Measuring the ‘NU effect’ in Indonesia’s election

Recent analyses of Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election have shown conclusively that religion and ethnicity play a central role in explaining vote support for the incumbent president Joko Widodo. Jokowi prevailed in districts with majority non-Muslim populations, and his opponent Prabowo Subianto tended to earn most of his electoral support in Muslim-majority districts. But among those Muslim-majority districts, there is wide variation in Prabowo’s success rate, falling along an axis of Javanese versus non-Javanese. Although such analyses invariably face the problem of ecological inference, the data are “consistent with a growing cleavage between Muslims and non-Muslims alongside an ethnic cleavage between Javanese and non-Javanese.” Continue reading →