Presidentialism

Let us first define what is meant by “presidentialism.” There are two main dimensions of this definition. The first is the functional aspect of how presidential systems work (Mezey 2013). In presidential systems, the head of the executive (that is, the president) and the legislature are elected separately, although in many cases these elections occur on the same day. The election of the president is direct by popular vote, with the legislature playing no role in it other than holding nomination rights in some countries (in Indonesia, for instance, the right to nominate presidential candidates is tied to the number of seats or vote share achieved by parties in the last legislative election). The president’s tenure is fixed, with almost all democratic presidential systems imposing term limits. Typically, legislatures cannot use policy disagreements or a change in the composition of presidential coalitions to seek the premature removal of the president (Mezey 2013, 7). Thus, presidents can be driven from power only under extraordinary circumstances; in most cases, this involves legal proceedings (by the legislature or courts) to prove violations of the law and the constitution, or popular uprisings that convince the president to resign. In other words, in presidential systems, the executive nominally does not need the support of a legislative majority to exist (Cheibub 2007, 35). In practical terms, however, presidents are in a stronger position if they control a majority in the legislature, allowing them to pass laws and budgets more smoothly. At the same time, most democratic presidential systems do not give presidents the right to unilaterally dissolve the legislature, establishing separated spheres between the executive and legislative branches.

But as Mezey (2013, 8) pointed out, presidentialism is not simply a functional or constitutional category. Rather, it also describes a set of normative and informal propositions. To begin with, “presidentialism is characterized by a broadly shared public perception that places the president at the center of the nation’s politics and views him (or her) as the person primarily responsible for dealing with the challenges before the country” (Mezey 2013, 8–9). Hence, regardless of the constitutional details, presidentialism is marked by a collective consensus, in both the elite and the broader population, that the president is the central figure of the nation. This is partly the result of the president being concurrently the head of state and the head of government but also a reflection of a country’s particular history, often involving struggles for independence that saw strong figures subsequently emerge as presidents (such as George Washington in the United States or Sukarno in Indonesia). These historically rooted beliefs in the centrality of the president can breed tendencies toward autocratization—both from the perspective of the president, who naturally seeks to consolidate power, and from that of the population which accepts this expansion of authority. Indeed, some ambitious autocrats have created presidential systems to profit from the aura of power naturally associated with presidentialism. In Turkey, for instance, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan found that his autocratic ambitions were best served by switching from a parliamentary to a presidential system in the second half of the 2010s (Esen and Gumuscu 2018).

Given this risk of personalization and autocratization, it is somewhat ironic that one of the earliest substantive political science debates on presidentialism focused on its alleged inherent weakness and instability. In the early 1990s, emerging presidentialism discussions were mostly concerned with whether presidential systems are stable enough to guarantee effective governance. In his seminal essay “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Juan Linz (1990) warned that presidentialism was not a good option for young democracies, and that parliamentarism was vastly superior. He justified this view by highlighting the dual and often conflicting democratic mandates for the president on the one hand and the legislature on the other; the unavoidable tension between the two, especially if a president did not hold a strong majority in the legislature; the winner-takes-all mechanism of presidential elections that produced much frustration among losers; and the incompatibility of the president’s role as symbolic head of state with the partisanship of being chief executive. Thus, in his view, presidentialism—even in its purest form and relatively uncomplicated settings—had too many built-in flaws to make it a recommendable option for democracies, especially young ones.

The situation is more complex in systems that have both presidents and prime ministers with strong powers, and in regimes that see presidents operating in fragmented multi-party systems. In the former, which are typically called semi-presidential systems, a particularly difficult constellation can arise if presidents and prime ministers come from different parties. In France, such constellations are referred to as cohabitation and have occurred three times between 1986 and 2002 (Conley 2007). Similar semi-presidential contexts exist in Central and Eastern Europe, with many post-communist societies opting for a high level of power dispersal after decades of authoritarian rule (Elgie and Moestrup 2012). In presidential systems with multi-party systems, on the other hand, chief executives often are confronted with a constellation in which no party has a legislative majority. As Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power (2017, 1) recognized, minority presidents in multi-party systems embody two contemporary trends at once: first, the move toward direct presidential elections in many younger democracies; and second, the shift toward ever-more diversified party systems, some of which have become atomized. In such systems, presidents constantly need to build and maintain coalitions to stay in power and govern effectively. Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe have a high contraction of such presidential systems operating in a multi-party environment.

While Linz’s claims accurately captured the challenges and complexities of presidents working in difficult institutional terrain, his conclusions met with significant opposition. Most importantly, many authors argued that he exaggerated the notion of the unworkability of presidentialism. In a first substantial response, Mainwaring (1993) remarked that Linz’s criticisms were only valid for a specific form of presidentialism: that is, a polity in which the president faces a highly fragmented multi-party system. Consequently, presidents operating in stable two-party systems, such as the United States, were unlikely to face the problems Linz described. According to this critique, presidents who hold legislative majorities in low-fragmentation multi-party systems were also shielded from major executive-legislative fallouts.

In the next step of de-problematizing presidentialism, authors began to question whether even presidents in severely fragmented multi-party systems fared as badly as Mainwaring and others suggested. Significantly, this included presidents far from holding a legislative majority. While Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power eventually developed this approach into the concept of coalitional presidentialism, they credited others for introducing the ideas that a) power-sharing can occur under presidentialism and b) that it happens in the form of multi-party presidential coalitions more often than initially thought. Concretely, they pointed to Shugart and Carey (1992) and Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh (2004), who demonstrated that Linz’s rigid separation between winner-takes-all presidentialism and coalition-building parliamentarism was misguided, and that presidents can deploy power maintenance strategies normally ascribed to parliamentary systems. One stream of this literature went further and argued that not only did coalition-building occur in presidentialism and parliamentarism alike, but that it produced comparable excesses in both systems. Drawing from the work of Katz and Mair (1995) on competition-limiting party cartels in Western Europe’s parliamentary systems, these authors pointed to similar patterns in Latin American and Asian presidentialism. In their work on Bolivia and Indonesia, Slater and Simmons (2012, 1366) revealed “powersharing arrangements [that] prove so encompassing as to make a mockery of putative partisan differences, and even to wipe out political opposition entirely by bringing every significant party into a ‘party cartel.’ ” In short, not only does coalition-building occur in presidential systems, its ramifications are similar to those found in parliamentary regimes.

The important work by Slater and Simmons has been part of a trend to revisit the “perils of presidentialism” paradigm, but in different ways than initially intended by Linz. The latter believed that presidentialism was essentially ineffective and prone to collapsing through inter-institutional conflict. By contrast, contemporary critics of presidentialism emphasize that it is the absence of such conflict that can be the problem—either because presidents pursue successful autocratization projects or because they build coalitions that reduce political competitiveness. These critiques are useful correctives to the coalitional presidentialism model designed by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power, which remains largely silent on the possible implications of minority presidents’ successful coalition-building for a country’s democratic trajectory. Nevertheless, the notion of coalitional presidentialism has been a breakthrough in the study of presidentialism, forming a significant part of the foundation for this book.

Coalitional Presidentialism

Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power (2017, 14) define coalitional presidentialism as “a strategy of directly elected minority presidents to build stable majority support in fragmented legislatures, specifically via the coordination of two or more legislative parties by the president.” At the core of their analysis are the specific mechanisms through which presidents achieve such majority support; however, they base the notion of coalitional presidentialism on seven propositions established by other authors between the 1990s and 2010s. First, the size of the president’s party determines how much political capital a president has to invest in gaining a majority in legislature. In this view, the closer a president’s party gets to the magic 50-percent mark in the legislature, the fewer instruments of coalitional presidentialism are typically deployed. As we will see later, the size of post-2004 presidential parties in Indonesia has been relatively small (holding around a quarter of legislative seats), which partly explains the strong impetus for coalitional presidentialism in the country. Second, the extent of constitutional powers at a president’s disposal decides the strength of the bargaining position he or she has in negotiations with potential coalition partners. These powers vary from country to country and shape the specific type of coalitional presidentialism a polity develops (Carey and Shugart 1998). Third, the level of cabinet discipline is linked to the proportionality of seat allocations in cabinet (Amorim Neto 1998). The more ministries are allocated strictly based on a party’s result in the legislative election, the higher the level of cabinet discipline a president can expect. By contrast, if presidents allocate cabinet seats based on other principles and preferences, they risk defections and acts of disloyalty.

The fourth proposition ties the presence of non-party cabinet members to a president’s willingness to act unilaterally, and thus outside of the traditional arena of coalitional presidentialism. The more non-party ministers (such as technocrats) operate in a cabinet, the more likely it is for a president to rule by decree. By contrast, a higher proportion of partisan ministers indicates a president’s preparedness to engage in the conventional dealings of coalitional presidentialism. This proposition is relevant for the Indonesian context, as the country typically has a high percentage of non-party ministers (more than half), but this is not necessarily an indication of lower levels of coalitional presidentialism. On the contrary, if we understand the concept of presidential coalition-building as not limited to the party and legislative arenas, then the inclusion of non-party actors is a sign of a broader approach to coalitional presidentialism. Fifth, the prevalence of particularistic, non-programmatic parties in a polity forces presidents to apply patronage-related strategies of coalition-building but also gives chief executives a chance to preserve a maximum amount of their policies (Ames 2001). Moreover, it leads to more flexibility in coalition-building and more frequent changes in cabinet. This may mean that presidents cannot achieve permanent coalitions, but it also allows them to play parties against each other and extract greater concessions. Sixth, rather unsurprisingly, presidential coalitions become less stable as the next election nears and parties re-align with different candidates.

Finally, Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power (2017, 17) draw from the existing scholarship that membership of the presidential coalition or the opposition becomes a new “meta-cleavage in political life.” This cleavage transcends ideological or value differences and becomes the main political identifier of parties in the legislature. This proposition has certain limits, however: if a party system includes a large number of particularistic, non-programmatic parties, coalition-building can be fluid, and the demarcation lines of this “meta-cleavage” can be re-drawn quickly, either by the president or by the parties.

Based on these seven propositions, Chaisty and colleagues introduce their set of strategies that presidents use to build majority coalitions in the legislature. We already considered their “toolbox” of coalitional presidentialism, ranging from a president’s legislative powers to exchange of favors. In developing their model, they take a highly legislature-centric approach. They consolidate this preference further by defining coalitions as “floor-based” rather than based on cabinet membership. Their main definition of a coalition member is therefore “parties and legislators [who] consider themselves to be, and are seen by others (especially the formateur), as belonging to the pro-presidential bloc in the assembly on a stable basis” (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power 2017, 216). Although for them the distinction between floor-based and cabinet-based coalition membership is merely an issue for their quantitative calculations (they found that under the former definition, the number of presidential coalition partners was 25 percent higher across their country studies compared to a cabinet-based analysis), the differentiation is paradigmatic. If applied consistently, a cabinet-based definition of presidential coalition partners would allow for (and indeed, require) an expansion of the range of actors examined. In the Indonesian case, as in many other Asian democracies, military officers, police generals, bureaucrats, or Muslim clerics sit in cabinet. Under Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power’s definition, they are only of interest as non-partisan minsters outside of the arena of coalitional presidentialism. If they were to be situated as coalition partners similar to parties, a new arena of inquiry would open.

Empirically, Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power focused on democracies and hybrid regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa, post-Soviet republics, and Latin America. In Sub-Saharan Africa, they studied Benin, Kenya, and Malawi; in the former Soviet Union, they looked at Armenia, Russia (until 2004), and Ukraine; and in Latin America, they investigated Ecuador, Brazil, and Chile. This is an admirably wide range of countries, but it misses the insights from another world center of presidentialism: East and Southeast Asia. For instance, South Korean or Taiwanese presidents have often had a minority position in their respective legislatures, and Philippine presidents have been model “artists” of coalitional presidentialism; like in no other country, Philippine presidents typically turn minorities into supermajorities within weeks after winning elections. And then there is Indonesia. Emerging from fifty years of authoritarianism in 1998, Indonesia built a democratic system in which presidents have a strong constitutional position but have to share power with the legislature and other actors. This has led to notoriously large “rainbow coalitions” (Diamond, 2009) and complaints by presidents that Indonesia’s polity resembles a semi-presidential or semi-parliamentary system. Consequently, presidents often rely on other actors than parties to stabilize their rule. Thus, Indonesia is a major Asian example of coalitional presidentialism and provides a great opportunity to test whether Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power’s legislature-centric approach can be fruitfully expanded to include other players. At the same time, Indonesia’s slow democratic decline offers the chance to explore to what extent this erosion is connected to the practices inherent in its contemporary coalitional presidentialism.

Indonesia

In addition to its broad suitability as a case study, there are more specific reasons why Indonesia is a near-perfect laboratory to explore the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism. The country adopted a presidential system when declaring independence from the Dutch colonial power in August 1945, and presidents thus have been at the center of political affairs since the beginnings of Indonesia as a nation. Importantly, too, Indonesia experienced various manifestations of presidentialism throughout its history. The first phase, executive presidentialism amid the conflict with the Dutch, only lasted until November 1945, when power effectively shifted to the provisional parliament and its prime minister. Founding president Sukarno stayed in office, but had his powers significantly curtailed (Kahin 1952). This constellation remained in place after the end of the war and the proclamation of a new provisional constitution in 1950, which created a ceremonial presidency placed on top of a parliamentary system (Feith 1962). With the help of the army, Sukarno grabbed power from parliament in 1959 and reinstated the 1945 constitution, resurrecting presidential supremacy (Lev 1966). With his 1959 coup, Sukarno initiated four decades of autocratic presidentialism, in which the country’s supreme legislative body nominally elected the president (and thus, strictly speaking, operated in a hybrid system). But the autocratic character of Indonesia’s presidentialism meant that the legislative institutions simply rubber-stamped the president’s election and decisions, making him the most powerful actor in a regime created by him. Suharto, coming to power after an alleged communist coup attempt in 1965, further entrenched autocratic presidentialism. Indeed, Suharto became the embodiment of Indonesians’ notions of an all-powerful president, both as a symbol of the state and as executive ruler (Elson 2001).

After Suharto’s fall in 1998, the new democratic leaders decided to amend, rather than replace, the 1945 constitution that had underpinned autocratic presidentialism (Horowitz 2013). This approach initially produced a hybrid and transitional presidentialism that was inherently unstable. Until 2004, the president was not elected directly but by the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) which, in turn, consisted of members of the legislature—the People’s Representative Council (DPR)—as well as appointed delegates representing regional and functional groups. Indonesia’s first post-authoritarian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, was elected this way. But his chaotic presidency (1999–2001) showcased that the old constitution lacked the necessary ingredients for a modern presidential democracy. Most importantly, there was no clear mechanism for presidential impeachments, leading to a trial-and-error process that removed Wahid from office in 2001. Consequently, one year later, the Indonesian elite established a detailed catalog of regulations on the presidency. Through the final round of constitutional amendments in 2002, it was stipulated that the president would be elected by popular vote from 2004 on; impeachment procedures were clarified in a way that made presidential removal difficult; presidents retained full ministerial appointment powers, but the legislature received confirmation authority for some non-cabinet positions (such as judges); and, as in the past, the president and the legislature were situated as co-legislators, although the overall transformation of the DPR from an authoritarian rubber stamp body into an autonomous institution meant that the legislature’s role in lawmaking would significantly increase (Crouch 2010).

Based on Mezey’s definition, therefore, it was not until 2004 that Indonesia witnessed the arrival of full democratic presidentialism—that is, a system in which the president and the legislature are elected separately and democratically. Not coincidentally, 2004 also marked the beginnings of an institutionalized regime of coalitional presidentialism. The three presidents before 2004 had built semi-coalitional cabinets, but they had done so amid irregular circumstances unlikely to be replicated in post-amendment presidentialism. B. J. Habibie, Suharto’s vice president in 1998 and his constitutional successor, was allowed to rule ad interim by a broad elite consensus (Elson, 2013). Once Habibie signaled ambitions to re-contest the presidency in the MPR in 1999, however, the elite removed him from competition by rejecting his accountability report. Wahid, for his part, falsely believed that he was unimpeachable; for him, coalition-building was only an instrument of gaining power, not a precondition for maintaining it (Mietzner 2001). Firing ministers one month into his presidency, he quickly self-destructed. When his vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, replaced him, she was given elite assurances—similar to those granted to Habibie—that she would be allowed to serve her term without disruptions until 2004 (Crouch 2002). In other words, Habibie and Megawati did not need continued coalition support to rule during their terms because they had received alternative (albeit temporarily limited) guarantees, and Wahid erroneously thought he did not require such support at all. None of these transitional presidents, then, made use of strategies of coalitional presidentialism to develop and, especially, sustain presidential coalitions over time. If they reached for the coalitional presidentialism toolbox, this was done for short-term gains.

In consequence, this book focuses on the presidencies of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–2014) and Joko Widodo (2014–2024) to illustrate the workings of coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia. They were the first to operate under the new presidentialism put in place with the 2004 elections, ending the transitional arrangements in both formal and substantive ways. Moreover, both men started out as minority presidents and ended up ruling with large legislative majorities; both sustained broad presidential coalitions over a decade, doing so first with a view toward re-election and then toward securing their presidential legacy as well as dynastic continuity; both expressed fears of impeachment to justify incessant compromising with their coalition partners, despite the strong safeguards against such impeachment in the amended constitution; and both were convinced that non-party actors were as important to the architecture of their presidential power as political parties and the legislature. Accordingly, Yudhoyono and Widodo were agents of coalitional presidentialism par excellence, with their re-elections and high approval ratings demonstrating that they understood how to use its tools effectively over extended periods. At the same time, the trend of democratic decline beginning in Yudhoyono’s first term and accelerating during the Widodo presidency provide important insights into the potentially damaging side effects of coalitional presidentialism for the democratic fabric of young post-authoritarian societies.

In addition to having a rich and turbulent history of presidential regimes, Indonesia is well suited as a case study of coalitional presidentialism because of its moderately stable party system, and the relative strength of some of its parties if compared to, for instance, the Philippines or South Korea (Croissant and Völkel 2012). In the Philippines, parties are little more than shells that individual leaders appropriate for presidential runs or other electoral purposes. With few exceptions, parties are often abruptly founded, merged, and disbanded, depending on the needs of politicians in specific electoral contexts. This constellation has made it easy for incoming presidents to pull legislators on their side, even if the former controlled only a minimal share of legislative support at the time of the election. In Indonesia, by contrast, parties hold a stronger bargaining position vis-à-vis presidents and thus pose a more significant challenge to the latter to deploy carefully crafted strategies of coalitional presidentialism. To be sure, parties have gradually weakened in Indonesia, too, largely because of the country’s shift to personality-based rather than party-centered elections since the mid and late 2000s (Mietzner 2020). But some parties remain deeply rooted in specific socio-ideological constituencies, and they retain a loyal voting base. For example, Indonesia’s leading party, the Indonesian Democracy Party—Struggle (PDI-P), originated in the nationalist movement of the 1920s, with the daughter of the initial founder—Sukarno—still chairing it at the time of writing in 2023. Other parties are less institutionalized, and their orientation is more catch-all in nature, but overall the Indonesian party system has shown a level of stability that makes tracing the impact of coalitional presidentialism more useful than in systems dominated by short-lived parties.

This book’s situating of the post-2004 Indonesian polity as a case of coalitional presidentialism, and its suggested focus on party as well as non-party actors, builds on the important work of other authors. Dan Slater, for instance, analyzed the phenomenon of oversized presidential coalitions in Indonesia since the Wahid and Megawati cabinets of the early 2000s. He used the paradigm developed by Katz and Mair to describe Indonesian presidential coalitions as party cartels guided by the collective interest of its members to avoid accountability, seek access to patronage, and sustain a system of collusive democracy (Slater 2004, 2018). Usefully, Slater viewed the military as part of the Wahid and Megawati era cartels—but he did so largely because the generals still held unelected seats in the legislature and the MPR at the time. Slater’s work—further developed by Ambardi (2009)—was crucial in advancing our understanding of how oversized coalitions function, and how they can damage democratic quality. As I explained elsewhere (Mietzner 2013), I believe that the cartelization approach overstates the extent of collective unity of purpose among party elites; misses the continued ideological divisions between parties; and understates the role of the president in managing coalitions. This book, in response, proposes that the coalitional presidentialism approach is better equipped to grasp the centrality of the president in forming and disciplining coalitions; capture the significance of material and ideological tensions between coalition partners; explain how these conflicts allow presidents to play coalition partners off against one another; and highlight the equal importance of non-party actors in coalitions.

Some authors have previously used the coalitional presidentialism lens to study aspects of Indonesian politics. The most advanced of these studies has been that of Dirk Tomsa (2018). One of his particularly valuable contributions has been to introduce non-party players as part of presidential politics—but he stopped short of positioning them as members of presidential coalitions. Instead, he classified them as “strategic groups [that] are defined here as extra-electoral veto actors with significant power resources whose support or lack thereof can make or break a president” (Tomsa 2018, 274). For Tomsa, these groups include oligarchs, the military, and conservative Islamic groups. As extra-coalitional veto actors, however, they remain outside of the coalitional presidentialism strategies that presidents normally would apply to political parties and legislatures. This book will show that non-party groups and their interactions with presidents should be analyzed in the same way as parties, given that both are represented in cabinet and have similar rights and obligations. Another instructive finding of Tomsa’s study was “the important role of political ideas and narratives that constrain presidents just as much as interests and institutions” (2018, 267). This emphasis draws our attention away from the almost ubiquitous focus on patronage as the guiding motive of politicians in Indonesia and beyond. While indeed a key motivation of politics, patronage and rent-seeking are often intertwined with major conceptual and ideological debates over what orientation the state should take, both in terms of the extent of its democratic liberties and the role given to religion. These conflicts, as those related to access to funds, often play out within the specific parameters of a polity’s type of coalitional presidentialism.

A rich body of literature exists on the informal politics that feed and frame such intra-elite conflicts, in Indonesia and elsewhere. These studies informed my conceptualization and empirical assessment of coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia. For example, Aspinall’s seminal 2010 article on the “irony of success” in Indonesia touches on many aspects covered in this book: the appeasement of veto powers that kept them from sabotaging the polity; the concessions made to them that made this outcome possible; and the damaging effects these deals have had on the prospects of consolidating democracy (Aspinall 2010). In many ways, this book expands and conceptualizes Aspinall’s approach by explaining in detail the mechanisms of this veto power accommodation through coalitional presidentialism—and how the informal politics of patronage have become increasingly formalized. This book also borrows from the work of Hadiz and Robison (2004), who have established the political economy approach to studying contemporary Indonesian politics. While not fully sharing their view of the dominance of oligarchic forces in Indonesia’s polity (as this relegates all other actors, including the president, to puppets of the wealthy elite), this book’s discussion benefits from their insights into how political power is exercised behind the scenes. It also finds strong similarities between their stress on the elite’s predatory interests and the coalitional presidentialism literature’s emphasis on the exchange of favors as a crucial element of the president’s toolbox to control leading political actors.

In the context of such elite accommodation dynamics, this book is also concerned with the link between consolidating coalitional presidentialism arrangements and declining democratic quality. Again, Indonesia offers a unique opportunity to study this relationship. Since the mid-2010s, much has been written on Indonesia’s democratic stagnation and, subsequently, regression (Tomsa 2010; Power 2018). It suffices here to briefly establish some fundamental evidence for this erosion. To begin with, leading democracy indexes recorded a slow but significant decline in democratic quality in Indonesia—in line with patterns in other countries. This decline occurred after the country reached its democratic peak between 2004 and 2008. Freedom House, for instance, upgraded Indonesia to “free” status in 2006, giving it its highest point score in 2008, but downgrading it again to “partly free” in 2013.² Similarly, as shown in figure 0.1, the Liberal Democracy Index designed by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), which covers the period from 1900 to 2021, points to a democratic peak between 2004 and 2008, and a descent from thereon. To be sure, none of this means that Indonesia has crossed over into non-democratic territory. It means that a young, defective democracy stopped improving after 2008 and lost some of the democratic substance it had accumulated after 1998. Indonesia, then, remained an electoral democracy at the time of writing in 2023, but one with increasing illiberal tendencies in the elite and society at large.

Indonesia’s democratic decline has been visible on many fronts. The first signs of democracy receding emerged in the second half of the 2000s in the arena of religious and political minority rights protections. Increasing attacks on non-orthodox Muslim sects or non-Muslim houses of worship, tolerated by the state, highlighted an expanding influence of Islamist groups on senior politicians (Bush 2015). From 2009 on, there were also growing concerns about the rise of vote buying in elections (Muhtadi 2019), the shrinking of political space for small parties (Mietzner 2020), and fewer choices in presidential elections (in the latter, the number of candidates decreased from five in 2004 to three in 2009 and just two in the 2014 and 2019 elections). Internal party democracy (which had been weak from the beginning) further eroded, with oligarchs having the best chances of capturing party leaderships. Executive illiberalism (that is, the tendency of power holders to use autocratic tools against opponents) became prominent in Widodo’s first term and a common feature in his second (Power 2020). There were also open calls to rethink electoral democracy as a whole, with some floating the idea of withholding voting rights from poorer citizens (in local elections) and others demanding that presidential elections be returned to the MPR. Conceptually, these trends were framed in what Warburton (2016) called the “new developmentalism” of Widodo’s era, which unapologetically subordinated democratic values to the need for economic development. This approach echoed that of the former autocrat Suharto, who had justified repression by his successful delivery of economic growth and the political stability required for it.

Indonesia, therefore, promises to deliver important insights into the practice of coalitional presidentialism and its correlation with democratic decline. This is not only because of Indonesia’s importance as the world’s third-largest democracy and its fourth most populous nation; rather, it exhibits all the features of coalitional presidentialism and democratic dynamics that make it a fruitful case study for a broader phenomenon. Indeed, as the next section shows, while Indonesia sits at the top end of stability in terms of its coalitional presidentialism regime, many other polities have exhibited similar patterns, both in terms of the tendency towards building broad-based coalitions as well as the erosion of their democratic quality.

Indonesia in Comparative Context

At the outset of this book, we noted Indonesia’s striking transformation from a feeble presidential regime in 1998–2004 into an exceptionally stable polity after the country’s 2002 constitutional amendments were put in place. We also observed that Indonesia’s stability stood out from many of its peers internationally, and indicated that the country’s full adoption of coalitional presidentialism practices after 2004 was the main contributor to that outcome. Part of Indonesia’s adoption of coalitional presidentialism was the inclusion of a wide variety of non-party actors into its coalitions—the importance of which has been understudied so far in conventional coalitional presidentialism studies. We also acknowledged that Indonesia’s democratic quality decreased as the stability of its presidential strengthened—and that by doing so, it followed a global democratic recession trend. In the following discussion, we must test these hypotheses against measurable data. Hence, we have to compare Indonesia against other presidential systems, especially those widely considered to also practice coalitional presidentialism, albeit in country-specific forms.

The selection of the countries to which Indonesia is compared in this section was guided by literature-based, institutional, and regional factors. Including some of Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power’s case studies ensures that this book communicates directly with theirs. Kenya, Chile, and Brazil are discussed here because they were important examples of coalitional presidentialism in their work (Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Powers 2017, 43). But to broaden the regional focus of our comparison, additional countries—which also conform to the institutional profile of coalitional presidentialism—were included. From the Asian continent (which was not covered by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power), we look at South Korea and the Philippines; and from Latin America, we add Peru and Bolivia (Julcarima Alvarez 2020; Albala 2021), which recorded some particularly dynamic processes in their presidential coalitions in the last few years. Overall, then, we have cases from three continents and some sub-regions within them, providing a good geographical spread. As for the investigated timeframe, we focus on 2004 to 2021, the period in which Indonesia’s current arrangements of coalitional presidentialism are investigated in this book.

We begin by testing the stability component. The stability of presidential systems can be measured in many ways, but some core indicators seem to be especially suitable for comparison. The first and second relate to the incidence and success of impeachment proceedings against a sitting president. Impeachment attempts point to cracks in the presidential coalition, while successful impeachments deliver clear evidence of its breakdown. Thus, we will separately list the occasions in which impeachment processes were officially launched (as opposed to simply being talked about) and cases of actual impeachments. The third broad indicator is a president’s loss in his or her fight for re-election. Although multiple factors may cause incumbency losses, one key determinant is usually the level of the president’s ability to keep his or her coalition together, both during the term and in elections. Coalitions that fall apart as presidents face re-election challenges indicate severe problems in that coalition, making it hard for a president to return to office. Conversely, incumbency wins suggest that coalitions worked effectively and that voters rewarded such effectiveness. Some countries have one-term presidencies, and this will be noted accordingly. Fourth, we look at possible legal prosecutions of presidents after they leave office (Helmke, Jeong, and Ozturk 2019). Such prosecutions highlight acts of post-coalitional revenge, which in most cases involve the opposition and other actors who felt slighted by the president. In combination with the other three, this indicator gives us a good hint at problems in the coalition, especially if one-term presidencies prevented a run for re-election.

Table 0.1 showcases that Indonesia sits at the high end of the coalitional presidentialism stability scale. It recorded no attempted or successful impeachment between 2004 and 2021, saw no president losing his bid for re-election, and witnessed no prosecution of a former president either. This all points to a tightly knit elite that seeks affiliation with presidents while in office and is ready to protect them after they leave it. It also suggests relatively high levels of public satisfaction with the arrangements put in place; at least voters returned the practitioners of coalitional presidentialism to office every time. In the other assessed countries, stability indicators are more mixed, or even highlight great instability. Three of the seven non-Indonesian countries examined here experienced at least one attempted impeachment; four had successful impeachments; and five charged at least one of their former presidents, with two committing suicide to escape imprisonment. One country (Peru) recorded multiple successful impeachments, and two (Peru and South Korea) launched criminal proceedings against various ex-presidents. Peru is at the bottom of the stability index, with impeachment and other forms of presidential removal the norm rather than an exception. After seemingly going down a similar path between 1998 and 2004, Indonesia took the opposite direction, with presidents taking office having a good chance of securing re-election, finishing their terms, and staying out of legal trouble during their post-presidential careers.

This does not mean, however, that Indonesia’s example is extreme and incomparable to other cases of coalitional presidentialism. Kenya, for instance, has seen few attempts to remove sitting presidents—its instability problems are more related to ethnically charged, violent, and disputed elections (Klaus 2020). Similarly, the Philippines recorded no serious challenges against presidents Benigno Aquino and Rodrigo Duterte. Indeed, in the latter’s case, his total dominance over the political system, including the legislature, became a source of concern (Kasuya and Teehankee 2020). Chile also enjoyed relative stability, with only one failed impeachment attempt in 2019—the first in over six decades. (That attempt was largely symbolic, as it targeted an outgoing president who was not eligible to seek re-election after two non-consecutive terms.) Hence, while the exceptional stability of Indonesia’s post-2004 presidential regime is intriguing, it can be integrated effectively into a cluster of other cases with similar arrangements for comparison and contrast.

In the next comparative step, we need to ask how Indonesia is situated vis-à-vis other systems of coalitional presidentialism in terms of the broadness of their coalitions. Is Indonesia an outlier with its systematic inclusion of non-party actors as equal partners in presidential coalitions? Or do we find similar patterns elsewhere? We look at four indicators in our seven non-Indonesian comparison cases to assess this. The first is the strength of the president’s party in parliament (more specifically, the lower house). Presidents whose parties hold a majority in parliament have become increasingly rare, putting them under pressure to consolidate their alliances inside and outside parliament. Regardless of the strength of the president’s party, however, the president might not have a strong position in his or her own party (Indonesia being a prominent example). Thus, we take as our second indicator of coalitional dynamics whether a president is the chairperson of his or her party. The third indicator examines the size of the presidential coalition in parliament, giving us a sense of whether presidents seek to build supermajorities or are content with gathering a 50-percent-plus-one majority. Fourth, and crucially for our context, we assess the percentage of cabinet positions held by non-party actors. Taken together, these criteria (all of which reflect the state of affairs in late 2021, for reasons of consistency in cross-country comparison) will point us to either a case of Indonesian exceptionalism or common patterns of broad coalitions integrating non-party actors—or something in between.

Table 0.2 highlights that presidents whose parties control only a small minority in the lower house are most likely to build oversized legislative coalitions well beyond the 50-percent mark, and are also somewhat more likely than others to include a large proportion of non-party actors in their cabinets. Indonesia, Brazil, and the Philippines have seen constellations in which presidents have built bloated coalitions in the lower house, although their parties were far from an absolute majority and thus faced a tougher challenge to achieve majority status. At the same time, they also heavily turned to non-party figures to fill their cabinets. It appears, then, that at the heart of a president’s drive to create oversized party and non-party alliances is a sense of insecurity overcompensated by the production of unnecessarily big coalitions. As this book demonstrates, this fear was certainly a motivator for post-2004 presidents in Indonesia. In Peru, President Pedro Castillo did not have a legislative majority at all, but he, too, integrated a high percentage (more than half) of non-party actors into his cabinet. Evidently, both large party coalitions and the inclusion of non-party figures (either in combination or separately) can serve as insurance policies for presidents concerned about their rule’s stability. We can conclude, therefore, that the pattern of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism—which rests on these two pillars—is not a phenomenon exclusive to this country but shared by others.

To be clear, the blunt assessment of the presence of non-party cabinet members tells us little about their backgrounds and why they were included. Some presidents may appoint non-party technocrats to “secure expertise” and “to avoid agency loss that comes with surrendering a key portfolio to a coalition partner,” as Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Powers (2017, 229) speculated. Given the lack of concrete comparative data on this matter, in-depth country studies are necessary to fully understand the extent and political significance of non-party participation in presidential coalitions. As we will see in the Indonesian case, presidents also include non-party members with a clear-cut political calculus of recruiting the latter’s groups into the coalition. Indeed, integration into cabinet is only one element of coalition-building, with additional material and policy concessions typically cementing the deal. The prominence of the phenomenon of strong non-party representation in cabinets built on coalitional presidentialism principles (when in the United States, for instance, non-party ministers are extremely rare) again suggests that the analysis of coalitional presidentialism needs to go beyond the arena of presidential-legislative relations, and must take a much closer look at what happens in the non-party space. Not doing so might overlook trends that could be decisive for a president’s fate: Bolivia’s Morales, for example, was not removed from office only by parties or the legislature; ultimately, the military and the police told him to go.

Finally, we need to test whether Indonesia’s democratic decline—while developing coalitional presidentialism as the organizing principle of its presidential regime—is an anomaly or part of a broader pattern. To achieve this, we can use a composite of democratic decline trends in Latin America as a proxy. This is because Latin America exclusively exhibits presidential systems and is the focus of coalitional presidentialism studies outside of Eastern Europe. As a result, V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy index for Latin America can serve as a useful guide for tracing the democratic quality curve in the continent’s presidential regimes. As figure 0.2 demonstrates, Latin America and Indonesia followed similar trends—at least after 2004, which is the period that concerns us most (obviously, the third wave of democratization began earlier in Latin America than in Indonesia, but this is of little relevance for this book). Importantly, in both cases, the indexes note a peak in the middle of the 2000s at above the 0.5 mark, with a subsequent decline in the early 2020s to about 0.45. Thus, the trend of democratic decline we identified in Indonesia is similar in other countries with coalitional presidentialism regimes, both in terms of the extent and timing.

In sum, the comparative contextualization of the Indonesian case has shown that the country scores high in the stability of its coalitional presidentialism system; the size of its presidential coalition in the legislature; and the level of integration of non-party actors in cabinet—but not to the extent that would make it an incomparable outlier among its peers. On the contrary, the detailed analysis of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism patterns undertaken in this book can deliver important hints toward areas of investigation that need to be deepened in other countries. For example, studying how coalitional presidentialism outside of Indonesia accommodates the vested interests of militaries (relevant in Bolsonaro’s coalition), police forces (highly influential in Bolivia), bureaucracies and local governments (essential in all countries), the oligarchy (powerful even in high-quality democracies such as Chile), or religious organizations (revered across Latin America and Africa) would be a good start for a comparative study of presidential coalitions that base themselves on both legislative majorities and strong backing by key non-party veto actors. At the same time, the comparative analysis has identified statistical similarities between the broad development of Indonesia’s democratic decline and that in other presidential polities, suggesting that this book’s investigation of the linkage between coalitional presidentialism and democratic erosion in Indonesia can deliver findings applicable to other countries.

Coalitional Presidentialism Redefined

Based on the conceptual, empirical, and comparative considerations outlined thus far, this book proposes to amend the definition of coalitional presidentialism developed by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power to better fit systems in which presidents not only seek to build stable majority support in fragmented legislatures but also to integrate non-party actors into their coalitions to stabilize their rule. The countries where this occurs are mostly younger democracies with security forces, bureaucracies, and religious groups that play key political roles and thus require courting by the president. Many Latin American and African countries fall into this category, and some Asian presidential systems, too, have long histories of non-party veto players that became part of a president’s support infrastructure. Against this background, this book defines coalitional presidentialism as a strategy by presidents in multi-party systems to build stable majority support in the legislature and integrate influential non-party actors into their governing coalitions. These broad coalitions are designed to fend off potential attempts at presidential impeachment and allow for more effective governance. The non-party actors included in presidential coalitions can be veto players but do not have to be. Tsebelis set a high bar for this status by defining them as “individual or collective actors whose agreement (by majority rule for collective actors) is required for a change of the status quo” (Tsebelis 1995, 298). Under our definition of coalitional presidentialism, it is sufficient for a non-party actor to have the potential to develop into a veto player to be included in the list of actors a president might wish to include in his or her coalition.

Broadening the scope of coalitional presidentialism means connecting the concept to different streams of political science literature that have so far been excluded from it. In the case of the military as a potential presidential coalition partner, this makes the existing civil-military relations literature highly relevant. In Indonesia, the number of former military officers in cabinet has roughly remained constant throughout the post-1998 polity (at about four or five in each ministry), despite the fact that the armed forces lost their non-elected seats in the legislature and the MPR in 2004. This suggests that presidents continue to view offering the military direct political participation as crucial to their rule, as generals might assume a key role in political crises. The civil-military relations literature posits such an approach as an appeasement strategy (Croissant 2013, 271). By integrating military representatives into the presidential apparatus, executive leaders hope to purchase the armed forces’ endorsement of the democratic system in general and the incumbent president in particular. Presidents might also choose to apply other strategies—such as monitoring, sanctioning, appointing loyalists, creating splits in the ranks, and so forth—but granting political and material concessions to the armed forces by privileging them with equal status to coalition parties is a favorite approach by presidents who are keen to avoid open confrontation with the military. Under such an arrangement, the military remains nominally subordinated to the president, but the former can extract rewards from the latter for acquiescing to his or her rule.

In the case of the bureaucracy, situating it as a part of presidential coalitions links it to the extensive literature on politicized bureaucracies. This politicization can occur in the form of the executive trying to subjugate civil servants to its partisan interests (Alemendares 2011) or the bureaucracy—as a corporate actor—attempting to defend its vested interests at the cabinet table or other government forums (Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In Indonesia, President Yudhoyono experienced the latter phenomenon in 2013 when he tried to push for extensive civil service reform but was opposed by senior bureaucrats who feared their privileges could be at risk. Ultimately, Yudhoyono backed down and endorsed a much watered-down version of the reform. The campaign against the reform initiative was driven by the head of the civil service organization (Korpri), who was also the secretary-general of the Ministry of Home Affairs. This meant that the target of reform sat at the table when the executive discussed it, and could undermine it both from within and through external mobilization. The tradition of the Korpri headship being held by a senior Ministry of Home Affairs official has continued, integrating the civil service into the presidential power apparatus it is supposed to neutrally serve. Since Yudhoyono’s experience, no further major administrative reform was launched, with key bureaucrats able to pre-empt such moves at their inception.

Similarly, the analytical inclusion of oligarchs into the study of coalitional presidentialism can draw from a large body of literature on oligarchic influence in new and old democracies. This influence is typically exerted through donations to politicians and subsequent demands for rewards, funding of lobbying groups that push for specific policy initiatives favoring the wealthy, or direct participation in party politics and presidential cabinets (Winters 2011). In Indonesia, all these forms of influence have manifested themselves (Robison and Hadiz 2004), but there is little need to uncover its deeper, hidden layers as oligarchs have actively and visibly engaged in politics. Oligarchs have been party chairpersons and ministers, with the second Widodo cabinet initially featuring five oligarchs in cabinet and several ministers representing parties chaired by oligarchs. The way these actors have promoted oligarchic interests has been anything but subtle. In 2020, the coordinating minister for economic affairs, an entrepreneur chairing a large party, oversaw the passing of a major package of deregulation measures that cut benefits for laborers and reduced environmental protections that businesses had for long complained about (Lappin 2020). President Widodo approved this package, partly because he hoped it would accelerate economic growth but also because such concessions to oligarchic interests constituted an integral element of coalitional presidentialism. Oligarchs who fund presidential campaigns and operations—and the many aides presidents require—are a main pillar of this power constellation.

The integration of religious actors into presidential cabinets has also been analyzed within a literature that has so far remained distinct from that exploring the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism. Although not necessarily members of parties or the legislature, representatives of influential religious movements can be useful additions to presidential coalitions for several reasons. They can give the president a devout image and thus help him or her penetrate particularly conservative segments of the electorate; they can handle religious conflicts that other state officials find difficult to manage; and they can reach out to extra-parliamentary actors from the religious right that might threaten the president’s rule. In return, religious actors recruited into cabinet or other presidential institutions can access state funds to support their various communities, and lobby for legislation and government regulations promoting their religious needs. These phenomena are typically discussed by a literature focusing on how secular leaders diffuse the repercussions of rising religious conservatism, with a particular emphasis on Islamism. In this literature, strategies of both accommodation and repression are investigated (Mustafa Şen 2010), and both approaches have been present in Indonesia. Facing a major threat from an Islamist mass mobilization against his government in 2016 and 2017, Widodo accommodated the more centrist of the Islamic conservatives and repressed the most radical Islamist margins (Fealy 2020). As a result, a conservative Islamic cleric who had initially endorsed the 2016/17 movement became Widodo’s vice president in 2019, while more hard-line Islamist leaders were penalized.

Despite its broadening, an integrated model of coalitional presidentialism can still focus on the five main instruments contained in the presidential toolbox that Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power described. Constitutional-legislative authority, partisan powers, cabinet appointment rights, budgetary authority, and exchange of favors are not only key presidential assets to ensure the loyalty of political parties, but they are also deployed to keep non-party coalition partners in check. However, as this book will show, the specific character of each actor requires slightly adapted presidential strategies that reflect the actor’s power, status, and constitutional setting. For instance, when designing strategies to deal with the military, presidents have to weigh their constitutional authority in military oversight against both the institutional strength of the armed forces and the possibility of generals going rogue by challenging the executive in unconstitutional ways. Thus, the armed forces need to be managed with adjusted tools that align with this context (for example, through the president’s grooming of loyalist officers). The police, bureaucracy, and Islamic groups also require presidential approaches that are in line with, but modified versions of, the five conventional toolbox instruments. This book’s detailed analysis of how these instruments are used in each context delivers a portrait of what Indonesian presidents can do to establish effective governance—and what the limits of their powers and coalition-building efforts are. Importantly, this portrait also showcases the potentially damaging effects that using the instruments of coalitional presidentialism—whether applied successfully or unsuccessfully—can have on a country’s democratic quality.

The picture that emerges is one in which presidents are neither all-dominant figures nor puppets of vested interests. Rather, they are tasked with balancing the presidency and its coalition partners in a way that serves the agenda of both sides in equal fashion. Indeed, it is this carefully calibrated balance that best describes the power distribution in stable cases of coalitional presidentialism. (By implication, unstable or failed cases typically produce either autocratization or impeachment of the president, depending on which side is advantaged by the imbalance.) In the Indonesian context, which has witnessed remarkably stable coalitional presidentialism arrangements since 2004, such an assessment corrects analyses that have viewed President Widodo alternatively as a reincarnation of Suharto (Maulia 2020) or a weakling struggling for agency (Muhtadi 2015). Under coalitional presidentialism, Indonesia has neither crossed the line into autocracy, nor have presidents been fully overpowered by their allies. In an effort to sustain the coalition’s balance and the general stability of the polity, however, the practice of coalitional presidentialism has led to democratic stasis and decline, raising questions about whether the quest for stability (which was Linz’s primary concern) is itself the source of democracy’s decay.

Methodology and Structure

Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power (2017, 42) used a small-N comparative approach that relied on a data set of coalition and cabinet membership in their case study countries and on survey data gathered from legislators across the respective polities. These data were enriched by qualitative analyses of actor behavior in various country settings. This methodology revealed important patterns that applied throughout multiple countries and set up a useful comparative scale for the intensity of presidential power and coalitional presidentialism. However, this book uses a different method. While it contextualizes the Indonesian case within the criteria defined by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power, it relies much more on in-depth qualitative analysis than they did. The reason for this lies in the significantly broadened spectrum of analyzed actors. Whereas the Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power approach is focused on presidential-legislative relations, and makes heavy use of quantitative indicators such as the effective number of parliamentary parties, the seat share of the presidential party, or an “index of coalitional necessity,” this book enters more diverse arenas. As indicated above, Indonesian presidents have built oversized coalitions well beyond the threshold of an absolute majority, and they added a wide range of non-party actors, formally and informally. To capture the motivations and practices that drive these oversized coalitions, both from the president’s and his or her partners’ perspectives, the value of quantitative data analysis is not as high as in a narrow presidential-legislative relations examination.

Accordingly, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of presidential politics in Indonesia that investigates how executive leaders integrate political actors into their coalitions. Quantitative data are used when necessary, but the main emphasis is on understanding why and how actors engage in coalitional presidentialism, and how the oversized coalitions resulting from it operate in practice. Hence, a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews, process tracing, and participatory observation is best suited for this book (de Walt and de Walt 2011). The book draws from twenty-five years of research on Indonesian presidents and their partners. During this time, about 150 interviews were conducted with presidential aides, party officials, legislators, Muslim leaders, military and police officers, and bureaucrats. Interviews with presidents Yudhoyono and Widodo provided insights into what motivates presidential coalition-building, and observing them during travel and campaign rallies added much to my understanding of how they interact with other actors. Having spent time at the presidential complex and in key ministries in Jakarta, I was able to observe the operations of the president’s staff office and how it manages cabinet members. The same applies to the legislature, where I watched many key events of post-Suharto presidential politics unfolding since 1998, from the election of Wahid in 1999 to the passing of the constitutional amendments in 2002 and important votes in the 2010s. Similarly, I attended party congresses at which presidents were either celebrated or ostracized by their parties, depending on their relationship at that moment in time.

The book also bases its examination on documents and regulations issued by the presidential office, ministries, political parties, and other actors involved in presidential coalitions. Analyses of media coverage and social media accounts are integrated into the investigation, too, as they help us understand how actors use public communications to position themselves in political negotiations with the president and others. Finally, while I did not conduct targeted surveys of elite actors—given the breadth of the actor spectrum covered in this book, this would have been impractical—I have used opinion survey data collected by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) and other survey institutes I have worked with on several projects between 2017 and 2020 (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2018, 2019, 2020; Mietzner, Muhtadi, and Halida 2018; Fossati and Mietzner 2019). These surveys contain popular and elite views, among others of the presidency as an institution as well as the performance of specific presidents. Analyzing such surveys allows us to gain a comprehensive perspective of how the post-Suharto Indonesian presidency has been reflected in and shaped by public and elite views. In combination, these documents, media analyses, and surveys—explored using the standard techniques of critical discourse analysis (Widdowson 2004)—add substantively to the interviews and direct observations of elite actor behavior.

It is important to note that the book’s qualitative approach to in-depth analysis complements—rather than replaces or challenges—that offered by Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power. It goes deeper where a small-N study comes to its limits and brings to life political processes that appear rather abstract in quantitative analyses. But it pursues the same aim: that is, to highlight how presidential coalitions are built and run, and to underline that they are—contrary to what Linz claimed—now a main staple of politics. In fact, they are now so common that we need to consider their unintended side effects, especially as they relate to the potential “perils of stability.”

The expanded definition of coalitional presidentialism, and the methodology applied, also informed the structure of this book and its chapters. The book begins with an overview of the presidency, discussing its historical development, constitutional powers, organizational set-up, and coalition-building strategies. The second chapter looks at political parties and how they have interacted with Indonesian presidents, both in supporting and opposing them. The third chapter separately examines the role of parliament in presidential coalitions—this is necessary because individual legislators often act outside of their parties’ mandate and thus require special attention from presidents who want to secure legislative support. Reflecting the broadened paradigm of coalitional presidentialism that looks beyond presidential-legislative relations, the subsequent chapters focus on the military, the police, the bureaucracy, local administrations, oligarchs, and Muslim organizations. In each of these chapters, the discussed actors are considered key members of presidential coalitions, equal to parties and legislators. Each chapter explores the constitutional and material leverage actors have in dealing with the president and what leverage the latter holds over the former. In negotiating these competing powers, typically an equilibrium is reached in the form of a specific arrangement under which an actor participates in presidential coalitions. The conclusion highlights the structural patterns of coalitional presidentialism in Indonesia, places it in a comparative context, and points to its stabilizing and damaging effects on democracy. It substantiates the hypothesis that while coalitional presidentialism helps to explain Indonesian democracy’s endurance, it also caused and sustained many of its defects.