Preference Mismatch for Environmental Policy in Indonesia

Preference Mismatch for Environmental Policy in Indonesia type

Preference Mismatch for Environmental Policy in Indonesia – YouTube
Okay good afternoon everybody to all of you here in the classroom and the many who are following uh through the zoom channel uh and welcome to today’s seminar the southeast Asia Research Center seminar my name is Diego fosa I am assistant professor here at the Department of Public and international Affair and associate director of cir uh this is one of our last seminars this semester we’re getting towards the end of a very productive uh semester for us this is the seventh uh seminar that we host and uh it is a pleasure uh to
welcome today Professor Nick kers from the National University of Singapore um I’ll just say something to introduce the speaker Professor cus he an assistant professor of political science at n us and a presidential young Professor at the National University of sing apore his research is interested in understanding how institutions structure political attitudes and has been published or is forcoming in journals such as the American Political Science review the British Journal of political science perspective of politics and word
politics Our Guest has a truly outstanding uh scholarship and publication record um Nik has received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and was previously a predoctoral scholar at the center of democracy development and the rule of law at Stanford University uh as usual I have asked our speaker to prepare for a presentation of about like 40 minutes after which we will have plenty of time for uh questions and answers uh the title uh uh of Professor Kus today is preference mismatch for environmental politics in
environmental policy in Indonesia uh without further Ado I’m going to leave the floor to Our Guest thanks great uh thank you Diego uh and thanks Mark for for joining online even though you’re feeling a little under the weather if you can’t hear me at any point mark just um just speak up and I’ll I’ll pick up the mic okay uh so again thanks for the invitation um and thanks for being here uh it’s my first time in Hong Kong I’m very excited uh so like Diego said today I’m going to be presenting a very early
stage research uh that’s joint with Alan seia at Princeton entitled preference mismatch for environmental policy in Indonesia uh so what I’ll do is I’ll talk for about 45 minutes about the project I hope that’s okay um and you know it’s a small group so you know feel free to interrupt me and and sort of we can have a discussion as things go if it feels appropriate um but like I said this is early stage research so we’re s really looking forward to any feedback or comments that you might
have so the project is motivated by three observations uh the first is that Indonesia today faces a series of what we call interlocking environmental challenges so the first and I think the most prominent um or or most famous is the issue of deforestation and particularly the use of fires for the clearing of primary and secondary forest in Indonesia um so in the course of writing this paper we dug up some statistics about this phenomenon and I was quite shocked to learn about the scale of it um so since 2001 Indonesia lost about 31

Indonesia faces a series of interlocking environmental challenges, including deforestation and fires, flooding and sea level rises, as well as mining and extraction. Voters care about environmental issues, about 57% say pollution is “very important” and 49.6% say climate change is “very important.” Standard theories of representation predict that politicians should move policy to align with preferences—or face electoral sanctioning. So why do Indonesia politicians under-produce policy to protect the environment? This paper develops a simple model of policy inaction which emphasizes two key frictions: 1. Costs to action. Politicians may face a range of costs for deviation from the status quo of environmental exploitation. 2. Costs to communication. Which lead to politicians misperceiving of voter preferences. To assess this argument, this paper uses two sources of data: voter survey and candidate survey. Voters report higher first-order beliefs about the importance of environmental issues, compared to politicians. Politicians hold incorrect second-order beliefs about environmental issues, understanding the importance voters attach to climate change and pollution.

million hectares of primary and secondary Forest tree cover to deforestation so this is the size of Germany right so this is a a huge amount of deforestation a lot of this is what they call commodity driven deforestation with both large corporations and small farmers clearing land to make way for say palm oil plantations um and as you also know a lot of this Forest conversion makes use of burning which is cheaper than say mechanical means that use tractors and so it’s I think more desirable to uh to boost.
Profit motives excuse me to boost them sort of bottom line uh but under drought conditions these sorts of burning techniques can spark wildfires that release CO2 and cause respiratory illness uh and so this becomes really bad during elino years as last year was in which Indonesia lost about a million hectar of forest cover to fires but like I said there’s sort of interlocking environmental challenges so the second that we want to draw your attention to is this issue of flooding and sea level rise so this becomes especially
pronounced uh as climate change is going to increase sea levels over the the next few decades uh and it’s going to become especially catastrophic in urban coastal areas in Southeast Asia in which you face land subsidence right Jakarta is sinking which means that in jakarta’s case it faces about $300 million and damages from flooding every year right so this is another and I think one of the more recent environmental challenges that’s uh come on the scene in the past decade or so is the issue of Mining and
natural resource extraction so the most famous would be the issue of of nickel Indonesia supplies about 50% of the world’s nickel which is a key input to electric vehicle batteries um it sits on approximately 20% of global reserves of nickel and so as the Ed industry picks up pace Indonesia is going to continue to extract this precious metal now the negative externality of the extraction process is that the smelting of nickel uh combines the metal with various toxic chemicals in order to purify it that then get dejected into waterways at the
end of the smelting process right so a consequence of this is environmental degradation right so this is the first observation which is that Indonesia faces very serious environmental challenges the second observation is that despite these problems very few politicians and IND India seem to really care about producing Environmental Policy so at least at the national level politicians care more about Economic Development and and what Eve warber Burton calls resource nationally and so you can see this in the recent export ban on Raw nickel
right this is jao’s initiative to boost Economic Development by promoting the uh development of a domestic uh nickel refinement industry right but this of course incentivizes it further extraction on the part of domestic players there’s a blanket ban on New Forest conversions in primary forests uh but this hasn’t really been matched with genuine enforcement right it gets passed down to the district level and District officials don’t do a tremendous job of enforcing this blanket van but in Indonesia uh with.
Decentralization in the early 2000s local governments were nominally handed the authority to manage the environment right so even though you see these things happening at the national level most of the action ought to be at the local level so for instance Reven VES derived from logging permits and Mining concessions these things constitute own source revenues which are scrutinized less than central government transfers and therefore this provides politicians at the local level with an incentive to court this sort of extraction right
because they prefer own source revenues over central government transfer and. So here again you see very little action at the local level the Frontline enforcement of Environmental Protections like the blanket band for instance this Frontline enforcement is given to District level officials but District level officials are captured by clientalism at a much higher rate than National level government official officials right and so again all of this is to say that our second observation is that there’s very little policy action

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on this issue despite growing severity and then the third observation and this comes from data that we collected for this project the third observation is that despite these problems being real and serious and politicians doing very little voters actually really care about environmental policy so what I’m showing you here on the x-axis is the percentage of respondents in Indonesia who said the issue of pollution was very important okay in this red dotted line is the average across all different provinces
in Indonesia and you see about 58% of respondents saying pollution is very important to them they want to see government action on this issue now it’s broken down by province on the y axis you see a lot of variation across provinces that we could I’m sure discuss for uh quite a long time um but you know just to draw your attention you see at the top sui bat which is um a province that’s faced a lot of rare earth metal extraction uh over the past uh decade or so right so here you’re seeing a lot of
the pollution around say the extraction of Niel and we think these three observations are puzzling right so voters care about environmental issues and so you know standard theories of political representation from political science from economics would predict that politicians would move their policy to align with the preference of Voters it’s a sort of a downan median Theory voter median voter Theory right if they didn’t they would face electoral sanctioning so this motivates for us to the question that we try and answer.
Which is why do Indonesian politicians underproduce policy to protect the environment what we do in the paper and what I’ll show you in this presentation is that we develop a I think very simple model policy and action that draws attention to two key frictions for the production of policy so the first is what we call the costs to policy action so these are costs incurred by politicians who may face a range of costs for deviation from the status quo which is in this case environmental exploitation and so there’s many ways to think about this
one way is that politicians who deviate from status quo environmental exploitation May face costs from say corporations or plantation owners who can withhold campaign financing from those politicians who deviate and that’s a very simple way voters also face costs but they face costs to communication it’s costly for voters to take time out of their day to communicate their preferences on Environmental Policy to politicians and of course there’s an opport opportunity cost to communicating this preference uh of Environmental
Policy action and that it’s difficult to then say you care about a different issue right and this in turn leads to politicians misperceiving voter preferences if voters are not communicated because they face this cost politicians are going to underestimate the extent to which voters demand action on that issue so I’ll explain a little bit later on in Greater detail how we’re thinking about these two costs but we think that this provides with sort of enough of a framework to evaluate uh these sorts of hypotheses
about the cost action the cost of communication and in order to evaluate these hypotheses whether or not they’re preventing policy action from occurring We join two sources of data the first is a voter survey that we conducted in December 2023 and this is about 5,200 Indonesian voters and we ask them for their preferences for Environmental Policy okay the second source of data is a candidate survey it’s a panel survey of legislative candidates at the local level in Indonesia it’s a three-wave survey so. We
conducted this survey in November January and then April the final wave is ongoing right now and it’s a panel in the sense that we surveyed the same politicians each each three time each of the three times and in the survey we engaged politicians preferences their own preferences for Environmental Policy we engaged their perceptions of how they thought voters cared about environmental policy and then in the the second wave of the survey we did something unique which is that we conducted an experiment in which we provided half of the
politicians with information about what their voters wanted right to see how it then changed their preferences and their perceptions for um for environmental policy and so to sort save you the suspense I’ll just give you the three main findings that I’m going to show you in the next 30 minutes to talk so the first finding is that we do this descriptive exercise where we compare the preference of Voters to the preferences of politicians when it comes to environmental policy and I’m going to show you that
voters demand environmental action they care more about the environment than politicians do second politicians underestimate how much voters want Environmental Policy so we ask politicians how much do you think voters care about this issue and they radically underestimate how much voters want the second finding relates to this experience that I just mentioned to you and so I said that there’s this big gap between what politicians think voters want what voters actually want and so the experiment tries to correct this Gap
right we try and shorten the distance between those two things to see if it then leads politicians to demand policy or excuse me produce policy and so what we show is that providing politicians with correct information about their voters preferences leads to learning right politicians learn what their voters want we can show this um and it leads to some uptake of politicians preferring Environmental Policy but it doesn’t lead politicians to actually support concrete policy proposals right so in other words.
They’re learning about their voter’s preferences they themselves are observing some preference change but it doesn’t actually lead them to support Environmental Policy right so talk is very cheap in other and we think this is sort of puzzling right um there’s some evidence of learning taking place but it doesn’t lead to actual support for new policy why is this the case right and so what we do with the third finding is we try and explain this policy and action and what we do is we take aim at
these costs policy action that I was describing earlier focusing on the extra legal costs that clientalism at a local level in IND and this draws on data from local public officials assets that they have to submit to the anti-corruption commission and we assume that if politicians in a given District have high levels of assets that means there’s high levels of Appliance and I think this is a fair assumption in right the wages and salaries of public officials are low uh the only way to get rich is typically
through clients list exchange what we show using this index is that this experiment worked to increase policy action but only in places where the extent of elite capture is low so in other words in these districts where politicians are not faced with serious extra legal costs for deviation from the status quo then providing them with information about what voters wanted actually LED them to support policy consistent with voter preferences so these are sort of the three findings that I’ll make my way through over the next uh I guess 30
minutes or so and feel free to stop me as I go you have questions okay so this paper is co-authored with an economist so we have a formal model in the paper uh so I’ll do a very sort of brief job of explaining what this formal model is doing so we developed this this simple model of policy and action like I said so imagine you have two sets of actors right voters and politicians and voters want to express a policy preference call it B but expressing this preference is costly so this is a cost parameter C and you can think narrowly or flexibly
about this cost parameter it takes time takes press preferences uh that incurs opportunity costs on things you might be doing otherwise um and what this means is that all else equal voters are going to underexpress their true policy preference be even if that cost is very narrow or very very small they’re still going to underexpress by some margin politicians for their part generally want to produce some policy out come call it P right and they want to do that as a function of v voter policy preferences because if they
didn’t do so then they would face Le to sanction but policy action itself is also costly right so again we can think about this flexibly or or or narrowly um politicians are surely also sensitive to their time constraints right so all else equal let’s just say that they’re um sort of not going to want to produce policy it takes time to produce legislation but also there are these extra legal costs that might come from say clientalism or or withhold bribes or campaign Finance in the event that they
deviate from the status quo so what this means is that all those equal politicians are going to underd deliver now the result that we show in the formal model is that policy in action is the equilibrium result voters are going to underexpress their preferences politicians will thus uh partly as a function of that partly as a function of the costs of policy action politicians will underd deliver and then this leads to a descending spiral voters further underere Express their preferences because they anticipate
inaction and politicians further underd deliver right so it’s a very Bleak portrait now we don’t think that this is like a genuine representation of what happens in the policy cycle but instead it sort of structures the analysis that I’ll present later on and so what we do to sort of put it in in one words is we take several hypotheses or predictions from this formal model and we take it to the data so the first is that our framework anticipates a discrepancy between voters first order preferences and politicians
second order beliefs right so remember that it’s costly for voters to express their preferences and so politicians are going to have a hard time understanding what voter preferences are and so you know the vocabulary I’m using here first order preferences capture oneone preferences what you yourself desire or want second order beliefs are someone’s beliefs about someone else’s preferences right so a politician it’s there it’s a politician’s belief about voters preferences so this is a what we call a
second order belief again we expect a a disjuncture between these two things this is the first expectation the second expectation that we had going in was that providing politicians with correct data on voters first order beliefs should ENC encourage action it should lead them to support policy action consistent with those voter practices but this should only happen when second order beliefs are wrong in the first place if politicians already know what voters precisely want there’s no scope for this new information to support new policy action
right if I know exactly what voters want and you come and give me information saying this is what voters want you’re going to say well I’m already doing what voters want so there’s no scope to for this information to change anything the third expectation we have is that when politicians perceived costs to action are really really high right say you’re in a a district in which you’re making tremendous amounts of money off of bribes being paid to you and if you deviate from the status quo those bribes
are going to be taken away from you and action will persist even after we express voter preferences right so this is a sort of extreme statement Elite capture so these are sort of the three hypotheses that we then take to the data so like I said you know this framework is a very I think generic framework it’s it’s not specific to Environmental Policy I think it works for other areas as well but we take it to this context of environmental policy in Indonesia so I’ll just go through where things currently stand when it comes to
environmental policy in this context um and I’ll start at the central government level so the good news is that the central government’s taken I think several nominally proactive steps to manage the impacts of climate change in IND so the ministry of environment and Forestry released um a large report on climate resilience and this included a bold prediction for the achievement of peak emissions in Indonesia by the year 2030 uh they also uh committ lied to carbon neutral by 2050 right now this is sort of in name only whether or not they
actually genuinely achieve this I think as a matter of serious debate as I mentioned earlier they introduced a blanket ban on primary Forest conversion for commodity use this is again I think a good thing the 2021 law on tax harmonization included a a framework for the introduction of carbon tax which is also I think uh for climate activists seen as a a major win so in in pract you know in theory these are all uh I think positive things for the achievement of uh sort of rather for uh for for managing the effects of
climate change now the bad news is that at least over the last 10 years the jakoi administration uh their record thus far has largely prioritized exploitation over I think conservation or climate adaptation so the new eay plan that plan to move the capital from Jakarta to kantan I think this reflects very little concern for climate adaptation or mitigation right Jakarta is sinking they’ll become increasingly prone to flooding as sea levels rise um and rather than staying and sort of managing this crisis they’re going to say well
we’re picking up Stakes we’re going to move to alib right so I think there’s little concern for genuine adaptation in 2020 the central government centralized the right to Grant mining concession permits this used to be at the local level and initially environmental activists said this is very good at the local level there’s a lot of corruption happening and this was leading to a lot of mining permits being issued but now that it’s at the central government level it’ll be much better there’ll be
fewer permits issued but this is not what actually happened um of course this was all part of jao’s plan for downstreaming the mining industry and promoting further extraction and then finally this carbon tax that I mentioned earlier um you know is initially slated to be introduced in 2022 but this has been pushed back until 2025 and I think will likely continue to be pushed back beyond that date as well so the good news is like you know in theory there’s all this all these commitments being made but in the bad
news is that in practice a lot of it’s not really happening so again this is sort of this portrait of policy and action now like I said most of the action is actually at the the local level right so with the passage of these decentralization laws in 1999 and 2004 the management of the environment was devolved down to these District level governments K and Indonesia the challenge not just with environmental issues but with really all policy issues but especially those that have distributive consequences is that local
governments in Indonesia are plagued with corruption and Elite capture that obtains through clientalism showing you the number of uh corruption convictions that have occurred at each level of government in Indonesia and this blue line is at the district level or the kab ban level in Indonesia you just see it sort of spiking up past 600 convictions since uh 2016 right so this is really a big problem now clientalism is important for our story in how we’re thinking about environmental policy in action and so.
It’s worth I think just mentioning very briefly how it operates in the Indonesian context so we think about it operating through three different actors and so the first is is voters candidates for elected office in Indonesia policy makers have to shower voters in cash in advance of Elections right this phenomenon called money politics um and this drives up the cost of campaign Finance whether or not this works to sway voters I think is a matter of serious concern and debate but the fact remains all politicians do this
right they spend thousands of US Dollars even at local level elections to to try and win voters this way political parties in Indonesia will often expect but not always but often expect candidates on legislative tickets to pay for positions on the ballot or legislative lists all of this drives up the cost cost of running for office in Indonesia right the election s campaign Finance in Indonesia is tremendously expensive and so what happens is that politicians try to finance these outlays through different mechanisms
right if they’ve used personal finance to fund their campaigns this creates incentives for graft once they win office right they need to recoup this money but if they turn to outside donors during the campaign this creates incentives for influence pedaling right so often times candidates in say rural regions will turn to large firms or businessmen say people who own plantations uh whose profits depend on environmental extraction and exploitation and if they’ve accepted money from these sorts of firms uh
there’s an expectation that they won’t deviate from the status quo environmental exploitation once they get to office right these are sort of the costs to action that we’re thinking and just to give you a sense of what we’re talking about um and the sort of comparative neglect of the environmental issue in Indonesia what I’m showing you here on the y axis is the percentage of candidates for different offices over different election cycles that mention in their official campaign platform these different issues whether
it’s Economic Development and gray healthare and blue or the environment in green right and here you see 2019 2024 and then for these three different levels of government so in this study we’re focusing on the most local level of legislative government the dpd2 and what you see is that in 2019 only 1% of candidates mentioned environmental issues in their platform now this increased in the most recent election which we focus on to 3% but it’s still dwarfed by these other issues development and Healthcare right so
again this I think builds up this idea that there’s sort of comparative neglect of the issue of environmental policy in Indonesia okay so how can we study this more systematically what can we do about it in order to Spur uh perhaps action so we do like I say is join two sources of data and I’m just going to spend um more time than I usually would talking about these data sources in part because um you know Diego you might you might find the data interesting and it’s all publicly available now and so you know I
think we’re hoping that people will use this data not just for this project but for others as well so the first source of data comes from this voter survey uh and this is data that I’ve collected jointly with Nathaniel shat Toyo my colleague at n us and it’s this initiative called cop in which we’re conducting weekly surveys of 1,600 voters um in Indonesia we’ve been doing it since November 2023 and we’re going to keep going until January 2025 we have interviewed about 100,000 voters by the end of it um and I
should also say you know in addition to the data being made public each week about 20% of the survey space is free uh and we’ve I think trying to make this space available to researchers who might have an interest in including a question but don’t um perhaps have the research funding at the moment to to uh to field their own survey and so again if you have questions you want to include you know anyone can email us and and we can try and get them on these are online surveys conducted by cint the company
formerly known as lucid and we use a quota sampling procedure that ensures representation on region age and gender what we do on this surveys measure first order preferences asking voters uh how important or unimportant they think different issues are and we focus mainly on the issue of climate change in pollution and then we also measure their second order beliefs asking them what they think politicians think to be important one of the big concerns with these sorts of online surveys is that there’s concern that they do a bad job.
Capturing population level estimates right that they’re not genuinely representative and so what we do to try and get a sense of this bias is that we Benchmark our online survey estimates against uh what we presume to be the ground truth of electoral returns so we asked survey respondents in advance of the 2024 election who they intended to vote for and in the week before the election we found that uh we we estimated that Pau would obtain 56.
6% of the uh Indonesian election or electoral vote this is statistically indistinguishable from The observed outcome of 58% and in fact did a better job in capturing the True Result than a lot of surveys based on uh stratified random sampling and face- to-face surveying techniques like um uh you know as seen with indicator and um and LSI right so here what we’re doing is looking at the vote share for these different candidates aniso ganar and then broken down by age uh and then we compare these different tranes to indicator’s exit poll which was
conducted by random through random sampling 3,000 voters conducted on Election Day what you see is that these results are actually you know statistically indistinguishable in other words the survey that we conducted did a very good job of capturing reality um and this is a tangential point but I think what’s going on here is that online surveys tend to oversample Highly Educated people in most contexts right in uh the developing world but also um uh in in more developed country contexts and education is typically a
polarizing variable in indes it’s not there’s comparatively very little educational polarization which means that online surveys I think are getting quite good in this context at capturing population level parameters okay so in other words I think you know we feel good about about this data this is going to I think just give you a a quick sense and then I’m GNA sort of speed up I think I’m taking a little bit longer than expected so what we’re showing you here is the the sort of first order beliefs of
different voters um over time and the issues in green are environment and climate change and you can see that they’re not the most important issues but but they’re quite important they’re quite Salient over time right all right the second survey that we conducted is this local legislative candidate survey and this is uh about three panel surveys of 800 candidates like I said these are candidates running for dpd2 elections um and the sampling procedure here involves genuine random sampling of 80 kot and then we randomly sample 10
candidates within those cou uh we think it’s a good survey contact rate was 80% we have a high Rec contact rate as well and in this survey what we did was we measured politicians first order and their second order beliefs using the same measures from the the voter survey but what’s really neat about this is the uh informational experiment that we’re able to conduct so what we’re going to show you is that there’s an error in politician second order beliefs they incorrect incorrect ly estimate how much voters want.
Environmental policy and what we can do with this experiment is reduce that error to see if it then leads to sustained policy action and so at the beginning of wave two enumerators were trained to provide candidates with a briefing right we gave them basically a slide deck that contained information on voter preferences which was based on the answers collected in the voter survey that I was describing earlier this report also contained aggregate data on politicians prep es and so they saw a figure that compared voters first order
beliefs with politicians second order beliefs and we could say look this is how much you guys were off about and then what we do in order to measure the effects of this briefing that enumerators gave to uh half of the politicians is that we introduce new measures we introduce measures capturing politicians perceive sense of urgency about different environmental issues and then we also measured their support for very concrete policy proposals so first is a carbon tax and then the second policy proposal was a total ban on new deforestation including
on secondary forests okay all right so I’m going to walk you through our three findings our three sets of results so the first set of results relates to these descriptive findings that I was mentioning earlier so what I’m showing you here on the x-axis is the percent of respondents who say an issue is very important and on the y- axis I’m showing you the different issues pal education economy minority rights then the climate change issues and pollution are down here now the black dots represent voters
first order belief right these are issues that voters say are very important to them in the extent to or excuse me how many voters say this issue is very important to them the gray dots are what politicians say are very important to them so there are three things to to highlight here the first if you look only at the black dots voters care about environmental issues so they care about climate change about 50% say it’s very important about 57% say pollution is very important this is less than the number that care about
health and education but it’s not massively so right I mean these are broadly comparable in terms of how much Fighters care about these issues the second thing to notice is that politicians care more about traditional welfare issues health and education politicians care more about these issues than voters do meanwhile politicians care much less about these issues like pollution and climate change than voters do so here only about 30% of politicians say climate change is very important but here about 50% of Voters Doo right so
that’s a 20 percentage Point yeah in terms of their own first order preferences what they personally care about the second finding what we’re doing here is keeping those black dots the same these are still the percentage of Voters who say an issue is very important to them but now the gray dot is the percentage of politicians who say that voters think that issue is very important so there’s two things to highlight here the first thing is that with these traditional political issues health education the economy politicians are
like very very good at estimating how much voters care about this right these are statistically indistinguishable like stunningly good at understanding how much voters want these different issues but when it comes to the issues like pollution and climate change and also minority rights politicians massively underestimate how much voters care about this so again you know recall 50% of Voters say climate change is very important to them about 28% of politicians or say that voters think that this issue is very important so in other words they’re
doing a very bad job of estimating how much Pol how much voters care about environmental issues and you know we have like a lot of sort of pet theories about why they’re so good at these issues and so bad at these issues uh but we don’t have a sort of compelling way of interrogating it right so for our purposes the important thing is is that they are bad at estimating these things and we’re going to try and correct them and see what happens when we correct them but it’s interesting that they’re
so good at those issues you know okay so here’s you know these are the two findings the descriptive findings voters care more about environmental issues than politicians do and politicians massively underestimate how much voters care about these issues and so in the next part of the presentation what I’m going to try and do is see what the effect is of correcting politicians second order beliefs right and so here on the x-axis is the estimated treatment effect right so this is the effect of giving politicians that informational report
that tells them that voters care about these issues to this degree and then what we’re looking at first is the effect of this information on politicians perceptions of citizens concerned so in other words we’re telling them that you estimated only 30% of Voters cared about climate change we’re showing you that 50% do how much more likely are you now to say that voters think climate change is very important and what you see is that there’s a 10.
5 percentage point up there right in other words politicians are learning that voters care more about climate change as a function of this report that we gave them there’s a 9.1 percentage Point increase in the proportion of politicians who say voters believe pollution to be very important and then a 3.2 percentage Point increase in the proportion of politicians who say voters believe minority rights to be very important there’s no effect on these other issues but if you recall these are the three issues on which there’s a huge
gap right these issues there’s no Gap and now when we introduce that informational experiment we only see movement on the issu for which there was the Gap the issues for which there is no Gap you see no change so in other words we think this is a sort of first stage result it shows that politicians are learning as a function of the information that we gave them the next thing we did is looked at politicians first order beliefs right what they personally care about after having been given this information and we see some evidence
that politicians own concerns are changing as a function of the report that we gave them so after giving them report politicians were 9.8 percentage points more likely to say that pollution is important very important their 9.5 percentage points more likely to say minority rights were important which again had that big gap at the beginning as well there’s no statistically significant effect on the issue of climate change but when we construct an index that combines both of these things to look at environmental issues broadly
we see a statistically significant effect on on this as well so in other words there’s evidence of politicians learning about voter preferences and evidence of some updating in terms of their own personal preferences so what’s the effect on sort of more concrete policy outcomes you know what we look at next is whether or not the information led to an uptick in politician sense of urgency the need for policy action on different issues and what we see is looking at the different issues rising sea levels
flooding extreme heat deforestation air pollution there’s no effect of this information uh on uh on politicians perceptions of urgency with these different issues and then we look next at the effect of the information on support for concrete policies this blanket deforestation ban as well as uh carbon tax and again we see no effect of this information on these concrete policy issues so again you know we think this is puzzling politicians are learning in the face of new evidence even nominally updating their own personal
preferences but this learning and updated set of beliefs didn’t lead to a change in willingness to support specific policy fors so we think you know what explains these seemingly inconsistent findings so we turned to two explanations and I’ll go through these sort of quick I know I only have a few minutes left so the first explanation we consider is that there might be sort of relatively limited scope for updating support for policy action like I showed you on average politicians misperceive voter preferences for
environmental issues but of course not all do right maybe 30 or 40% of politicians actually do a good job of estimating voter preferences and for them the information should have no effect which could generate floor effects right it’s dra wrting down the overall treatment and so what we do here is we construct a measure of high or low misperceptions of voter preferences that draws on data from the first wave of the survey and so politicians that are highly misperceived at Baseline are those that say voters on average believe
pollution to be somewhat or very unimportant we know that voters think it’s important but if a politicians said they thought voters thought it was unimportant then we say these are misperceived politicians and then we rerun the same analysis we look at the effect of the information on support for these different policy proposals uh based on whether or not a politician here on the left-and side had sort of correct perceptions otherwise known as low misperceptions or they had high misperceptions right they were
highly wrong about what voters wanted at the beginning and so on the right hand panel what you see is that there’s a huge effect of information on support for this deforestation B but only among politicians who were wrong at the beginning about what voters wanted so like intuition here is that if you know exactly what voters want and then we tell you voters want this thing there’s no updating that’s going to happen because they already are correct right but if we tell them that they’re very wrong then they’re going to update
and this is in fact sort of what we show the second explanation I think is more sort of exciting to us or not exciting but consistent with our theoretical framework which is that the costs to Environmental Policy action are simply too high in the Indonesian context for this sort of misperception Correction to actually have an effect on policy outcomes so like I said in you know many Indonesian contexts local Elites really benefit from the status quo policy and action which in rural places is characterized by Environmental
exploitation mining palmm oil Plantation so on and so forth politicians for instance may be receiving rents from these local Elites through campaign Finance donations or just outright bribery and this we think could be preventing these voter preferences from encouraging action so what we do in order to see if this is preventing the information from having an effect is we construct a proxy for the level of clientalism in Indonesia and this proxy is based on I think really amazing data it’s available through the
Capa website the anti-corruption commission website that requires all public officials in Indonesia at a structural level to report their total assets each year now you have to imagine that politicians and policy makers are lying on this form right they’re not reporting their true assets if they have five Lamborghinis they’re not going to say that right they’re G to say no I only have one Lamborghini very modest right uh and so what we do is we create a standardized index that looks at comparisons across districts right so in.
Tther words we’re not looking at the absolute number we’re looking at the relative number and we’re assuming that there’s this sort of intercept shift that happens from this bias and we assume that if there are high assets that reflects high levels of clientalism and vice versa and then we rerun the analysis so here on the Y AIS is the estimated treatment effect that informational intervention on support for these two different policy issues and again I want to draw your attention to this right hand panel so on
the left hand side of the right panel these are places that have very low numbers of Assets in other words low levels of clientalism here on the left hand side and then on the far right hand side these are places that have high levels of clientalism as reflected by very rich public officials okay and you see that the effect of information on support for the deforestation band gets worse as we move to richer and richer places and the sort of statistical test of the interaction term is statistically significant here and so we interpret
this as evidence that the intervention worked on uh on promoting support for a deforestation band but only in places where there’s very little Elite capture right in places where there’s a lot of elite capture in fact the intervention sort of reduced support for this deforestation so again we think this reflects that there’s these costs to policy action imposed by locales all right so to wrap up um you know what I’ve shown you are a sort of set of I think three finest right first voters care about
environmental issues more than politicians do and politicians are very bad at estimating voter concern right they radically underestimate how much voters care we did this need experiment in wave two where we provided politicians with this information about uh about voter concern and how bad they are at estimating it and it does lead them to update their perceptions and even their own personal preferences uh but it didn’t lead to change in terms of support for concrete policy action and so we introduced this model
that guides our mechanism analysis and what we show we think is that um the additional evidence points to the constraining role of clientalism and the costs that eles are able to impose on policy makers for deviations from the status quo uh and that how these costs constrain uh information from converting into Pol excuse me information about voter preferences from converting uh into policy uh in the end right okay so I’ll stop there I think that’s about 45 minutes um I’ll take a seat I’m looking forward to hearing your
questions and comments thank you thank you uh thanks Nick for the exceptional talk very thought-provoking and some uh great data that you have collected as well uh really looking forward uh to to what comes out of it in terms of Publications or other projects uh follow up uh so the floor is open for questions if we have any from K or joce or Mark Mark you have a question yeah I have a question hi Nick again hey Mark thanks very much for that um and uh this is a fascinating talk Uh Kevin uh who’s there in the audience uh
I think we’ll also agree that we think this what you what you’re talking about is very relevant elsewhere in the region particularly the Philippines um so I think what you’re on to there is uh and of course we could go beyond that and say perhaps uh a trend in in in the developing World although I think it’s important not to over idealize not that you you’d said so or or did so but one could perhaps say implicitly well and you know in in wealthier countries people are doing more we’ve seen the problems of
collective action on environmentalism and if uh Trump gets in uh again we will see a lot of environmental regulations reversed in the US which is already a lagered place anyway just to point that out that uh we don’t want to suggest that Indonesia looks that bad compared to the competition because the competition is not doing that well either just wanted to to add that point um my question is um so politicians don’t get it basically is what you’re saying and the you know and you’re using kind of this
uh economics based formal modeling so to speak in those terms um there must be imperfect competition because in a very competitive Marketplace if you don’t get it you’re out you’re uh you’re you’re you’re lost at the next election because your competition is is is not sleeping they will uh they will get in there and and and get to those uh pref ref is because that can get them votes right so you know that’s that’s that’s what I’m what what I’m interested in and also
related to that the role of Civil Society because isn’t Civil Society kind of the the social movement aspect that on the one hand should be providing this kind of information uh to society generally and politicians in particular and also you know getting citizens mobilized so that if the politicians aren’t responding to their needs uh that they you know can can be mobilized in a way that they um uh can you know as I said provide adequate competition so politicians better better listen to these issues
better react to these issues better respond and maybe even do something about it rather than just talking about it if they if they do know about it um and and I it was one kind of notable absence in your talk as an actor Civil Society really didn’t make an appearance at all so I’m wondering about that aspect as well thank you yeah yeah thanks Mark um those are I mean great comments great questions you know the F the first thing uh about the sort of developing developed country distinction I mean you’re totally right um and I don’t.
Think I circulated the paper but the current draft of the paper sort of opens with a discussion about how the costs of climate change are going to be disproportionately felt by developing countries and this is true but you know it does set up the paper and the project as something that’s unique to developing countries which is not I think our intention at all right I think it’s the case across the world that uh climate change mitigation and adaptation is being hampered by Elite interests that benefit from a
status quo of environmental exploitation right and this is the this is true in the United States and in developed democracies uh as well right um what Indonesians I think uh call clientalism we simply call campaign Finance right so I think uh there’s a a different way of uh through which these legal or extra legal costs that Elites try and impose actually bite when it comes to policy makers right so so we are thinking I think flexibly about this framework and we think it helps explain environmental policy and action in Indonesia across
the developing world but also across the develop world as well um now your two questions uh you know they’re also very good you know the first question as I understand it is like uh this question about perfect competition why why don’t voters just throw the bums out and replace a politician or a policy maker with a politician who actually supports environmental uh uh protections um I mean we agree it but the the fact is that they’re not doing that right so we think that this motivates um our our project we’re
trying to understand why it’s the case that voters are not in fact throwing the bums out even though they’re not producing environmental policy that they demand and we think you know a couple things are going on in the next stage of the project is going to try and get at this a little bit more but one of the things that we think is going on um is that the costs to voters communicating their preferences are actually considerably higher than say theoretical models would predict right um it’s very costly for
voters to throw the bums out right to hold politicians accountable it takes time it takes information it takes organization right which I think points to the second question that you raised and perhaps this is why you raised it around the role of Civil Society uh which again you know you’re totally right we don’t I think uh theorize or really bring into the narrative or the the argument at all um but Civil Society of course plays a huge role in helping voters overcome Collective action problems uh and to overcome which
constitutes again a sort of big cost to communication is this Collective action problem in Civil Society organizations I think this is what you’re getting at uh can help voters overcome this cost and you know I hadn’t thought about this point until just now but we’re in the process of trying to design uh a next a new survey module to get at uh how voters themselves are thinking about the costs to communicate communicating their preferences for Environmental Policy to politicians and uh you know I think we can include some
questions about uh Civil Society organizations in the next survey to try and get a little bit more of a sense of how voters view those organizations as alleviating the costs of the communications preferences um so so thank you for that that that question um which I think will sort of push us in a good direction in the next stage of this project um yeah thanks Mark I hope that answers your those answer your question just if we follow up on what uh Mark was just mentioning about why aren’t these politicians Ved out of
office could it be that there is also like a matter of like how these different policy priorities are ranked uh in terms of like you know maybe those uh those issues that um politicians believe that are especially Salient in the mind of Voters they are considered by by voters as being um at least as important if not possibly even more important than Environmental Protection so consider the case of say a politician who performs like very poorly in terms of like protecting the environment or you know trying to curb pollution or.
These kind of clientelistic practices but at the same time they deliver broad-based Social Services uh such as like healthare or education so it’s not entirely clear to me or at least I don’t think it’s that automatic that you know this kind of like politicians would we would expect them to be voted out yeah uh so maybe this is what you’re saying you know it’s like right because you’re asking like what what these are uh you think like any of these issues are very important right yeah and they’re going to say
they’re all important but the question is yeah which one’s more important than the other right so would that be worth looking into that yeah so you know I think there’s and in fact you’re sort of a good person to ask about this because one of the things we’re struggling with is how we want to design this question to get at this for voters right um you know one way to do it is just to give voters these six issues and say rank them in terms of your policy priorities I think a a better way to get at it is
that Indonesian politics has this sort of mental map of Environmental Policy as existing in a zero sum game with an economic development Indonesian voters talk about this politicians talk about it right so it’s not as much about like the ranking of Environmental Policy over health or education as much as asking voters how much development are you willing to give up in order to protect the environment and so we’re trying to you know I think this would get at the issue that you’re raising a little bit better than just a ranking
right because what might be going on is that voters you know whatever like 55% of Voters say the economy is important the same number say pollution’s important they genuinely believe these two issues are very important but if you ask them you know which one would you rather have 100% they say Economic Development 0% say pollution and I think maybe this is what politicians are responding to maybe that’s why we get policy right so but I don’t know how to design this survey question you know what I me yeah yeah I I completely uh
agree that um if you ask the kind of questions which is more important uh you know Economic Development or Environmental Protection there’s really a lot that you are missing it’s like uh you wouldn’t see like this kind of like pattern that are still like yeah quite important I’ve been doing like the last couple of years some work uh on popular understanding of democracy and uh that’s exactly the same issue like if you’re looking at the research on east Southeast Asia what do people believe
democracy is about a lot of it is based on asking them uh which is most important is like civil rights or is it like a having like access to healthare and education for all and these kind of things when you see that kind of questions then uh many um will take the more like a substantive or policy oriented sort of understanding of democracy but uh this is this do not mean that they care little about rights that’s a misinterpretation in know way it’s it’s like um there’s got to be a way I mean this is sort of like a
political economy paper so I’ll just continue with the vocabulary it’s like there’s got to be a way to capture the elasticity of demand for these sorts of things right in other words you know how are people in sort of a a Continuum thinking about these crofs between these things right it’s not like people don’t care about these rights they don’t care about democracy is that they they have this mental model that says I’m willing to give up a little of this for a lot of something else right
um so their demand for those things is highly elastic that expected that issue and I think that’s something we need to you know maybe politicians are bad at estimating this number but they’re really good at estimating that number you know speaking of which you mentioned you had a couple of pet theories about like is difference across ability to estimate across policy areas yeah so my pet Theory and then maybe you have a pet Theory or someone else has a pet Theory so basically like you know these three issues health.
Education the economy they’re really really good at estimating how much voters want them now these two issues in particular in a patronage democracy are very very important for politicians the way that politicians win support is by getting voters access to health and education right they promis them that you’re going to get a sort of doctor’s appointment your daughter son is going to be able to go to a good school or whatever and so they spend a lot of time with constituency service managing these
issues This Is How They maintain power and so because they maintain power this way maybe they develop a very keen intuition for how much voters want these things because they talk about it so but in a patronage democracy pollution and climate change are pure public goods which means that they’re non-excludable so you can’t prevent certain voters from getting them and other voters from not getting them in other words if you prevent pollution everyone gets clean air and then you can’t stop certain voters from getting it which means you
can’t cultivate support by restricting access to it and so my pet theory is that in a patronage democracy politicians have incentives to develop very good intuitions for Club Goods but very bad incentives to develop good intuitions for Pure public goods to which they can’t exclude access does that make sense yeah it makes sense I was also thinking that it’s a you know it’s easier to Target um you know voters like more specifically more narrowly with yeah things such as Healthcare and education and uh not so.
Much with the with the others yeah with like you know if you solve climate change it’s like you know I wonder if there’s also like a matter of like maybe beliefs about how easy it is to claim credit yes yes um yeah that’s good point that that could be um that could be part of the issue uh yeah so I have this paper with um Allison post about City size and public service provision and Indonesia and one of the things we find is that small municipalities in Brazil as well as in Indonesia do a much better
job at building schools and building clinics and we thought this was interesting and when we went and interviewed people and these policy makers in these towns uh and compared it to the interviews in big cities what they said was you know we like building schools because it’s very easy to claim Credit in a small town everyone knows that we did it um it’s easy to coordinate with other politicians uh but again with pollution it’s like whichever way the wind blows even if you do a lot to try and stop it if the
neighboring C po then or whatever is still burning props you’ll still sort of get misattributed or uh for not doing much on the issue so yeah I think I think credit claiming is very very good explanation we have part of the paper where we speculate on these different explanations okay and but again there’s no it’s hard to get good evidence on on the Divergence yeah also wanted to ask you a think about the um the experimental design like the how do you design the treatment in terms of like delivering um
information about what voters U believe about this issues and so I’m thinking that one of the first like um chart you showed us the it shows like quite a bit of variation across province in terms of like how Salient I think yeah pollution or Environmental Protection is so when you are um um delivering the treatment sing this uh politicians what voters want and how right or wrong politicians are about their beliefs about voters beliefs are you is this about like voters in general or is it like their own own voters in
their own uh yeah um so we just did it at the national level we weren’t able we didn’t have enough at the time we didn’t have enough statistical power to break it down by their own constituency so what we showed them in the report was you know first we showed them this graph like literally this graph um but in order to facilitate uh the interpretation of the graph on the part of you know politicians who presumably don’t have a PhD in political science um what we did was we just created a bar and then we
showed like negative 25 percentage points orative 10 percentage points and then we showed them this graph as well and we showed them a few other graphs um and we train the enumerators but but again this is at the national level right so these are just National level Aggregates and but we train the enumerators to be able to deliver a this like a 10-minute presentation okay and the reaction that I heard from the enumerators was that the politicians quite liked getting this report you know these are local politicians um and basically they got 10
minutes of free political Consulting um like you know we told them here’s what voters want and so they were I think quite engaged and excited to receed the report but yeah but I mean to your first point I think you were talking about the regional variation yeah because I was think maybe you know they hear that voters in general yeah but again you know like if you look down here this is the lowest thanu 45% and then the highest is you know 70% but again most of that is dispersed around 65% so it really just runs from 45 to 65
which you know it is a very Co charge there’s um I mean what I think is interesting here so this is the percentage of Indonesia voters who say pollution is very important now the percentage of Voters the provinces in which the lowest percentage of Voters say it’s very important Bantan these are these are places with palm oil plantations like this is where burning really takes place and yet these are the places in which the fewest number of respondents are saying pollution is very important so I think part of what’s going on is this Economic.
Development issue voters in these places suffer under central government enforcement of this blanket ban on the use of burning because it means that it’s more expensive for them to now clear their fields they have to use tractors they can’t be burning because there’s more attention on these places and so I think there’s this sort negative polarization going on as a function of this mental map of every gain of Environmental Protection is a loss for economic development you see what I mean and so voters that are
exposed to this Environmental Protection in these places say no pollution is actually not important let us go back to burning because we’re able to make so much more money than we did it that way again this is sort of just I was just thinking but you have like some you know research um resource extraction having provinces uh uh over there at the bottom but then you have like but is quite close to the top yeah that’s right and presumably there too there is a lot of you know similar issues and yeah so it’s very interesting
yeah speaking about like One issues are are Salient can you go back to that slide you had about candidates talking about like different things like yeah this one you have like a quite a substantial increase between like 2019 and 2024 in a lot of these uh categories is it like a what’s happening is it like just better data or is it like that or is it that like I don’t know maybe elections are getting more more programmatic in a way yeah I don’t know so um so I guess development issues have stayed sort of roughly similar so here
mhm in here but yeah Health increase here here over here too so I think there’s two things going on um one is that uh identity politics became much less Salient in 2024 than it was in 2019 you know DED politics in 2019 was very tough you so many of these campaign platforms mentioned things relating to Islam and and so that’s sort of gone and so that’s freeing up space for perhaps these other issues um but the other thing is that you know parties so only 60% of candidates um provided campaign Platforms in 2019
and now it’s closer to 100% now I excluded the 40% that didn’t from 2019 but again they’re just the process of submitting these official platforms wasn’t super institutionalized uh and now parties are like oh this is a great way for us to introduce candidates to voters I think they’re forcing Vote or politicians to put more effort into them so perhaps they mentioning more issues that they care about and so you know this is I mean what we’re doing here is we’re just looking at again the share
of platforms that mention one of these issues it’s not a sophisticated analysis interesting have you had a chance to look at whether they uh vary across space across Province like the share of say candidate mentioning the environment for example no no we haven’t um we can look at that it would be interesting to see if uh you know there’s a an overlap with the kind of like a variation that your survey data yeah is capturing yeah I mean one thing we could do is look at like yeah we could look at or not it
correlates with survey data at a comp level we could also look you know does it correlate with air quality indices for instance you know um but yeah this data is actually on my website for both 2019 and 2024 so if you’re interested in using it it’s freely available nice I I I can’t see is there anybody else raising their hand Diego or can I ask some a couple more K has a question thank you for an interesting lect the topic is relevant especially for me from the Philippines so also facing environmental concerns and also
the Philippines is among the deadliest countries for environmentalists so raising environmental concerns especially involving corporations and lo Parts TR so uh in view of such my question is as a scholar who has studied preferences for policy actions did you come across public opinion on quote unquote Progressive environmental policies and if so how and under what conditions do policy makers support such Progressive policies and so what would a progressive Environmental Policy be for example uh marbon tax production or implementation of
renewable support for renewable energy at expense of yeah so I mean you know one of the sort of main outcomes that we look at in the you know final analysis here is the sort of support for carbon tax right so one of the the question that asked politicians you know I can’t remember the exact text basically would you support a carbon tax um you know the challenge with this question I think one of the reasons why we see no effects on this is because politicians in Indonesia are not well socialized to the idea of a carbon tax
like they don’t know what it’s referring to so at the national level I think politicians know but we were doing this at a local level and one of the things that we found is like you know when we ask politicians for instance do you support a blanket ban on deforestation on secondary forests uh basically 100% of respondents said either yes yes or no but when it came to the carbon tax about 40% of respondents just said I have no idea which we think means that a lot of politicians just don’t know what it
means um and then I think probably the other 60% most of them didn’t know what it means but they wanted to see like I knew what it means and so they gave a bogus answer right um but my reaction to this question is like the issue of a carbon tax needs to be I mean at least on the part of Cl activists if they want to see this policy proposal achieved it needs to be better communicated um to politicians is like one of the takeaways that I had from this particular policy proposal um you know we only asked about these
two policy proposals a BL a ban on deforestation on secondary Forest right so regrowth forest and support for carbon tax we had initially hoped to ask for support for other issues as well so for instance we initially had a question about would you support the construction of a seaw wall like to protect against uh rising sea levels and environmental advantages from flooding um but one of the challenges we ran into is that uh this survey was too long so we had to cut this stuff right so it’s a logistical problem so these
are the only two and I would character of carbon tax like you say as a progressive policy issue deforestation I think as well but it’s more of like a Standard Environmental Protection rather than something that’s more new and in Progressive yeah Mark we have plenty of raised hands here but if you want to if you want to ask a question you can well if uh we still have a bit of time so why not I’ll uh and uh I must preface this was saying I have two comments and two questions so I’ll get at it uh the comments are ER if you’re

looking for a politician with the PHD you can of course go to Anise uh yeah that’s right that’s right wa on he uh he got his PhD from Northern Illinois University so there are some politicians capable of understanding that I’m I’m guessing yes um the other thing comment is uh it’s notable given your point about uh the increase in in interest and willingness to put up political programs by Indonesian politicians contrast sharply with the trumpus Republican party which has now stopped publishing a
program and just basically said as of 2020 we’ll do what Trump wants yeah and that perhaps goes along with your point about us is now about identity politics so uh programs don’t matter uh as much given the prominence of identity politics an interesting thing to think about I think uh the questions are um so I’m wondering about the limits of your methods because we we’re coming up to against a lot of questions that arise and you’re kind of looking for ways that you can kind of get these through you know tweaking your
your in your your data instrument but I’m wondering if there’s there’s some things that can only be got at through qualitative methods and you know looking at politicians in in more detail I mean I’m thinking of you know when you mentioned patronage democracy look at all the work that’s been done on patrio Democracy particularly this comparative study that recently came out by some prominent Southeast Asian Scholars and and look at their work uh and the kind of methods they employ isn’t that a very
promising way my question about Civil Society isn’t that a a way to get at this issue of Civil Society what what Kevin just raised about the Philippines is there’s some sort of you know deterrence or even Fear Factor that’s out there uh that keeps people from you know raising issues that might endend certain interests which would want to defend themselves this kind of thing that surveys would miss right um so I’m wondering if if if if if one needs mixed methods as it were to to to get at some
of these issues and the second question is um because you you raised it as kind of an aside I’ve been curious about this for a long time so why no polarization along education yeah and that is obviously one of the most striking things about the US and increasingly about Europe as well uh or or maybe they’ve run in parallel I don’t know the literature that well but the I know in the US it’s become such a striking uh uh cleavage uh wh why is it that uh or what what kind of theories are people developing that that you’re familiar
with about Indonesia and I think it’s true of a lot of other Southeast Asian cases where education doesn’t provide this uh difference particularly on such an issue like environment which as your own analysis shows based based a lot on information and even Elite politicians albeit local ones uh without phds but still uh should know about right uh or you think they’d know about but but but still don’t and and and you know the better educated they were you think the more they know about but and voters who
who know about this more who are better educated would know about more so you think this would be a factor in these kind of issues yeah um no thanks for that Mark um you know your first question about qualitative methods um you know I mean there the very short answer is is yes I mean um you know I think answering these questions about say how politicians are thinking about the cost to policy action or uh or voters are thinking about the cost to communicating their preferences for Environmental Policy I mean you know survey methods
can I think attempt to quantify these things but um you know they don’t get at the sort of meat of how and why voters or politicians are thinking the way they are about these particular issues and you know you point to I assume you’re talking about Ed and Meredith and Paul and and Allen’s recent book um you know we’re heavily influenced uh in our thinking about clientalism in Indonesia and and especially the costs that uh sort of Elite interests are able to impose on politicians we’re heavily
influenced by Ed and Ward’s recent book democracy for sale I don’t know if you’ve seen this volume Mark uh in which they draw I think you know they’re both really excellent mixed method researchers they do good ethnographic research so I think we draw quite heavily on on on their work um you know I spend a good deal of time in Indonesia I spend time talking to politicians uh you know I’m not skilled at integrating that information into a written manuscript and I’ve never have been um
but I do do the work and I do I think let that uh sort of reflect how I’m thinking about um uh or I you know I hope it infuses the the the manuscript but uh but we you know we haven’t discussed doing formal qualitative interviews but maybe we should um you know certainly forgetting at these Civil Society organizations it’s hard to conduct a formal survey of Civil Society groups I mean you need sort of more traditional I think qualitative methods to get at that stuff um so you know I appreciate the the
suggestion and I’ll um I’ll take it to my co-author he’s an economist so I don’t know how he’ll react to this particular suggestion he might fall out of his chair or something I don’t know um you know your second question why is there no educational polarization in Indonesia I mean I mean it’s a great question so I think I have two hypotheses um and I’d be curious to hear deo’s thoughts on this as well you know my first hypothesis uh is that one thing that’s going on in
Indonesia that’s different than other countries is that um education correlates with conservativism in particularly religious conservativism or what we might call religious is Islamic modernism Indonesia I mean would you say this is fair Diego uh you know Islamic modernism is uh to an extent yes but I would say it it depends a bit on also how you measure things depending on uh um for example I remember like uh uh asking one of the service like a few years ago those are did for Isis um whether like they identified like as a
sry as opposed to this sort of thing if you look at this kind of uh measures um you will find that the CES are indeed um significantly have a lower level of education and and income oh the sties low lower education as compared with those who self-identify Aban but admittedly that was like a only like a the specific I think it was only like two regions basic two provinces yeah East and Central Java and uh yeah if you’re looking at more broadly at not only like islamism but also like a range of factors like a range of like policy
preferences yeah I think uh it’s uh uh it’s more complex than that yeah uh one thing yeah like high level of uh education I think uh they do correlate with a certain type of uh conservative ideologies in in some instances and maybe not so much in in others depending on what you mean by conservative also yeah um I think yeah I mean I think I think what I was trying to get at with this mark and um I think sort of Diego’s comment speaks to this a little bit too is that there’s a lot of I think counter it Indonesian politics can’t be
situated on a left right Axis for one and there’s a lot of uh sort of counterveiling forces at work so I think that this sort of religious conservativism and the extent to which it correlates with education is one thing but the you know the second thing that I want to point out is that Indonesia’s unique in terms of How It’s youth break down uh like sort of generational politics right so what you’re’ seeing here and you can look at any of these these three different panels are just different surveys but say you look at
the sort of far right panel which is the indior exit Pole right the the gray bar is support for Prolo right the sort of nationalist authoritarian figure the black bar is support for Anis basedon the islamist and then the light gray bar is for gunar who uh you know I wouldn’t say he’s the progressive candidate but he’s sort of like the secular Nationalist and what you see is that support for proo is actually much higher among the youngest voters who are also the voters by the way who are most likely to be getting a
college degree right much more than their parents who weren’t availing themselves of college education when they were younger because there weren’t as many econ economic opportunities to do so and so I think what I’m getting at is that younger voters in Indonesia are surprisingly conservative they’re also more likely uh to be uh uh college educated uh and this is I think being on the other hand sort of counter veiled or counterweighted by the more generic tendency for older voters to hold more
conservative attitudes and so you’ve got this sort of weird set of sort of crisscrossing political behavioral attitudes in Indonesia that I think just dilute the educational polarization phenomenon that we’re seeing in other countries around the world so um I mean again that’s not a super satisfying answer I think it’s a great question you know I hope someone does a more systematic study of it do you see this like a a difference across Generations also when it comes to preferences for Environmental Protection
yeah that are very little variation yeah that’s a good suggestion I’ll run this trft though for yeah because you know it’s it’s it struggle a bit how to make sense of the proo vote uh in in these elections it’s a it’s a PR that is quite different that’s right um it’s I think I wrote something like a for Global Asia like uh just published this month I think where I basically describe this as trovo version 4.
z uh so we actually just wrote uh me and Nathaniel and Risa wrote a piece for Pacific Affairs and about Pro’s election and the title is third times a charm third times a charm similar to your proo 4.0 see like you know there’s the authoritarian like brao that we saw like a just when the uh you know the New Order collapsed and then the pr was running with megawati and then there’s the the populist sort of like islamist friendly PR yeah and then there’s this um who’s running with this uh young boy boy who doesn’t seem
to have much substance it’s just like uh you know catchphrases and things and and not much else so is it still a conservative vote I don’t know um no I mean I don’t think yeah it’s hard to capture I suppose what it signals in a more comparative sense yeah I think it does signal a it it’s symbolic of uh sort of authoritarian personality it’s symbolic of a a nationalist vote right I mean I I do think it signals those things um now of course it doesn’t signal any longer at least in this context religious
conservativism which un captured yeah but it’s capturing some measure of some axis of what we would call conservative I think I think we okay I think we are out of time um if there are no other questions I would thank our speaker thank thank you for the lovely presentation very much thank you very much yeah thanks Mark thanks a lot feel better sure let’s take a hold on I’ll just I’ll just be below Mark so the hierarchy is respected two three
smile all right thank you exciting very good project thank you yeah thanks for the comments um yeah in some ways very small group it’s a better discussion well well back to methodological issues it’s quality not quantity yeah yeah I appreciate that it’s both it’s both I just to add to the what Diego was saying about proo by the way Diego I couldn’t find that online is that is that online yet your Global Asia piece yes yes it’s online I have a paper copy if you want they send it to me okay thank you uh is that you
know that what we what we uh observers once thought was the uh progressivism represented by jakobi turned out to be conservativism and that was what you know transferred to Pau so it’s this kind of develop and this fits with your talk I think Nick this sort of developmentalist emphasis that uh you know uh that plus a few Tik tock dances helped uh kick up support yeah have you uh have either of you talked to Marcus recently.