RI democracy weak without social trust: CSIS

A survey found that the fabric of democracy in the country is fraying with a majority of respondents professing low trust in their community.

A new study from the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that only 27.5 percent of respondents are willing to trust their neighbors and only 4 percent said that they could trust people of different faiths.

The survey also found that there is a high degree of mistrust toward the government with only 11.3 percent of respondents saying that they could trust government officials.

In the survey, conducted between Jan. 18 and Jan. 24, researchers interviewed 2,220 respondents from 23 of 33 provinces in the country.

CSIS’s head of politics and international relations department Philips J Vermonte said that if the trend continued, tension could quickly explode as members of the community were sequestered to their own exclusive confines.

Philips also said that the absence of social trust could also undermine the country’s fledgling democratic traditions.

“Public trust is necessary to support active participation and is also important because trust can be considered as social capital for democracy,” he said.

He asserted that no democracies in the world could run smoothly without sufficient social capital.

Philips attributed the lack of social trust to the poor performance of the state’s bureaucracy and the actions of law enforcers, which the public saw as bolstering injustice.

CSIS researcher Sunny Tanuwidjaja said that in rural areas, 57.3 percent of respondents perceived that discontent was brewing in their community.

The portion of rural respondents claimed that in the past six months civil conflicts broke out in their areas as a result of juvenile brawls, election-related conflicts or land disputes, Sunny said.

“Conflicts and unrest are spreading everywhere in the country. For the time being, we can’t say that the current security situation is under control,” he said.

The survey also found that 55.3 percent of respondents had anarchistic tendencies. The respondents said that they could condone an attack on government officials.

On Wednesday, NGO activist Deddy Sugarda assaulted Sistoyo, a prosecutor who was convicted of accepting bribes, after a hearing at the Bandung Corruption Court in West Java.

The incident serves as example of the public’s growing disgust for corruption among law enforcers.

Earlier in February, CSIS announced the results of its survey, which revealed waning public trust in political parties.

The survey found that only 22.4 percent of respondents believed that political parties still performed well.

The survey further found that 92.2 percent of respondents did not know the names of the legislators who came from the party of their choice.

Analysis of the results found that the deep distrust could reduce the quality of the upcoming 2014 general election, as more people might abstain from voting or turn in a “donkey vote”, a term for an uneducated vote based solely on the order in which candidates appear on a ballot.

An official from the Home Ministry, Bangun Sitohang, responded to the survey’s findings by pointing out that the least that the government could do was educate the public about politics.

“We have run our programs since 2005, we educate people about politics through seminars,” he said.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/03/02/ri-democracy-weak-without-social-trust-csis.html