Coalitions in Multiparty System: Empirical Reflection of the Indonesian Regional Elections

Abstract

A lot of changing in recent Indonesian political dynamics with eventual fact shows how political recruitment for legislative and executive chairs in national as well as regional levels in direct voting systems have brought the patterns of coalitions among political parties into interesting focus of observation. We evaluate the Regional Elections data held since June 2005 to September 2008 as election matrix. The matrix is then transformed into the ultrametric space yielding the hierarchical trees based on proximity on inter-party coalition. We represent the distance of coalitions among political parties based on the activity in regional elections and contrasting the findings with some nation-wide facts of the respective properties. The observations draws how Indonesian voters are failed to be segregated into any extreme political and ideological streams but the combinations among the existing and widely-recognized ones.