Morality policies and the prospect for inclusive citizenship in decentralized Indonesia: A study of West Java

This study examines the making of exclusionary morality policies and how those policies have affected the lives of faith-based and gender-based minority groups in West Java, Indonesia. Combining policy review, in-depth case studies, and survey, we identify distinct patterns of exclusion, which are top-down for faith-based minorities and bottom-up for sexual/gender minorities. Around 121 exclusionary morality policies may contribute to such exclusion and these policies were adopted via three pathways of policy-making, i.e., government-led, party-led, and religious group-led policy-making processes. However, regardless of the pathways, our research also suggests that exclusionary morality policies are more likely to get adopted where decentralization has been followed with an alignment of interest between politicians who need to secure the support of the majority, conservative religious groups seeking access to policy-making, and voters who prefer to cast their votes for candidates of the same ethnicity and gender.