Introducing the HI-RES SIKAP of Indonesian voters

“Information! Information! Information! ― I can’t make bricks with out clay,” Sherlock Holmes was described saying in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Journey of the Copper Beeches.

For college kids of Indonesian politics, public opinion knowledge is the clay we have to make sense of this yr’s nationwide and native elections. The stakes are excessive: over the previous few years, Indonesia has skilled what many observers regard as a democratic erosion.

Take into account the latest Constitutional Courtroom ruling that paved the way in which for Gibran Rakabuming’s inclusion on the poll as a vice presidential candidate. Was this episode a easy case of elite politics and manoeuvring on the a part of Jokowi? Or does it replicate a declining public urge for food for the burdens related to the rule of regulation?

To reply these types of urgent questions, we’d like entry to publicly out there survey knowledge.  To make certain, there exist a number of such sources, together with the World Values Surveys (WVS), the Asia Barometer survey, the USAID Demographic and Well being Surveys, the Indonesian Household Life Survey (IFLS), and the Pew Heart’s examine of the World’s Muslims, to checklist some notable examples. However these surveys are typically one-off snapshots—a indisputable fact that undermines their utility for observing how Indonesians’ attitudes are unfolding in actual time and in response to exterior occasions. (The World Values Survey was most lately performed in Indonesia in 2018, for instance.)

With a watch in direction of encouraging data-driven analysis, since November 2023 we’ve been conducting weekly public opinion surveys, gauging the attitudes of 1,650 Indonesian adults every week. We’ll proceed to conduct weekly surveys till January 2025, aiming to survey roughly 95,000 Indonesian adults over the course of 58 weeks.

Importantly, we’ll make the information freely out there to researchers. We name this initiative Excessive-Frequency Surveys on Indonesians’ Information of and Attitudes on Politics (HI-RES SIKAP). Under, we describe the survey design, the pattern, two use case examples, and learn how to entry the information.

The design

The SIKAP undertaking attracts inspirations from the Nationscape examine run by the Democracy Fund and UCLA. As co-Principal Investigators, we contribute equally to the undertaking and want to acknowledge funding from the Singapore’s Ministry of Schooling and the Nationwide College of Singapore that has made the undertaking doable.

The important thing part of SIKAP is the weekly on-line surveys that we’ve been operating and can proceed to run for a complete of 58 weeks, from 27 November 2023 to five January 2025. This era, as college students of Indonesia will instantly discover, covers a number of politically vital occasions, such because the presidential election in February 2024, the inauguration of Prabowo Subianto as president in October 2024, and the simultaneous native elections in November 2024.

We developed a set of core modules which are requested throughout all 58 surveys. That the surveys have overlapping core questions, and are fielded weekly signifies that SIKAP affords insights on how voters’ attitudes on a difficulty could change as a response to a political occasion.

As an example, we will theoretically look at if there’s a rising sense of affective polarisation over the course of the election marketing campaign. It is perhaps the case, for example, that supporters of presidential candidates more and more turn out to be extra unfavorable towards one another.

Desk 1: Core Modules in SIKAP

Sampling strategies

Every SIKAP wave collects knowledge from a contemporary pattern of 1,650 respondents, offered by the web panel vendor Cint (previously often called Lucid). Within the superb case, by the conclusion of the undertaking we may have collected knowledge from 95,700 distinctive respondents. Nonetheless, for a number of sensible causes, we enable respondents to be interviewed once more after eight weeks have handed since their final interviews.

This offers us the very best options of cross-sectional and longitudinal knowledge. Aiming for a contemporary pattern in every wave permits us to seize a various pool of respondents. Permitting for a number of interviews, in the meantime, permits us to trace how social and political attitudes of re-interviewed respondents may change over the course of 58 weeks.

On-line surveys are usually not consultant of the Indonesian inhabitants. Many citizens don’t have web entry and the underlying elements that drive such entry could also be correlated with the attitudes wherein we’re fascinated about measuring. For instance, our pattern is extra educated than the inhabitants.

However, we prioritised implementing quotas that enabled us to attain representational parity on different essential variables: gender, age, and area. These quotas enhance the representativeness of our pattern and, on the similar time, nonetheless be certain that every survey wave can end in a single week.

Desk 2: Demographic Quotas in SIKAP

The dearth of representativeness of our pattern has vital implications. Researchers who want to use our knowledge are solely answerable for the content material of their analyses, however basically we’d discourage utilizing the SIKAP knowledge to current easy descriptive statistics or to extrapolate these statistics to the inhabitants.

For instance, it’s not advisable for researchers to analyse our presidential vote desire query after which extrapolate that to argue for what number of voters help Anies Baswedan, Prabowo Subianto, or Ganjar Pranowo. That form of workout routines requires a special sort of sampling technique.

As an alternative, we imagine our knowledge is especially helpful for 2 kinds of workout routines.

The primary is to look at the development of a political perspective as a operate of time. For instance, a researcher may look at how, because the election date nears, heated non secular rhetoric may result in extra exclusionary attitudes amongst voters.

The second sort of workout routines is to look at how a shock created by a major social or political occasion results in modifications in traits of sure political attitudes. For instance, as we measure respondents’ attitudes towards China, the researcher may look at how these attitudes change after a reporting of China’s incursion into Indonesian territories within the Natunas.

These are simply few examples and, ultimately, totally different researchers would need to analyse the information in a different way. Under, we current two preliminary analyses that we’ve performed on the information.

Use case: affective polarisation

How do supporters of a presidential candidate really feel towards supporters of different presidential candidates, and the way do these emotions change over the course of the election? This is without doubt one of the questions that we will look at utilizing the SIKAP knowledge.

SIKAP contains questions on respondents’ presidential vote preferences. It additionally contains questions that faucet into the respondents’ emotions towards supporters of the three presidential candidates that competed within the February 2024 presidential elections. Respondents could point out their emotions towards supporters of every of the candidates on a 5-point scale that ranges from a robust dislike to a robust like.

Determine 1 presents ranges of affective polarisation among the many three candidates’ supporters from the primary week of SIKAP (27 November 2023–3 January 2024) to the tenth week (29 January 2024–4 February 2024).

Determine 1: Emotions between supporters of presidential candidates

There are no less than two notable patterns.

First, every candidate’s supporters really feel most beneficial towards fellow supporters. That is moderately unsurprising. What’s attention-grabbing, nonetheless, is that the sensation will not be excessive―on common, a rating of 4 out of doable 5. This means that political campaigns don’t essentially induce partisans to turn out to be extra optimistic or really feel extra beneficial towards their ingroup.

Second, amongst each supporters of Prabowo Subianto and Anies Baswedan, emotions towards supporters of Ganjar Pranowo are comparatively fixed within the ten weeks of the marketing campaign interval. They hover across the impartial level of three. In different phrases, Anies and Prabowo supporters neither like nor dislike Ganjar supporters.

On the contrary, we observe that Prabowo supporters’ emotions towards Anies supporters more and more turn out to be extra unfavorable, which is reciprocated by Anies supporters as their emotions towards Prabowo supporters additionally grew to become extra unfavorable in these 10 weeks. This sample is extra attention-grabbing amongst Anies supporters.

Initially, Anies supporters considered Prabowo supporters extra positively than they did Ganjar supporters. Over time, this notion modified such that by early February Anies supporters truly view Ganjar supporters extra favourably than Prabowo supporters. This sample may truly replicate how within the closing days of the marketing campaign Anies’s marketing campaign mounted an offensive towards Prabowo, highlighting for instance his enterprise offers, land possession, and lukewarm monitor report as defence minister.

Use case: gender and generational politics in Indonesia

Appreciable consideration has been given to the function of the youth vote in Indonesia’s upcoming presidential election. For the primary time, a majority of voters will likely be millennials or gen-Z. That is having wide-ranging penalties for the way candidates are interesting to voters, and is broadly believed to have influenced Prabowo’s rebranding technique as a “cuddly grandpa.” To what extent is that this pivot working to sway younger voters?

Determine 2: Assist for Prabowo by era

SIKAP knowledge permits us to look at this query in-depth. In Determine 3, we look at the share of voters from totally different generations that help Prabowo. The primary takeaway that stands out is that Gen-Z voters are more likely to help Prabowo than older voters—by a margin of about 20 proportion factors. That is shocking in its personal proper: in comparison with older voters, younger voters are usually not usually thought to help candidates with authoritarian inclinations. The proof suggests this can be altering.

Digging deeper, we will look at how generational variations work together with gender by way of help for Prabowo. Once more, what we observe on the right-hand panel of Determine 3 is that older women and men are equally as prone to help Prabowo—there are not any gender variations. However the left-hand panel exhibits a stark gender divide: younger males are more likely to help Prabowo than younger ladies.

The benefit of the high-frequency nature of the SIKAP knowledge is that we will pinpoint the second at which this gender hole emerges: till the primary week of January, younger women and men had been equally as prone to help Prabowo. However early within the new yr, help for Prabowo amongst younger ladies dropped and help amongst younger males elevated—maybe as a consequence of the 7 January televised presidential debate.

Methods to entry

We welcome researchers, journalists, and different members of the general public to entry and analyse our knowledge for his or her analysis. Our knowledge is exclusive in its high-frequency nature and as such affords insights tough to acquire by analysing different datasets. On the similar time, we need to make a disclaimer that we’re not answerable for inferences drawn by different researchers utilizing our knowledge.

researchers could entry the information from our web sites nicholaskuipers.com or nathanael.id. For accountability functions we want to perceive who accesses our knowledge, so potential customers must fill in a brief kind and enter their emails. The hyperlink to obtain the information will then be despatched to this electronic mail.

As the primary batch, we’re releasing Wave 1 to Wave 11. We’ll launch extra waves as the information turn out to be out there. We hope that this straightforward train will assist create a path towards higher knowledge sharing and knowledge openness practices in Indonesia.