Mengolah as Grassroots Political Methodology: Decolonizing Lobbying Practices among Indonesian Youth

This paper proposes mengolah, a culturally embedded Indonesian term describing informal grassroots lobbying and political brokerage, as a decolonial methodology and medium of political communication for understanding youth political participation in Indonesia. Grounded in the everyday practices of Indonesian political culture, mengolah represents a distinct form of political engagement that operates through personal networks, informal negotiation, and relational trust rather than formal institutional channels. This study explicitly positions mengolah not as an inherently corrupt practice but as a legitimate cultural medium through which citizens engage with democratic processes, functioning analogously to constituent services and political networking in Western democracies while reflecting Indonesian values of kebersamaan (togetherness) and gotong royong (mutual cooperation). Drawing on data from the 2024 Indonesian general elections, where youth voters comprised 56% of the electorate, this study examines how mengolah functions as both a grassroots political methodology and a structured pathway for political mobility. Skilled practitioners of mengolah (pengolah) typically progress from grassroots volunteers to organizational leaders in organisasi masyarakat (mass organizations) and eventually to formal party cadres or elected officials. This trajectory demonstrates that mengolah serves as political apprenticeship, a medium for cultivating democratic capacities and connecting informal community leadership with institutional politics. Through analysis of social media data, electoral brokerage patterns, and youth political behavior, this study contributes to the project of decolonizing political science by centering indigenous Indonesian political practices as legitimate, functional, and epistemologically significant objects of scholarly inquiry.