What Drive Marketization and Professionalization of Campaigning of Political Parties in the Emerging Democracy? Evidence from Indonesia in the Post-Soeharto New Order

Abstract

This work is directed to examine what drive marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia. Focusing on such issue, this work adopts Strömbäck’ (2007, 2010) and Strömbäck et al.’ (2012) conceptual models of marketization and campaign professionalization of political parties and deploys a case study method. The findings are as follows. Following factors encourage these parties to adopt such practices. They include democratization of politics, establishments of the democratic political, government, media and election systems, declines of Indonesian electorates’ partisanship and number of loyal voters, the emergence of rational voting behaviors, ICT development and increasing influence of the media logic in political news productions, domination of the media agenda over the political agenda and numbers of media consumers and the Internet and social media users who strongly engaged in political consumerism and activism. This work offers an analytical model that visualizes the structural factors and conditions, which stimulate political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia to take up such practices. We could consider this model as we want to evaluate developments of marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracies, especially those shared similarity with Indonesian politics.