Introducing the HI-RES SIKAP of Indonesian voters

“Knowledge! Knowledge! Knowledge! ― 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 information 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.

Think about the current Constitutional Court docket 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 obtainable survey information.  To make sure, 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 research of the World’s Muslims, to listing some notable examples. However these surveys are usually one-off snapshots—a undeniable 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 just lately carried out in Indonesia in 2018, for instance.)

With an eye fixed in direction of encouraging data-driven analysis, since November 2023 we now have been conducting weekly public opinion surveys, gauging the attitudes of 1,650 Indonesian adults every week. We are going to proceed to conduct weekly surveys till January 2025, aiming to survey roughly 95,000 Indonesian adults over the course of 58 weeks.

Importantly, we are going to make the info freely obtainable to researchers. We name this initiative Excessive-Frequency Surveys on Indonesians’ Data of and Attitudes on Politics (HI-RES SIKAP). Under, we describe the survey design, the pattern, two use case examples, and how you can entry the info.

The design

The SIKAP venture attracts inspirations from the Nationscape research run by the Democracy Fund and UCLA. As co-Principal Investigators, we contribute equally to the venture and wish to acknowledge funding from the Singapore’s Ministry of Training and the Nationwide College of Singapore that has made the venture attainable.

The important thing element of SIKAP is the weekly on-line surveys that we now have 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 important 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 might be requested throughout all 58 surveys. That the surveys have overlapping core questions, and are fielded weekly signifies that SIKAP gives insights on how voters’ attitudes on a difficulty might 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 could be the case, as an illustration, that supporters of presidential candidates more and more turn into extra destructive towards one another.

Desk 1: Core Modules in SIKAP

Sampling strategies

Every SIKAP wave collects information from a contemporary pattern of 1,650 respondents, supplied by the web panel vendor Cint (previously generally known as Lucid). Within the splendid case, by the conclusion of the venture we could have collected information from 95,700 distinctive respondents. Nevertheless, for a number of sensible causes, we permit respondents to be interviewed once more after eight weeks have handed since their final interviews.

This offers us the most effective options of cross-sectional and longitudinal information. Aiming for a contemporary pattern in every wave allows us to seize a various pool of respondents. Permitting for a number of interviews, in the meantime, allows us to trace how social and political attitudes of re-interviewed respondents would possibly change over the course of 58 weeks.

On-line surveys will not be 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 through which we’re occupied with measuring. For instance, our pattern is extra educated than the inhabitants.

Nonetheless, 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 sure that every survey wave can end in a single week.

Desk 2: Demographic Quotas in SIKAP

The shortage of representativeness of our pattern has important implications. Researchers who want to use our information are solely chargeable for the content material of their analyses, however typically we’d discourage utilizing the SIKAP information 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 type of workout routines requires a distinct kind of sampling methodology.

As a substitute, we imagine our information is especially helpful for 2 kinds of workout routines.

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

The second kind of workout routines is to look at how a shock created by a big social or political occasion results in modifications in traits of sure political attitudes. For instance, as we measure respondents’ attitudes towards China, the researcher would possibly 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 wish to analyse the info in another way. Under, we current two preliminary analyses that we now have performed on the info.

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 likely one of the questions that we will look at utilizing the SIKAP information.

SIKAP consists of questions on respondents’ presidential vote preferences. It additionally consists of questions that faucet into the respondents’ emotions towards supporters of the three presidential candidates that competed within the February 2024 presidential elections. Respondents might point out their emotions towards supporters of every of the candidates on a 5-point scale that ranges from a powerful dislike to a powerful 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 not less than two notable patterns.

First, every candidate’s supporters really feel most beneficial towards fellow supporters. That is slightly unsurprising. What’s fascinating, nevertheless, is that the sensation is just not excessive―on common, a rating of 4 out of attainable 5. This implies that political campaigns don’t essentially induce partisans to turn into 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 into extra destructive, which is reciprocated by Anies supporters as their emotions towards Prabowo supporters additionally turned extra destructive in these 10 weeks. This sample is extra fascinating 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 would possibly truly replicate how within the ultimate 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 position 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 information 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 stunning in its personal proper: in comparison with older voters, younger voters will not be typically 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 when it comes to 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 aren’t any gender variations. However the left-hand panel reveals a stark gender divide: younger males are more likely to help Prabowo than younger girls.

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

The right way to entry

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

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

As the primary batch, we’re releasing Wave 1 to Wave 11. We are going to launch extra waves as the info turn into obtainable. We hope that this easy train will assist create a path towards higher information sharing and information openness practices in Indonesia.