Conventional understandings of the Yudhoyono years have long been framed in terms of personal leadership. This focus on personal leadership has been abundantly evident in journalistic treatments of Indonesian politics, and in everyday commentaries, comparisons and counterfactual musings about the strengths and weaknesses of Susilo Bambang Yudho-yono's presidency. There is also a long history of academic preoccupation with questions of leadership in Indonesian politics, dating back to Herbert Feith's account of the tensions and conflicts between ‘solidarity-makers’ and ‘problem-solvers’ in the decline of constitutional democracy in the 1950s and extending into the writings of William Liddle over the long rule of the Suharto regime (Feith 1962; Liddle 1996). Recent years, moreover, have seen a wide range of institutions and authors in the so-called development industry emphasising and extolling leadership as a (if not the) crucial ingredient in enacting economic reforms, enhancing good governance and otherwise promoting development (see, for example, Grindle 2007).

This tendency to emphasise—and essentialise—leadership as a personal quality of individuals has almost always served as a substitute, rather than a starting point, for serious analysis of Indonesian politics. It is often said that Presidents B.J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid were mercurial and erratic; President Megawati Sukarnoputri was staid and standoffish; and President Yudhoyono was indecisive and conflict-averse. In lieu of references to traditional Javanese culture and jargon from the heyday of modernisation theory, today's political analysis simply uses the language of personality tests, pop psychology, pulp fiction and the tabloids. Indonesian presidents, it is assumed, have different personalities that explain the different politics they pursue and produce. Thus, after the July 2014 presidential elections, leading commentators on Indonesian politics breathed a collective sigh of relief that the hot-headed, ill-tempered, violence-prone Prabowo Subianto had lost his presidential bid and would not be subjecting Indonesian society to his authoritarian personality disorder and childish antics for the next five years, and that the appealingly approachable, earnest, easygoing and apparently incorruptible Joko Widodo (Jokowi) had been cast in the leading role in Indonesia's political drama instead (Mietzner 2014).

If this kind of individualised ‘great man’/personality-based approach to Indonesian politics is ultimately unhelpful, inaccurate and obfuscatory, a comparative perspective on presidential leadership in Indonesia may prove more illuminating instead.