Since the implementation of decentralization laws in 2001, local governments have maintained a crucial role in advancing social welfare in Indonesia. Indonesian districts, cities and provinces currently enjoy substantial autonomy in several fields, ranging from development policy to public works, environmental protection, and the provision of social services such as education and healthcare. Understanding how local politics works is therefore of primary importance in appreciating the state of democracy in Indonesia.

For several years after the breakdown of the New Order regime, a critical view of Indonesian politics prevailed in the literature. From this perspective, democracy in Indonesia is systematically prone to oligarchic domination and elite capture, with meaningful democratic advancement being thwarted by powerful local interests (Hadiz 2010; Hadiz and Robison 2005; Winters 2011). More recently, however, scholars have studied the emergence of new actors in Indonesian politics, showing that democratization has provided unprecedented opportunities for civil society mobilization and political change (Aspinall 2013; Mietzner 2013a ; Rosser 2015; Pepinsky 2013).

Against this mixed picture of the democratization process, the introduction of local direct elections for district heads and governors in 2005 has received particular attention. While local direct elections, known in Indonesia as pilkada, are overwhelmingly supported by Indonesians (Gabrillin 2014), scholarly work has highlighted their limitations, casting doubts on their ability to enhance accountability (Erb and Sulistiyanto 2009).

New research has provided valuable insights into pilkada elections, but this is almost exclusively based on case-study analysis and qualitative work, and the findings have not been triangulated with the help of alternative approaches. This bias in the literature has had an important, unfortunate consequence for our understanding of Indonesian local politics: while we know a great deal about political elites, we know very little about voters. We have a fairly clear picture of interactions among key political actors, of the role of political parties, of the importance of political finance, and of how local leaders mobilize ethnic and religious identities to their own advantage. We know little about how common people acquire information on local politics, use this information to orient their voting choices, evaluate candidates, participate in political campaigns, and assess the performance of elected politicians, local government and local institutions.