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This paper presents a new method of identifying a nation’s political elite using computational techniques on digitised newspaper articles. It begins by describing the three most widely used methods of identifying political elites: positional, decisional and reputational. It then introduces the “reported elite method”, exploring the kinds of elites it detects and how well it reflects the composition of political elites in our case study of Indonesia. Compared to the other existing methods, we find that our method casts a much wider net when searching for political elites, resulting in many more people from civil society, far fewer formal politicians, and challenging conventional notions of who is a political elite. The method has two major underlying assumptions: (1) the newspapers from which the texts are drawn are free and fairly representative and (2) political power can be inferred from frequent appearance in newspapers alongside other frequently appearing individuals in computational “communities” of political elite.

Why has an increase in personal piety among Indonesia's Muslims not translated into electoral gains for Islamic political parties? To help explain this conundrum, this article focuses on the role of Indonesia's mass Islamic social organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah. Using a political economy lens, it argues that control over state resources and the provision of social welfare facilities have helped political parties maintain power over the years and that NU and Muhammadiyah have at times played important mediating roles in this process. Extending this analysis into Indonesia's contemporary politics, it then proposes that since 2004 in particular, the health and education facilities provided by NU and Muhammadiyah are becoming less important to ordinary people in relation to the services provided by the state. It concludes that this trend has weakened the ability of these organisations to channel public support to political parties/candidates and is one reason why Islamic parties...

This article adds to the literature explaining a rise in the levels of violence and intimidation against the Islamic sect Ahmadiyah in Indonesia. In contrast to approaches which stop at describing the actors or doctrinal differences involved, this article situates the anti-Ahmadiyah discourse in wider processes of maintaining or securing political and social authority. The first section describes the ways in which charges of heresy have historically served to consolidate state and political authorities. It then extends this analysis into the post-Soeharto landscape by showing how the charges of heresy against Ahmadiyah have supported fragments of the New Order state to claw back some of the authority which was lost following the 1998 political transition. The third section then situates this process in the context of increased competition among religious authorities. The implications of using such an approach are that (1) the Indonesian state’s role in the conflict is not just defined by its absence, but also by its active involvement (2) understanding the rise of conservative ulamas as part of a wider process of an increase in many different voices weakens the claim that Indonesia is becoming more religiously conservative. The more general conclusion is that the role of academic writing should be to contextualize contemporary discourses of heresy by revisiting some of the methods used in classic heresiology.