The Traditional Social Group as A Sociological Factor of the Voting Behavior in the 2015 Karangasem-Bali Local Election

摘要

This article argues that Bali traditional social groups (banjar, kasta, sekaa and dadia) playan important role in determining the voting behavior of the 2015 Karangasemelection. The election raised a surprising result: a female candidate, supported by a coalition of small political parties defeated two other male candidates, one of them was the incumbent and supported by PDIP and Golkar. This research applied a quantitative research method where the 420 respondents were collected through a multistage random sampling based on the proportion of voters in every sub-district in Karangasem Regency with 95% of confident level and 5% of margin of error. Using the sociological approach of the voting behavior theory, the findings suggest that: (1) the majority of voters in Karangasem are an active member of their traditional social groups, mainly banjar and dadia; (2) 23.8% of the voters in the 2015 Karangasem Election elected the candidates who were chosen as the favorite candidates in their banjar and dadia; (3) 57.6% of the voters in the 2015 Karangasem Election followed the political instructions given by kelihan banjar and kelihan dadia regarding who should be voted; (4) The role of kasta were proven to be insignificant to the voting behavior of the Karangasem voters. To conclude, even though the traditional social groups play asignificant role in determining the voting behavior of Karangasem voters In the 2015 local election, this research showed that out of four traditional social groups, dadia, sekaa and banjar emerged as three significant groups compared to kasta.