What determines incumbent vote in Indonesia? Understanding the roles of economic conditions, religiousness, political ideology, and incumbent performance

Abstract

This study investigates possible factors leading to voting for a presidential incumbent in Indonesia, a Muslim-majority democratic country. In addition to economic factors, we argue that religious-psychological factors will also play a role. However, they may operate through different mechanisms. Using data from a national survey ( N = 1088), we found some support for our hypotheses. We found that economic factors (objective personal economy and subjective national economy, but not subjective personal economy) had significant direct relationships with the incumbent vote. In contrast, religiousness did not directly correlate significantly with the vote. Indirect effect analyses showed that incumbent evaluation mediated the relationship between economic factors (except for objective economic conditions) and the incumbent vote. On the other hand, we did not find a mediating role of incumbent performance evaluation in the relationship between religiousness and incumbent vote. Rather, we found a significant mediation effect of political ideology. We also found that the relationship between religiousness and the incumbent vote was mediated by political ideology and incumbent performance evaluation in serial. These findings suggest a stronger effect of non-religious than religious factors. However, the indirect effect analysis suggests that the role of religiousness is not negligible.