Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

STATE CORPORATISM AND PLURALIST CHALLENGE 17institutions [legislatures, the judiciary, and political parties] need to link civilsociety to the state and competition needs to be institutionalised, as well asinvolve moderation, compromise and widespread respect for civil liberties andhuman rights.)Other scholars give an additional explanation of growing pluralism inauthoritarian polities. Hoogvelt argues that people’s experience with thestructures of political exclusion and poverty, combined with structural adjustmentprograms (economic reform), sparked urban movements and militant protestactions against social injustice and authoritarianism. In particular, regimeledeconomic reform made under structural adjustment agreements withinternational funding agencies caused an upsurge in associational activism indeveloping societies, as urban populations were deprived of state support, urbanservices, and subsidies. 46 Chazan argues in the case of many countries in Africathat there was a growing diversity of associational- activism since the adoptionof structural adjustment. 47 In their study of China, Unger and Chan note thateconomic reform policies ‘jeopardised’ workers’ benefits and led to organisedworker resistance and militant actions by the 1990s. 48Thus, middle-class and entrepreneurial elements of society, and to someextent labour, increasingly conduct their activities outside the tutelage of theexisting corporatist structures, which originally were instituted to containsocietal pluralism, and they compete with, and exploit, the weaknesses of theauthoritarian institutions. 49 With respect to labour, regimes that initiate reformscommonly devolve authority within the centralised corporatist structures to locallevelorganisations, partly in response to new economic imperatives and partly inresponse to an upsurge in complaints against the unrepresentative arrangements.Whereas the goal of the regime invariably is to extend its corporatist net oversocial organisation by becoming, or appearing, more responsive to targetconstituencies, relaxation of controls tended to have the opposite effect. Chazannotes that in Africa ‘specific groups carved out their own spheres of autonomousaction…[and] several officially controlled social institutions detachedthemselves from state control’. 50 Unger and Chan argue that, as China’s centralleadership gradually devolved authority to the regions, corporatist arrangementsshowed signs of shifting from state to societal corporatism. They began to parcelout into more numerous, semi-independent entities and reflect the concerns anddemands of their designated membership. In particular, during the mid-1990s,‘local union branches broke loose of central control and led strikes’. 51 Overall,the different studies addressing regime transition indicate that, whereas in the1960s and 1970s central state (corporatist) controls stunted the development ofautonomous associational life, increasing associational capacity during the 1980sand 1990s was undermining authoritarianism and state corporatist structures inmany developing countries.Scholars have given different weight to factors responsible for transitions suchas economic liberalisation, crisis, intra-elite rivalry, political reform, socialmobilisation, and foreign intervention. There is also debate on the prospect of