Indonesia's Golkar Party has seen many institutional forms over its fifty-year history. Founded in the early 1960s by members of the Indonesian military as an organization representing key “functional groups” (GOLongan KARya) in Indonesian society, Golkar was coopted by Suharto in the late 1960s and transformed into the New Order regime's central vehicle for both political organization and electoral contestation. Although the Suharto regime never permitted Golkar to be called a political party, it was the most important mass political organization in Indonesia for nearly thirty years. After the New Order regime collapsed in the late 1990s, Golkar the mass organization transformed itself into the Golkar Party, which today remains one of the most influential political parties in democratic Indonesia. That means that Golkar, like the KMT in Taiwan and the PRI in Mexico, is both the holdover of the former authoritarian regime and a central participant in the current democratic process. Studies of Indonesian politics have produced exhaustive treatments of Golkar's formation and its political development under the New Order, but as Dirk Tomsa notes in this important new book, there have been no systematic studies of Golkar's new role as a political party in the democratic era.

Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia's point of departure is that because democratic consolidation requires that political parties and the broader political system undergo a process of institutionalization, one cannot understand democratic consolidation (or it absence) in Indonesia without taking into account Golkar's trajectory as an institution in the democratic era. Tomsa therefore concentrates tightly on recent developments in Golkar party politics in order to assess the extent to which the party has, in fact, institutionalized. As such, Tomsa's book is at once a study of party institutionalization in Indonesia and an intricate review of Golkar's internal politics since democratization.

Tomsa's argument relies heavily on a framework for studying party institutionalization proposed by Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand (“Party Institutionalization in New Democracies,” Party Politics 8 [January 2002]: 5–29). Their framework is multidimensional, comprised of a party's “systemness” as an organization, its “decisional autonomy” from non-party interests and pressure groups, its “value infusion” as an organization the transcends the self-regarding interests of its members, and its “reification” as a political actor in the minds of ordinary citizens. For Tomsa, this framework has two key benefits. First, its multidimensional nature means that a party might be highly institutionalized along some dimensions but not so highly institutionalized in others. Second, it distinguishes party institutionalization from party system institutionalization—it is the former that primarily interests Tomsa, although for broader questions of democratic consolidation he makes reference to the latter where appropriate. It also makes it possible to compare Indonesian parties with regards to their level of institutionalization, and to remark on the consequences of uneven institutionalization across parties for the possibilities and limits of Indonesian democracy.

At times, the substantive focus on Golkar party politics strays a bit from the books' overall conceptual framework. Chapter 3, for example, which gauges Golkar's “systemness,” presents a detailed overview of leadership struggles within Golkar. But it is not quite clear what importance these have for adjudicating the level of “systemness” in Golkar. The claim cannot be that institutionalized parties do not have fierce intraparty leadership squabbles. In Chapter 4, after a thorough discussion of Golkar's decisional autonomy from its former military patrons, we read an extended discourse on money politics. What remains unclear is why money politics impinges on Golkar's decisional autonomy rather than simply being an indicator of rampant corruption in the party. Perhaps this lack of clarity is due to the inherent weakness of “decisional autonomy” as a dimension of institutionalization. Many parties have clear links to non-party social organizations and external patrons, and it is not obvious why resisting external pressures on internal party politics is a necessary component of institutionalization. Tomsa clearly is least comfortable with this component of Randall and Svåsand's framework, but by proceeding anyway we are left without a satisfying conclusion.

These small points aside, Tomsa's central finding is that while Golkar is undoubtedly more institutionalized than all other Indonesian political parties (with the possible exception of the Islamist PKS), by global standards Golkar remains rather weakly institutionalized. Tomsa also gives scholars of Indonesian politics a clear framework through which to think about institutionalization in rigorous theoretical terms. In fact, when Tomsa separates out the four dimensions of institutionalization, he finds that Golkar is highly institutionalized only with respect to “reification.” “Systemness” and “decisional autonomy” are at best moderate, and “value infusion” appears rather low. This is an important corrective to the casual discourse of Golkar being Indonesia's most institutionalized political party. Golkar did inherit a deep territorial infrastructure, but Tomsa demonstrates how hollow this infrastructure is at the local level. By the same token, Golkar has been successfully reified in the Indonesian public imagination. This sort of conceptual nuance, matched with close attention to Golkar's actual politics, is a welcome addition to the literature on Indonesian parties.

Tomsa also asks, though, whether Golkar's comparatively high level of institutionalization vis-à-vis other Indonesian political parties explains its relative electoral success (as of 2004). As Tomsa takes pains to note, party institutionalization is an abstract and multifaceted phenomenon, and Golkar scores well in some regards and poorly in others. The problem is that it therefore becomes rather difficult to make sense of how institutionalization—taken as a whole—could be a causal explanation of anything. The alternative approach is to imagine that what Tomsa has taken to be the indicators of the four dimensions of institutionalization are themselves the actual causes of Golkar's relative electoral success. That is, Golkar's unparalleled name recognition and Indonesians' general belief that it is a party of power and government leads to Golkar's electoral success (rather than being an indicator of Golkar's reification, one of the four dimensions of its overall institutionalization, which it then doing the work of explaining the party's relative electoral success). In this way of thinking, the causal arrows run straight from public opinion to electoral success, not from public opinion to reification to institutionalization to electoral success.

Indeed, for all of its care in thinking through party institutionalization and how to measure it, the book lacks a causal logic that explains why party institutionalization should lead to electoral success. Clearly party institutionalization is not necessary for electoral success in Indonesia, as the rise of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his personalist Democrat Party demonstrates. Nor is party institutionalization a sufficient condition, as evinced by the disappointing electoral showing of the highly institutionalized Prosperous Justice Party in 2009. In the conclusion Tomsa speculates that Golkar institutionalization leaves it better placed to survive as a major Indonesian political party in the long run, but one might just as easily imagine an ever-changing roster of personalist parties like the Democrat Party that deprive Golkar of any sustained electoral success.

Viewed still differently, electoral success might be a cause of party institutionalization, not a consequence of it. A final verdict on these and other questions about institutionalization and long-term electoral success will have to wait for future political developments. For now, Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia is a valuable guide to Golkar as a party in the democratic era, and provides the template through which all scholars of Indonesian politics should think about party institutionalization in the country.