REPRESENTING POWER: Muhammadiyah in the 2014 DPD‟s Election in Yogyakarta Special Regions, Indonesia Husni Amriyanto Department of International Relation Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta Yogyakarta, Indonesia choenny@yahoo.com David Efendi Department of Governmental Studies Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta Yogyakarta, Indonesia defendi83@gmail.com Abstract—After the big bang of democratization, Indonesia has been employing a dramatic decentralization practice in Indonesia nationwide. Since 1999, Indonesia has been electing for representative council (DPR RI) and regional representation so called DPD RI in very direct way. This paper aims to analyse the DPD’s election in Yogyakarta special region of Indonesia in the competition process among the different group interests which are Islamic group (Muhammadiyah, NU, PKS), Kraton /aristocrat interest, and nationalist group interest (PDI- P). Those groups are the big four that have been playing important role in the competition in DPD election sequentially in 2004, 2009, and 2014. In Yogyakarta special region, four member of DPD since the first election has been represented by three Islamic group both modern and traditional ones and by Yogyakarta palace. this paper more focus on the 2014 election which were followed by more competitor from Pakualaman palace, and also from nationalist group that have same mass with the Palace. this competition was really interesting to explain, how people decide their representative members and how different group compete each other in this election. Also, what strategy and by manner they collect voters in this individual based- individual candidate election. From the field research, It can be concluded at least there are three point (1) each candidate was strongly endorsed by established organization and community to support for the election since 2004. So, four incumbent easy won the competition; (2) the success team have many thing in common for example the focus on the core of supporter (basis masa) by using strategy ‘by name by address list”; and lastly (3) they were employing any symbolic that really easy to understand for the common people such as Islamic value, organization value, ideology, etc. by adopting many social activity and ritual in promoting candidates for example club goods, voluntary organization, and other forms of informal communities. Keywords—symbolic power, representation, electoral, Muhammadiyah, democracy. I. INTRODUCTION Under the democratization project in Indonesia there are growing number of different type of political engagements among the people. Some of faith-based organization prefer to participate in such political party and in the same time they are ready to support candidates for regional representative council so-called DPD RI. But several Islamic groups remains „apolitics‟. The reasons why they are supporting candidate in individual elections are many. The main reason mostly it is about representative of the organizations to have their people in parliamentary assembly in the name of privilege of organization. Another reasons are about political access, financial resources, and to help organization in building network nationwide. Interestingly, there are a lot of organizations including political parties in Yogyakarta Special Regions claim themselves that they are appropriate to have candidate elected in the general election regularly. That is why in every 5 th year elections there are at least 10-13 candidates run for DPD RI in Yogyakarta. One of significant reform demands is actually the decentralization of political power from the previous authoritarian regime whose power held for more than 32 years in the base of power, the capital city, DKI Jakarta. This demand afterward was institutionalized in a democratic mechanism that is with holding an election in local level to elect the local representatives for regional representation in national level. This regional representation (DPD) is a new institution that officially established in 2004. Many observers and scholars say that this new institution is replacing the local delegation in new order era. The existence of this institution furthers becoming a challenge regarding to the quality of political decentralization—whether DPD, in the same time, would bring a region it represents to a better condition and able to reinforce the local government capacity in development . In accordance to UUD 1945, the local representative council has several authorities as mentioned in below article 22D: 1.) The local representative council can propose to house of representative a bill which related with local autonomy, relationship between central and local government, the proliferation and the unity of region/district, the natural resources management and other economy resources management, and also affairs related to budget balance between central and local government. 2.) DPD joins the discussion of bill draft that related to local autonomy; relationship between central and local government; The formation, proliferation and unification of a region/district; International Conference on Ethics in Governance (ICONEG 2016) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 84 327