Estimating the multilevel coattail effect during the 2019 Indonesian election

Abstract

The 2019 Indonesian general election provides an interesting platform to study coattail effects considering the fact that the presidential elections were held concurrently with the three levels of the legislative offices including the national, provincial, as well as regency and city. Moreover, the multi-party system practiced in the country allows the influence of the party’s position on several aspects of the coalition including the origin, old and new members, as well as new parties. Therefore, this study estimates the presidential coattail effect on the 2019 election by analyzing the relationship between presidential candidates and party vote share at three tiers of legislative elections. It also indicates the different effects of each party at every level of the legislative election with a decreasing trend from national to provincial, regency and city. The results showed several critical points which include (1) the presidential coattail effect occurs differently for parties at each level of the legislative election but most of them experienced decreasing trend from upper to lower level, (2) incumbency is not a guarantee that the coattail effect occurs equally among all members of the incumbent coalition, (3) origin party in the incumbent and competing coalitions experienced different level of effect, (4) party’s history or track records in the coalition might influence the coattail effect, and (5) the presidential coattail effect is critical for the new party to gain support, specifically when it has no prominent figures.