Agenda Control as a Veto Point: An Empirical Legal Analysis of Legislative Scheduling Discretion in Indonesia

Abstract

Digital publics are credited with forcing Indonesia's Sexual Violence Crimes Law onto the statute book in 2022, yet mobilisation against bills has failed to slow them and mobilisation for bills has failed to start them. This study asks where in the constitutional sequence public pressure ceases to determine outcomes, testing whether scheduling discretion under Law No. 12 of 2011 operates as an unregulated veto point. Three evidence layers are combined: two source-verified event chronologies (136 events, 2014–2026; blind re-coding of 30 events, Cohen's κ = 0.952) tested by permutation; direct measurement of intervals between the constitutional stages each bill traverses; and Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of eleven contested bills, one right-censored. Legislative steps followed mobilisation at a median of 20 days in one paired case against a randomisation expectation of 113.5 (p < 0.0001), but at 568.5 days in the other (p = 0.91). Executive responsiveness was near-identical at 24 and 25 days, within the 60-day limit of Article 49(1); the ensuing parliamentary interval, bound by no statutory deadline whatever, ranged from 6 to 1,102 days. Bills opposed by mobilised publics were enacted at a median of 111 days and bills demanded by them at 1,036 days, a contrast directionally consistent across four pre-specified specifications, two of which reach significance, but inferentially fragile at n = 11. Three long-demanded bills never entered joint deliberation. Comparison with Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States identifies transplantable remedies, and three de lege ferenda reforms are drafted.