A Quest of Presidential Identification (Pres-ID)

• In Event: Following the Leaders? The Impact of Dynamic Individuals

Abstract

Earlier in April 2019, sympathizers of the challenger Prabowo Subianto flooded streets in Jakarta, Indonesia. On January 6, 2021, supporters of the US incumbent president Donald Trump surged to Capitol Hill violently. Two years later, on January 8, 2023, sympathizers of the Brazilian incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, also violently stormed key government buildings. Beyond those insurrections and massive protests, supporters of competing presidential candidates also differed in their opinions concerning various issues. One may wonder why voters unwaveringly stand behind the presidential candidates.

While the literature on partisanship, populism, and leadership emphasizes the leader effects, the micro-foundations of favorability towards a particular presidential candidate is understudied. Furthermore, some may refer to the presidents’ supporters as partisans, but a systematic study to conceptualize and examine leader-based partisanship has not been attempted. Drawing on the literature on the psychological model of voting behavior (e.g., Campbell et al. [1960] 1980; Converse 1966; 1969), this research asks about the extent to which a presidential candidate generates affective attachment and group identification, later conceptualized as presidential identification or Pres-ID. As affection and identification reside at the micro level, how do leader attributes and contextual settings matter in forging presidential-based partisanship? Under what conditions do presidential candidates shape citizens' political affection and identification?

This study attempts to conceptualize Pres-ID by arguing that affective attachment towards a presidential candidate might operate the same as the Party-ID model though its characteristics might differ due to the origins and nature. While voters with Pres-ID might employ perceptual screen and heuristics, presidential identification is constrained by the electoral survival of political leaders, which situate Pres-ID to be short-lived and endogenous in nature though its implications on either attitudinal or behavioral outcomes might mimic Party-ID. I theorize that campaign exposures and political messages orchestrated by presidential candidates are critical origins of Pres-ID.

Given the fact that Indonesia suffers from weak party system institutionalization—leading to consistently low Party-ID—and maintains an active cleavage between Islamist and nationalist groups, the new democracy meets the scope conditions of Pres-ID theory. As the developing democracy conducted its general election in February 2024, I tested and explored Pres-ID by fielding multiple research strategies, including, panel survey, survey and quasi-experiments, and in-depth interviews.

The two-wave panel study for about 1200 respondents generally suggests that the Pres-ID develops when voters are exposed to candidate appeals approaching the voting day. In addition, though I did not find a convincing result from the quasi-experiment, in two survey experiments, first deployed for 700 students and then for the general voting population (400 respondents), I found that political messages delivered by a top political leader, approximated through a presidential candidate, explicate the sources of how Pres-ID develops, conditional on the prototypicality between the leader and the masses. In Indonesia, Islamist prototypicality is convincingly the case.

Furthermore, in-depth interviews with the presidential supporters reveal that the mechanisms of the ways how they develop Pres-ID differ in two ways: mediated and unmediated development of Pres-ID. Yet, the mediated mechanism only works for the Islamist voters where the Islamic ulema plays a significant role as the mediator. Observing the origins of Pres-ID and how it develops may uncover the pathways of its consequence and how electoral democracy works for broader implications.

Author

• Arya Budi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign