Introduction

Abstract

This chapter recounts the story of national legislative candidates who, like our knight in shining armor, wanted to present themselves as challengers to the status quo. It focuses on Indonesia's democratic system, which is characterized by an array of economic incentives given to voters during election campaigns and corrupt behavior among those elected. The chapter also investigates how the shift to democratization following the end of the Suharto regime intensified political competition in elections—and, subsequently, the ubiquity of money politics. Individual campaigns cannot be divorced from the political environment in which they occur, and, as the chapter emphasizes, the attention to the dilemmas that candidates face allows us to assess the real impacts of both formal and informal institutions and systems on democratic elections. By integrating an investigation of individual campaigns with a theoretical consideration of the role of context within campaign decision making, the chapter generates new ideas about the nature of election campaigns from both a systemic and a personal (candidate) perspective.