The Dynamics of Political Parties’ Coalition in Indonesia: The evaluation of political party elites’ opinion

Abstract

During the Indonesian president election process, the coalition of parties could be shown as the dominant process beside the president campaign. The coalition could be regarded as the emergence of the parties’ preferential coherence based upon the interest and attributes of each party. The similarity and difference of parties’ preference and attributes could be depicted through of party elites’ opinions and attitude toward flowered political issues. In this paper, we use the Heider’s balance theory to construct relation network among parties by using the longitudinal news data of the party elite’s opinion that published by the media, and then analyze the dynamic of coalition formation in the Indonesian political system during the election process. We have shown that the balance of the party’s relational network move toward the larger balance index relative to the initial condition. This phenomenon has verified the structural balance hypothesis especially for the conflict situation such as the election process. Interestingly, the balance of the system is fluctuated dynamically through time following certain trajectory. This dynamics is divided into 3 phases, that is, disorder state, conflict state, and order state, as well as signed the difference of party behavior before and after the legislative election. Moreover, we also analyzed the stability two parties’ relation in particular period in order to understand specifically the dynamic of the system in triadic level.