Building Democracy From Upstream: The Internal Democratization of Political Parties in Indonesia
Keywords:
Candidate Selection, Constitutional Court, Intra-Party Democracy, Political Parties, Political RecruitmentAbstract
Candidate recruitment is the point at which political parties decide who may later govern, yet Indonesian scholarship on electoral democracy has paid far more attention to the conduct of elections than to the closed internal processes that precede them. This article examines how Indonesian parties recruit and select candidates for the presidency, the vice-presidency, and the House of Representatives (DPR), and it proposes a recruitment design that is more democratic and inclusive. Using doctrinal legal research with statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, the article analyzes the 1945 Constitution, the Political Parties Law, the Elections Law, the statutes of the parliamentary parties of the 2024 election, and the documented record of recent nominations. It finds that recruitment remains centralized and opaque, that party elites dominate nomination decisions, that the law does not require cadre development for presidential nominations, and that candidacy buying persists. It argues that Constitutional Court Decision No. 62/PUU-XXII/2024, which abolished the presidential nomination threshold, shifts the burden of democratic quality onto parties themselves. The article contributes a two-track model: binding internal conventions for presidential tickets and tiered, decentralized deliberation with explicit eligibility criteria for DPR candidates, framed within the comparative literature on selectorate inclusiveness.
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