You are Fired, My Lord: Deference, Accountability, and Identity Politics in Indonesia

Do voters support political candidates because of shared religion or ethnicity, or can attention be shifted toward performance? We investigate this through a multi-wave survey experiment conducted around the 2024 Indonesian General Election—the world’s largest single-day election. Using a full factorial conjoint design, we find that while voters favor candidates who share their religion or ethnicity, they place even greater weight on candidate track record, particularly regarding corruption. We then test whether voter priorities can be influenced by a low-cost informational intervention. A 75-second animated video framing elections as mechanisms of accountability—where politicians are public “employees”—significantly increases the weight voters assign to competence and policy, especially among those with limited prior understanding of electoral accountability. The treatment also shifts self-reported vote choice in the actual election. These findings shed lights on the malleability of voter preferences and show that a simple, scalable educational intervention can provide a promising pathway to strengthen democratic accountability in identity-divided settings.