the need for legal renewal is also a political choice that produces real consequences for democratic life. The book shows how this phenomenon occurs in the context of Indonesian electoral law. Stemming from fundamental issues identified during the evaluation of the 2019 simultaneous elections—ranging from the workload of organisers to the determination of electoral district numbers and sizes, and the need to refine the simultaneous election design—there was hope that the Election Law would be revised before the 2024 elections. Instead, the opposite happened. The Election Law Bill was withdrawn from the national legislation programme, meaning the expected legal renewal never materialised. One of the book’s main strengths lies in its blend of analytical depth and practical experience. Titi Anggraini is not an academic observing elections from an ivory tower, but a figure who has dedicated more than two and a half decades of her life to electoral issues. The book’s strength also lies in the perspective it offers. So far, studies of Indonesian electoral law have focused more on the electoral system, presidential nomination thresholds, election organisers, or electoral dispute resolution. Titi directs attention to a relatively rarely discussed issue: the consequences of legislative inaction. By placing legislative inaction at the centre of analysis, the book invites readers to see that the quality of democracy is determined not only by the laws that are made, but also by the laws that fail or are never formed. Interestingly, the book does not stop at the question of what happened, but also seeks to explain why it happened. The author utilises public choice theory as an analytical tool, viewing lawmakers not only as constitutional actors but also as political actors with interests, incentives, and electoral calculations. From this perspective, legislative inaction does not always stem from inability or negligence. Under certain conditions, inaction can be a political choice deemed more advantageous compared to carrying out reforms that could potentially alter the existing balance of interests. Through this combination of empirical experience, theoretical approach, and institutional analysis, the discussion of legislative inaction in the book feels alive. Readers are not merely invited to understand a concept, but also to see how legislative inaction can concretely affect electoral governance. In this view, the silence of lawmakers is not an absence of action, but a political act in itself. The book does not stop at identifying the problem; the author also offers a way out. According to her, a fundamental issue in Indonesian electoral law is the absence of an institution specifically tasked with maintaining the continuity of electoral law reform. As a result, the reform agenda often fluctuates according to political dynamics and the short-term interests of lawmakers. This vacuum, the book argues, often forces the Constitutional Court to play an increasingly significant role in the development of electoral law. Yet, the Court was fundamentally designed to review the constitutionality of laws, not to become the main driver of legislative reform. Consequently, legal changes often occur reactively through court rulings after problems arise, rather than through a carefully planned process of evaluation and renewal. From this perspective, the idea of establishing an electoral law commission emerges. Such an institution is envisioned not as a replacement for the government and the House of Representatives as lawmakers, but as a guardian of the continuity of electoral law reform. Its function would be to ensure that the evaluation, renewal, and refinement of electoral regulations do not stall simply because the political priorities of lawmakers have shifted. This idea is not entirely foreign. Countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and South Africa have institutional mechanisms that allow for periodic evaluation of the electoral system, the arrangement of electoral districts and proportionality systems, campaign finance, and the provision of other electoral law reform recommendations by experts. In this context, the proposal to establish an electoral law commission can be understood as an effort to create a similar mechanism, adapted to the needs and constitutional framework of Indonesia. One point that must be underlined is that this idea is supported not only by policy arguments but also by a constitutional foundation. The author refers to Article 22E of the 1945 Constitution and Constitutional Court Decision No. 11/PUU-VIII/2010, which opens the door for the development of supporting institutions for the electoral system. Through that ruling, the Constitutional Court affirmed that the institutional design of election organisers does not stop at the KPU.