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The strengthening of political identities, including the use of Islamic populism, has widely been used to explain the electoral victories and defeats of candidates at the municipal, provincial, and national levels. However, no study has been found to investigate this phenomenon in the village elections (pilkades) of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Our research, conducted in ten villages, did not find a tendency to use Islamic populism. Rather, in two villages—Baleharjo, Gunungkidul, and Temon Kulon, Kulon Progo—we identified an interesting phenomenon: the principle of inclusivity was used to ensure that competition was open to candidates of all backgrounds, including religious minorities. This article seeks to investigate this trend, which enabled religious minorities to be elected to the highest position within the village government: chief. It finds that minority candidates' electoral victory was made possible by several factors. Importantly, Islam's limited penetration into suburban Java restricted its ability to be used for identity politics in village elections.

Research on electoral politics in post-conflict areas tended to place religious primordiality as a key explanation for electoral preferences and voting behaviour. Although they contribute to explaining fragmentation and patterns of relationships between groups, they ignore personal networks in electoral consolidation. Based on the case study in the 2019 legislative election in Ambon Indonesia, this article discusses the strategies of women candidates who cross religious primordialism. This study found that women candidates seek to use personal networks to help them consolidate constituencies and votes in interfaith communities. This situation happened in the context where there was a tight competition between candidates because of the electoral system and simultaneous elections. Candidates cannot rely on party machines or local institutions so they have to look for alternative strategies. The Ambon case shows that women candidates use personal networks to cross primordial division, which is a constituency characterized by residence locations divided on a religious basis. Personal networks appear in various forms and functions, but all contribute to additional votes as well as a new trend in which politicians approach interfaith communities. In this sense, electoral democracy in a divided society can contribute to the maintenance of peace.

Political machines are widely evident in Indonesian elections, particularly in the sale of political services and use of clientelistic strategies. However, in several cases candidates have created political machines without buying political services or employing clientelistic strategies. Using a qualitative approach to examine the 2018 village chief election in Ngestiharjo, Yogyakarta, this article explains how electoral challengers can use political machines without buying political services, as well as the reason such challengers and their machines decide not to employ clientelism in their search for electoral victory. The author shows that several factors, including elite fragmentation, candidate recruitment, socio-political networks, and the existence of a shared enemy effectively nullify the buying of political services and the use of clientelistic strategies. This article shows that local village contexts, as well as reliance on social bonds, enable challengers to avoid the transactionalism and clientelism that have long characterised political machines. This is further supported by the ability of a challenger and his socio-political network to exploit the weaknesses of the incumbent.