From Collective Action to Connective Action: Rethinking the Logic of Youth Mobilisation in Contemporary Indonesia's Politics

This article investigates why Indonesia's 1998 Reformasi movement secured institutional breakthroughs, while post-2019 youth protests have yielded primarily symbolic impacts. Utilising political process theory and a path-dependency perspective, the study argues that this divergence results from the complex interplay of media ecology, grievance structures, elite configurations, organisational mediation, and access to institutional channels. Analysis reveals that the 1998 success was facilitated by a convergence of systemic political opportunities, robust organisational capacity, and widespread cognitive liberation. In contrast, the 2019–2025 cycle operates within a digital ecology that accelerates horizontal mobilisation while facilitating selective state responsiveness and issue fragmentation. The effectiveness of youth activism in hybrid regimes depends on the capacity to construct collective-connecting infrastructures and institutional relays that translate viral momentum into sustained policy change. It suggests that durable reform requires movements to bridge the gap between digital-age connectivity and the structural depth of traditional organisational mediation.