I am delighted to report that I have been awarded a Fulbright grant to return to Indonesia in 2027, where I will work with colleagues at the Fakultas Ilmu Sosial Ilmu Politik of Universitas Islam Negeri – Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, on a large database project, “Documenting and Analyzing the Biographies of National Legislators in Indonesia.”
If BRIN approves my research permit application and my visa application process goes smoothly, I hope to start in Indonesia in January 2027 and work through November 2027. While I will be hosted by UIN-Syarif Hidayatullah in Ciputat, I also hope to see many friends and colleagues in Indonesia while I am there.
Here is the research proposal as submitted to BRIN:
Research Background and Aims: Indonesia has a strong and proud democratic tradition dating back to 1945, but the dynamics of the national legislature in this democratic tradition have not been understood as well as they should be. This is particularly true in comparison with other electoral democracies, like Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere, where there is significant and easily accessible documentation of members of the legislature and their work. In contrast with neighboring countries such as the Philippines and Singapore, where all members of the legislative branch since independence are listed accurately on Wikipedia with data such as their party affiliations and constituencies, Indonesia’s coverage is inconsistent and often inaccurate. The goal of this research is to better understand Indonesia’s national legislature (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, or MPR) by documenting and making available to the public through an online database the profiles and backgrounds of members, dating back to 1945 and the KNIP (Komite Nasional Indonesia – Pusat). By creating a database of legislators for the past 80 years, researchers and the general public will also be able to track changes and advances in the composition of the legislative branch, such as shifts in educational background, use of feudal and religious titles, gender composition, family networks in the national legislature, and more.
This research project will build on a pilot project launched in 2018, which was a collaboration between Dr. Kevin W. Fogg (the international researcher on the project) and Dr. Syahrul Hidayat, at that time appointed at the University of Exeter and the University of Indonesia. The pilot project was able to document the backgrounds of all members of the Indonesian constitutional assembly (Konstituante) of the 1950s, and created the online database at www.konstituante.net. That project also produced an article for the Indonesian Journal of Political Research (run by LIPI, the predecessor to BRIN), highlighting findings like how more members of the Konstituante were educated in the Middle East than in Europe, overturning longstanding assumptions in the history of Indonesia’s early leaders. The proposed project in this research, because it will be diachronic and not just synchronic, has the potential for even greater findings.
Research Methodology: The primary activity in the research period will be to digitize, standardize, and link the profiles of members of Indonesia’s national legislature from 1945 until the present. For most periods of Indonesian history, these profiles were published by the legislature, although for some eras those publications have become hard to access (such as the publications for the 1950s).
The technical backbone of this project will use the back-end database mechanisms already set up for the Konstituante pilot project, building out the database for a series of parliamentary sets including mapping the connections between members across time. The international researcher, Dr. Fogg, and the Indonesian counterpart, Dr. Idris Thaha of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN-Syarif Hidayatullah) will oversee the collection of primary data from government sources and publications and oversee a team of student research assistants who will input data from these sources into the database.
Although some aspects of this project are technical and could be conducted anywhere, the core research that will fuel the datasets must be conducted in Jakarta. In order to get full profiles of the members of the Indonesian national parliament—more than just their names and listed parties—and to cross-check reliable sources on finnicky questions like deaths, expulsions, nominated replacements and party switches, it is essential to have access to the Indonesian National Archives (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, in South Jakarta) and the Indonesian National Library (Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, in Central Jakarta) for the first two decades of Indonesia’s independence, and the Parliamentary Library (Perpustakaan MPR RI, in Central Jakarta) and the General Election Supervisory Agency (Badan Pengawas Pemilu, in Central Jakarta) for more recent decades. The data held by all of these Indonesian government agencies is free and open to the public, but it will require expertise to access, collect, and compare it.
Research Outputs: The research will result in two types of outputs:
- First, it will create a database that will be fully accessible online, following the model of www.konstituante.net. This database will make this history of Indonesia’s national legislature and national elite available to researchers and the general public anywhere.
- Second, the lead researchers will collaboratively write academic journal articles using this data. These articles will be jointly authored by Dr. Fogg and Dr. Idris Thaha, and—for some specific aspects of the analysis—with other scholars at FISIP, UIN-Syarif Hidayatullah. For example, Prof. Dr. Dzuriyatun Toyibah will contribute to an article analyzing changes in gender composition and the dynamics of female membership over time, and other colleagues may look diachronically at the delegations from a specific province or region as they changed over time