Open Access Indonesia Journal of Social Sciences

Platform Governance and the Heterogeneity of Online Discourse Hostility: A Matched Community-Month Panel Study of Two Social Platforms, 2015–2020

Dwi Valinia Ivanka — 2026-08-30

Background: Service-wide toxicity figures circulate in regulatory debate as though they described a platform. Whether such a figure is stable, or an average over communities that differ, is untested.

Objective: To estimate the difference in discourse hostility between a strongly and a minimally moderated platform in matched communities, and to test whether it changes over time, varies across communities, and rests on equivalent measurement.

Methods: A matched observational panel of 914 community-platform-month cells, of which 820 formed 410 matched pairs across six identically named communities on Reddit and Voat over 71 overlapping months to December 2020, was analysed. Hostility was modelled as a latent construct with three indicators and tested for cross-platform invariance. Month-clustered regressions, random-effects pooling, Newey-West trends, and bias-corrected bootstraps were estimated with Holm adjustment across nine directional tests.

Results: Matched cells on the minimally moderated platform were more hostile (+0.066 in toxicity, 95% CI 0.053 to 0.078; p < 0.001) and more negative in valence (-0.064, 95% CI -0.076 to -0.053). The difference widened by +0.002898 units per month (p < 0.001), reversing sign at month 10.2, and was null only between months 9.1 and 13.6. Between communities, I-squared reached 96.5% and Hedges g ranged from 0.36 to 1.70, so the prediction interval for an unmeasured community (-0.0363 to 0.1676) included zero. Metric invariance held (p = 0.174); scalar invariance did not (p < 0.001).

Conclusion: The platform difference is real, widening, and community-conditional rather than constant, and raw levels are not comparable across services. Comparative metrics need a heterogeneity statistic, a prediction interval, and an observation window.

Digital Government Maturity and Public Service Performance in Indonesia: A Three-Wave Ordinal Panel Study of Level Versus Within-Unit Change

Alex Putra Pratama — 2026-08-30

Background: Digital government maturity is assumed to raise public service quality, but longitudinal subnational evidence is scarce and rarely separates whether well-digitised governments simply perform better from whether becoming more digitised makes a government perform better.

Objective: To estimate the association between within-entity change in electronic government maturity and the ordered transition in public service performance predicate among Indonesian local governments, and to distinguish that estimand from the lagged-level association.

Methods: Two Indonesian national open datasets for 2023–2025 were linked on normalised agency names: the Sistem Pemerintahan Berbasis Elektronik (SPBE) maturity index and the Indeks Pelayanan Publik (IPP) performance index. Guided by technology enactment theory, 194 consecutive annual transitions from 135 entities within 665 entity-year observations were modelled with cumulative-link proportional-odds regression adjusted for baseline IPP, interval, and government level, with entity-clustered robust standard errors.

Results: The adjusted odds ratio for a better IPP transition per 0.5-point SPBE gain was 1.400 (95% CI 0.780–2.513; p = 0.261; Benjamini–Hochberg adjusted p = 0.420); proportional odds held for the exposure (p = 0.914). The first difference was null (β = 0.003; 95% CI −0.085–0.091; p = 0.953), whereas SPBE level predicted the following year's IPP score (β = 0.195; 95% CI 0.079–0.312; p = 0.001; adjusted p = 0.006). The design could detect only odds ratios of 2.31 or larger at 80% power.

Conclusion: Digital maturity and assessed service performance appear jointly produced by durable institutional capacity rather than by annual increments in digitisation. Assessment coverage moved by more than 40% between adjacent waves, so Indonesia's evaluation infrastructure must be stabilised before causal claims can be tested.

Compounding Repression and Electoral Integrity: A Dynamic Panel Study of 142 Countries, 2012–2024, with Policy Implications for Indonesia

Ahmad Badruddin — 2026-08-30

Background: Elections are increasingly retained while the conditions for verifying them are degraded, yet restriction of digital space and repression of civil-society organisations are almost always estimated separately, so whether they substitute or reinforce is unknown.

Objective: To estimate both instruments jointly and test the derived prediction that a negative interaction identifies two partially substitutable verification routes, whereas a positive interaction identifies a weakest-link chain.

Methods: A balanced panel of 142 electoral democracies and transitional regimes from 2012–2024 (N = 1,704 country-years), constructed from Varieties of Democracy version 14, the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity index, and World Development Indicators, was analysed using two-step system generalized method of moments with the Windmeijer correction.

Results: Digital space restriction reduced the Clean Elections Index by 0.221 points per unit at the mean of the moderator (widest interval attainable over the unreported covariance: 0.154 to 0.288; worst-case p < 0.001), equivalent to 0.058 points per SD; civil-society repression reduced it by 0.254 points per unit (p < 0.001). The interaction was negative (−0.094; 95% CI −0.155 to −0.033; p = 0.002): the damage from closing digital space rose from −0.186 where civil society was least constrained to −0.277 where it was most constrained under every admissible coefficient covariance.

Conclusion: The routes are substitutes: repression destroys redundancy, and the return to opening digital space is largest where civil society is weakest, inverting the usual sequencing intuition for Indonesian reform. Whether the outcome was measured annually or carried forward between elections could not be established, which conditions the dynamic results.

Fiscal Rigidity and Labour Exposure in Indonesia’s Extractive Districts: A Dynamic Panel Analysis of Just Transition Readiness, 2015–2024

Hanifah Yasin — 2026-08-30

Background: Indonesia’s net-zero commitment attaches a schedule to the decline of an activity that simultaneously funds district development budgets through derivative revenue sharing and employs a large share of the local workforce, yet the fiscal and labour channels of that exposure have never been estimated on the same subnational units.

Objective: To quantify how contractions in natural-resource revenue sharing and in mining value added transmit to district capital expenditure and open unemployment, and to derive a district-resolution just-transition readiness typology.

Methods: A balanced panel of 118 extractive-producing Indonesian districts observed annually from 2015 to 2024 (1,180 district-year observations) was drawn from the 514-district national budget frame. Two-way fixed effects with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors and two-step System GMM with the Windmeijer correction were used; precision, long-run multipliers, budget incidence, and a quadrant projection were derived from the archived estimates.

Results: A 10% fall in revenue sharing was associated with a 4.78% contraction in capital expenditure (95% CI −5.62 to −3.94; p < 0.001), rising to 7.76% in the long run. Capital expenditure absorbed 35.4% of the shock while constituting 18.2% of spending. Mining contraction was associated with higher unemployment (−0.624; p < 0.001), amplified by extractive concentration and attenuated by educational attainment; however, under an 80% output decline, only 17.8% of the exposed employment would appear in the measured rate.

Conclusion: Fiscal exposure is severe and measurable; labour exposure is severe and largely unmeasured. H1 to H5 were supported; H6 is descriptive. A transition transfer indexed to capital-expenditure incidence and district instrumentation of the informal margin are the priorities.

Policy Framing Volatility and the Erosion of Human Mobility Compliance: A Dynamic Panel Analysis Across COVID-19 Restriction Regimes in Indonesia, 2020–2023

Susi Diana — 2026-08-30

Background: During protracted public health emergencies, statutory mandates rely fundamentally on sustained voluntary civic compliance. Executive crisis messaging, however, may exhibit pronounced volatility through abrupt shifts in regulatory terminology, ambiguous threat appraisals, and contradictory economic-epidemiological rationales. This study investigated how policy framing volatility affected community mobility compliance across successive administrative restriction regimes in Indonesia from 2020 to 2023.

Objective: To estimate the relationship between policy framing volatility and community mobility compliance across Indonesian provinces and determine whether communication volatility moderated the compliance-generating effect of formal policy stringency.

Methods: A weekly dynamic panel dataset covering 34 provinces observed across 146 consecutive weeks (N = 4,964 jurisdiction-week observations) was constructed. The framework combined the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, Google Community Mobility Reports, and a Policy Framing Volatility Index based on semantic cosine distance across 1,842 official press briefings and regulatory decrees. Two-step System Generalized Method of Moments estimation used Windmeijer finite-sample standard-error corrections and collapsed instrument matrices.

Results: A one-standard-deviation increase in policy framing volatility reduced mobility contraction by 3.824 percentage points (95% CI 2.946–4.702; p < 0.001), indicating premature community movement. The interaction between policy framing volatility and the Stringency Index was negative (−0.042; p < 0.001). Compliance erosion was greater in retail and recreation (elasticity −0.514) and transit stations (−0.448) than in workplaces (−0.285). Diagnostic tests yielded Arellano–Bond AR(1) z = −5.42 (p < 0.001), AR(2) z = 0.94 (p = 0.348), and Hansen J-test χ²(40) = 46.28 (p = 0.265).

Conclusion: Policy framing volatility can decouple statutory executive mandates from population compliance. Sustained public adherence during prolonged crises requires stable messaging, unified scientific communication channels, and scheduled transition notices rather than reliance on escalating punitive sanctions alone.