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Indonesia's Golkar Party has seen many institutional forms over its fifty-year history. Founded in the early 1960s by members of the Indonesian military as an organization representing key "functional groups" (GOLongan KARya) in Indonesian society, Golkar was coopted by Suharto in the late 1960s and transformed into the New Order regime's central vehicle for both political organization and electoral contestation. Although the Suharto regime never permitted Golkar to be called a political party, it was the most important mass political organization in Indonesia for nearly thirty years. After the New Order regime collapsed in the late 1990s, Golkar the mass organization transformed itself into the Golkar Party, which today remains one of the most influential political parties in democratic Indonesia. That means that Golkar, like the KMT in Taiwan and the PRI in Mexico, is both the holdover of the former authoritarian regime and a central participant in the current democratic process. Studies of Indonesian politics have produced exhaustive treatments of Golkar's formation and its political development under the New Order, but as Dirk Tomsa notes in this important new book, there have been no systematic studies of Golkar's new role as a political party in the democratic era.
Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia's point of departure is that because democratic consolidation requires that political parties and the broader political system undergo a process of institutionalization, one cannot understand democratic consolidation (or it absence) in Indonesia without taking into account Golkar's trajectory as an institution in the democratic era. Tomsa therefore concentrates tightly on recent developments in Golkar party politics in order to assess the extent to which the party has, in fact, institutionalized. As such, Tomsa's book is at once a study of party institutionalization in Indonesia and an intricate review of Golkar's internal politics since...