The Center for Southeast Asian Studies Presents:

Southeast Asia Lecture Series

Speaker: Nathanael Sumaktoyo, Notre Dame University, Department of Political Science, Religion & Society

Title: “Double Minority Candidates and Muslim Voting Behavior:  Evidence from Indonesia”

How do Muslims in a Muslim-majority society respond to an ethnic and religious minority political candidate (a double minority candidate)? To the extent that there is an opposition to the candidate, would such an opposition be driven more by the candidate’s ethnicity or religion? Taking advantage of the presence of an ethnic and religious minority candidate in a gubernatorial election in Indonesian capital Jakarta and employing both experimental and observational designs, Sumaktoyo finds that ethnic considerations drive voters’ choices more than religious ones. Ethnic sentiment and the candidate’s ethnic background negatively affected voter support for the candidate more than religious sentiment and the candidate’s religious background. This finding holds even after accounting for various voter characteristics. He discusses how these findings inform our understanding of the limits and extents of religious influence on Muslim voting behavior.

Sumaktoyo is a postdoctoral fellow with the Global Religion Research Initiative hosted in the Department of Sociology, the University of Notre Dame. His academic interests cover religion and politics, political behavior, political psychology, religious freedom, social and political tolerance, and political networks. He received his Ph.D. in political science in May 2018 from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to a Ph.D., he has an M.S. in computational statistics and an M.A. in social psychology. In the summer of 2012, he interned as political data analyst for Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign Headquarters in Chicago.