Political Literacy And Money Politics In Indonesia: The Phenomena of Money Politics in Jakarta's Local Election on 2017

摘要

General election is one of the indicators of democratization alongside the other values of democracy. Beside presidential election, the general local election was also held in Indonesia under the Law No. 32/2004 of Local Government. Adding to that, the government also composed the Law No.22/2007 about the implementation of the general election. The increasing number of civic participation in the local election can be seen from the comparison between the number of voters in 2012 election and the 2017 election. Despite the higher public engagement, money politics has been a prominent phenomenon in several election at the district level. Election Monitoring Institution (or in Indonesia known as Bawaslu) found that there are 600 cases of money politics from 101 districts in Indonesia, including the one happened in Jakarta. Regarding these matters, Edward Aspinal used the concept of patronage and clientelism which observe the significant benefits within political elite to distribute something in the form of money or other things to their constituent to get political support. Clientelism encompasses the reciprocal, hierarchical, the repetitional aspects. The society tends to think in a pragmatic way in addressing this issue. During the 2017 local election in Jakarta, the solution that was used to solve money politic issue was by continuously improving the political literacy for the society, especially for the political elites. Receiving money, things or services from the elite that would be exchanged by political right of constituent will break the high values of democratization.