Incumbent bureaucrats: Why elections undermine civil service reform in Indonesia
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1838 |
| Author | Ward Berenschot |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Incumbent bureaucrats: Why elections undermine civil service
reform in Indonesia
Ward Berenschot
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast
Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden,
The Netherlands
Correspondence
Ward Berenschot, Royal Netherlands Institute
of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
(KITLV), Reuvensplaats 2, 2300 RA Leiden,
The Netherlands.
Email: berenschot@kitlv.nl
Funding information
Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen, Grant/Award Number:
SPIN3‐JRP‐56; Nederlandse Organisatie voor
Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Grant/Award
Number: 451‐12‐013
Summary
This article develops an explanation for why democratisation processes sometimes fail
to foster effective civil service reform. Using ethnographic fieldwork on the evolving
relationship between civil servants and politicians in Lampung, a rural backwater in
the southern tip in Sumatra, this paper attributes the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic
reform measures in Indonesia to the way in which elections trigger competition over
control over state resources. I argue that a merit‐based bureaucracy is particularly dif-
ficult to institute when a local bureaucracy enjoys strong discretionary control over
the distribution of state resources. During Suharto's authoritarian regime, this control
rested largely in the hands of bureaucrats. This authoritarian legacy generates strong
incentives for politicians to prefer loyal bureaucrats over capable ones. Politicians
need to use bureaucratic appointments as a means to obtain campaign support and
to develop control over state resources. In developing these arguments, this paper
offers an approach to incorporate informal and clientelistic dimensions of politics
more explicitly into analyses of processes of bureaucratic reform.
KEYWORDS
civil service reform, clientelism, democratisation, governance,Indonesia
1|INTRODUCTION
It is often argued that democratisation and the institution of local
elections can serve to improve the quality of governance. A deepening
of democratic accountability would pressurise politicians to introduce
stricter oversight procedures and to engage in more merit‐based
bureaucratic appointments. In order to boost their appeal to voters,
politicians would need to strengthen bureaucratic capacity and ensure
a more effective implementation of government programmes
(e.g., Besley, 200 6). This “principal‐agent approach”underpins a range
of policy initiativesaimed at boosting “accountabilityrelations,”such as
thoseaimed at improving transparency,citizen participation,or achieving
freedom of information (Brinkerhoff & Wetterberg, 2016; World Bank,
2003). Along these lines, decentralisation was promoted as a harbinger
of good governance, becausecloser interaction betweenvoters and pol-
iticianswould further boost accountability(Crook & Manor, 1998).
This article discusses why, contrary to these expectations,
Indonesia's democratisation process has largely failed to foster a more
merit‐based bureaucracy. When Suharto's authoritarian regime ended
in 1998, he left Indonesia with a civil service that was not only highly
corrupt but also very inward looking and unresponsive. One of the hopes
of Indonesia's post‐Suharto reformasi (reform) was that decentralisation
and the institution of direct elections (in Nunberg & Taliercio, 2012)
would serveto foster a more responsive bureaucracy staffedby civil ser-
vants appointed on the basis of merit rather than connections. Yet
despitethe adoption of a range ofpolicies aimed at bureaucratic reform,
various studies suggest that money and personal connections remain key
determinants of bureaucratic appointments. Kristiansen and Ramli
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
© 2018 The Authors Public Administration and Development Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Received: 9 February 2017 Revised: 23 April 2018 Accepted: 7 September 2018
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1838
Public Admin Dev. 2018;38:135–143. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad 135
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