Why is There Zero Women Candidate for Governor Election in West Java, Indonesia?

Elly Malihah,Siti Nurbayani,Leni Anggraeni

doi:10.15294/komunitas.v12i1.21373

Abstract

Democracy requires active public political participation. Sustainability of general elections is vitally important in democracy. As a developing country, Indonesia is still struggling to implement its democracy. Interesting phenomena in Indonesian democracy, the number of women who run their candidacy in an election is still limited. For instance, in West Java Province Regional Election, there are no women candidates for governor or vice governor. The political sociology perspective sees these phenomena as the patriarchal culture that the community prefers male leader to women. This research aimsÂ atÂ understandingÂ causesÂ of why there are noÂ femaleÂ candidatesÂ in the general election in West Java. This researchÂ makes use ofÂ quantitative approach with survey method aimed to explain political viewsÂ of West Java society about female candidatesÂ in a gubernatorial election. The area of the researchÂ coversÂ West Java province, involving 500 respondents. The data was collected by using the questionnaire distributed by Google Form to people living in this area. The data wereÂ thenÂ analyzed by inferential statistics. This studyÂ indicatesÂ that West JavaÂ residentsÂ stillÂ holdÂ strong ideology on gender differences, believing that a good leader should be male. Even in the smallest scope of institution,Â menÂ is suppossedÂ be a leader. In addition, there is a dichotomy between the public and the personal space for male and female duty. Women are suggested to stay at the private space, while male has a duty at the public sphere. It is alsoÂ evidencedÂ in the research that women voters have little tendency to elect the female candidates. ThisÂ occursÂ not just because of their patriarchal cultural background, but alsoÂ due toÂ their education. ItÂ isÂ indicated that evenÂ femaleÂ voters had higher education, their tendency to elect the women candidate was still low. Â

Highlights

As one of the developing countries, Indonesia is still on its truggle for democracy
Research Objectives This research aims at providing an overview and data about the views of the community that is closely related to the public view of the ideal woman figure as leader in West Java, knowing the possibility of the election of governor and deputy governor of West Java in the future from among women and understand the factors - a factor that resulted in the absence of a candidate for governor and deputy governor of women in the 2018 regional election
Useing a quantitative approach (Creswel, 2008, Williams, 2007), this study makes use of survey methods (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) which aims to explain the political views of West Java society about female candidates in the gubernatorial election

Summary

Introduction

As one of the developing countries, Indonesia is still on its truggle for democracy. It is indicated, for instance, by limited number of woman candidates on an election, as in West Java gubernatorial election, where neither governor nor vice-governor candidates are women. From the point of view of political sociology, this is seen as a patriarchal culture in which a particular community prefers male leaders instead of female. This has made women who run her candidacy for gubernatorial election have often to face resistance from their communities. In the Indonesian context, there are two aspects that make a woman be nomi-

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion