The Language of Justice: Examining courtroom discourse in an electoral conflict

Indonesia’s Presidential election in 2019 was a repeat contest between Joko Widodo (JM) as the incumbent, and Prabowo Subianto (PS) as the second-time contender. Once the manual counting of the votes was over, the General Election Committee declared that JM gained more than 55% of the votes; yet that count was challenged by PS. The issue was settled in the Constitutional Court of Indonesia. This study aims to discuss the courtroom dynamics of that dispute, using corpus-assisted methods to analyze a dataset consisting of all the official transcripts from the proceedings in the courts. The transcripts from all roles in the court (judges, lawyers, witnesses, and experts) were compiled as a corpus. The corpus was tokenized, annotated, indexed, and analyzed using LancsBox 6.0, a corpus query system that supports the Indonesian language, the language used in the court. Our key findings were that: the number of speakers, and thus the relative number of words, from the petitioner’s side were much higher than other parties, thus leading to more influence over the proceedings; PS’ team used some witnesses as pseudo-experts to give additional expert-like testimony; and even though legal-domain-specific terms were used, we also found a substantial number of colloquial terms to help mediate power relations within the courtroom. Drawing upon corpus-based evidence, this study describes the language used by both parties, which ultimately led to JM’s electoral success.