When Mirini was appointed No. 1 on the National Awakening Party's list of national legislative candidates in Aceh Province, she put it down to her local connections. After all, the 30-year-old Acehnese activist was a known quantity: a former civil servant, university lecturer in Banda Aceh and a campaigner for women and children's rights.

Mirini certainly didn't buy her place atop the party list: Her entire campaign budget was less than Rp 100 million ($8,700), only 2 percent of which was earmarked for T-shirts, a longstanding Indonesian campaign tool. So it was of no particular concern to her when the Constitutional Court last December struck down the decades-old party list system, ruling that candidates who receive the most votes will win seats in the House of Representatives and provincial-level legislatures.

"Unlike other candidates, who give money, it's the other way around for me," Mirini said in a telephone interview from the Central Aceh town of Takengon. "People ask me to come, I give voting simulation demonstrations and do voter education, and the people who invite me provide food and drinks. I'm the poorest of all the candidates."

If only it was that simple for thousands of other House candidates. The Constitutional Court ruling turned the 2009 legislative elections campaign, which ended on Sunday, completely on its head, leaving candidates with little choice but to actually reach out to voters.

"All hell broke loose. Nobody really knew how to prepare for it," said Karim Raslan, a political observer and newspaper columnist. "The campaigns were all disorganized. No one knew what factors made the difference."

Come 2014, they had better know. The Constitutional Court has in affect emasculated the authoritarian political party bosses, who dished out positions on party candidate lists in exchange for envelopes stuffed with cash. In some cases, candidates stood for office in provincial districts in which they had never set foot.

Those days are over because the "most votes wins" rule has forever changed the way legislative election campaigns in Indonesian will be run.

"It's a continued refining of the political system," said one Western political observer, noting that voters elected House members in free and fair elections in 1999, and then directly elected their president for the first time in 2004. "There's unrelenting pragmatism going on with election reform." However, some are warning that it's too much and too soon.

"Indonesians aren't ready for this," said Sunny Tanuwidjaja, an electoral researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. "Election campaigns here are seen as social events," rather than for serious debate on complex political, social and economic issues.

Regardless, the just-concluded campaign show that times are changing. While the political parties had very little in the way of platforms and didn't do much to differentiate themselves, many House candidates were out on the stump talking about poverty and the economy, rather than corruption and security, which had been the hot-button issues in 2004.

Candidates were forced to get out and campaign on their own merits, go door-to-door and build up a grassroots following, rather than the usual practice of being inserted as a party crony into a slot on a candidate list. One Golkar candidate who was No. 1 on the party list in Padang, West Sumatra Province, all but abandoned his campaign after the Constitutional Court ruling because he was not from the area and had no local network.

But the more motivated candidates were campaigning well before the Constitutional Court ruling, while political parties spent in new ways to adapt with the times. During the 2004 campaign, parties spent only Rp 300 billion on political consultants, but this time around spending surpassed Rp 400 billion by the end of February.

"Although there's an absence of policies, there's not an absence of differences among the parties," said Stephen Sherlock, a professor at Australia National University. "Leadership is important, but that means building a profile that appeals to a wide range of people."

But for many candidates, appealing to the masses meant flooding voters with cash, cement, rice and other gifts to get them to show up at rallies, speeches and even village dialogues. Analysts said the 2009 campaign saw money politics on an unprecedented scale, with candidates frantically trying to buy support while knowing full well that voters would gladly take their rupiah and then vote for whoever they wanted.

"[Vote buying] is really a problem now," said Hadar N. Gumay, executive director of the Center for Electoral Reform. "It undermines democracy."

The same went for the mass rolling rallies, with parties spending huge sums of money to put paid supporters onto the streets wearing their colors and flying their flags. It's debatable whether these Suharto-era parades even attract voters – more likely they anger motorists because of traffic jams – but the parties feel they have to match their opponents. "You can't afford not to do it," Tanuwidjaja said.

The 2009 campaign also showed for the first time the power of television advertising in an attempt to woo voters. The campaign of ex-Army general Prabowo Subianto's Gerindra party is something of a phenomenon: A top-down campaign bankrolled by his family, with a sophisticated, high-tech message using lots of visuals, and even focus groups.

It's completely opposite to the campaign of, say, the Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS. The Islamic-based party's election strategy is based around slowly but surely building a grassroots network in the provinces, expanding party branches one by one, and it hopes to get more than 15 percent of the national vote.

Theoretically, Gerindra's strategy is "not supposed to work in Indonesia," said Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University in the United States, who has been researching Indonesia for 25 years.

But he added: "If the PKS gets less than 10 percent [of the vote], and Gerindra gets 7 percent, it's going to send shock waves through the political system."

Aside from its new trends, the 2009 campaign continued a tradition in which there was unrestricted media access and an absence of election-related violence. Outside of Aceh, not a single candidate or party supporter was killed, unlike in neighboring countries such as the Philippines, where dozens of candidates die during each national election period.

For all the positive changes in Indonesia, however, voter apathy is increasing, analysts said. They noted that voter turnout has declined in every election since 1999 and they expect the trend to continue on Election Day on Thursday, and during the presidential poll on July 8.

So, do the campaigns even serve a purpose, aside from providing an economic infusion?

Sherlock released a paper last week in which he argues that voters will ultimately cast ballots based on aliran, a Javanese word use to describe people's political and religious thinking. "If they're a truly devout Muslim, they will go for Islamic parties," he said. "If they have a more modernist view, then maybe secular."

With the 2009 legislative campaign done and dusted, analysts said political parties should already be looking ahead to 2014. Despite fears that the Constitutional Court ruling will weaken parties because their candidates are financially independent and less answerable, they are nonetheless likely to field candidates who are widely popular in their home districts and already have a network in place.

With voters having even more direct control over who gets into the House, as well as provincial and district legislatures, aspiring politicians must reach out and cater to the aspirations of the grassroots like never before. While that hopefully will benefit the public, it also means Indonesia could be in a perpetual state of campaigning activity.

"If you want to run in 2014, you have to start campaigning now," Raslan said. Lucky us.