Received: 9 February 2017 Revised: 23 April 2018 Accepted: 7 September 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pad.1838

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.

KEY W ORDS

civil service reform, clientelism, democratisation, governance, Indonesia

1 | I N T RO D U CT I O N of good governance, because closer interaction between voters and pol-

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, 2006). This “principal‐agent approach” underpins a range
of policy initiatives aimed at boosting “accountability relations,” such as
those aimed 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
iticians would 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 serve to foster a more responsive bureaucracy staffed by civil ser-
vants appointed on the basis of merit rather than connections. Yet
despite the adoption of a range of policies 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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136
(2006) find, for example, that aspirant bureaucrats still have to pay hefty
fees (of up to 27 times their starting salary) in order to enter the civil ser-
vice. Performance appraisals have little real impact, and promotions sim-
ilarly require sizable bribes (Turner, Imbaruddin, & Sutiyono, 2009). On
the basis of interviews with civil servants, Blunt, Turner, and Lindroth
(2012a, p. 215; see also Blunt et al., 2012b) come to a particularly damn-
ing conclusion: “[W] hat matters is who you know, what and who you
pay, and to whom you pledge loyalty, [while] initiative, excellence and
results matter little” (see also Brinkerhoff & Wetterberg, 2013; Rosser
& Fahmi, 2016; Wihantoro, Lowe, Cooper, & Manochin, 2015).
So why has Indonesia's democratisation process not been more
successful in fostering a merit‐based bureaucracy? Using ethnographic
fieldwork on the evolving relationship between civil servants and pol-
iticians in Lampung, a rural backwater in the southern tip in Sumatra,
this article argues that the failure of bureaucratic reform measures in
Indonesia is due to the way in which elections have triggered compe-
tition over control over state resources. In doing so, this article
responds to the call in recent literature on public sector management
for more “micro‐level studies of bureaucratic politics” (Berman,
2015; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2015; Pepinsky, Pierskalla, & Sacks,
2017, p. 1316). Whereas this literature often focuses on technical
interventions and formal regulations, this article provides an approach
to study how informal and clientelistic dimensions of politics shape
prevailing incentive structures. I argue that a merit‐based bureaucracy
is particularly difficult to institute when a local bureaucracy enjoys
strong discretionary control over the distribution of state resources.
In clientelistic political arenas, this discretionary control matters
greatly. When bureaucrats can use their control over distribution of
state benefits to cultivate their own support base, they develop an
independent capacity to influence voting behaviour. In this context,
politicians face strong incentives to appoint bureaucrats whose loyalty
is assured. The appointment of loyal bureaucrats serves politicians not
only to strengthen control over state resources but also to motivate
bureaucrats to provide campaign support during elections.
I develop these arguments using ethnographic fieldwork on election
campaigns and their aftermath, undertaken between March 2013 and
August 2014 in Lampung, Banten, and Central Kalimantan (see Aspinall
& Berenschot, 2019). While incorporating insights from research in these
other regions (where my arguments are equally applicable), this paper
focuses on North Lampung. During this fieldwork, I followed candidates
for both district head and local parliament on the campaign trail while also
engaging a range of interviews with (in Lampung) about 35 civil servants,
politicians, and civil society actors. The advantage of such an ethno-
graphic approach over purely interview‐based studies is that it enabled
the study of informal and sometimes secretive exchanges between politi-
cians and bureaucrats. As I hope this article will show, these informal
exchanges are crucial to understand the obstacles facing civil service
reform in clientelistic political systems.
This article proceeds as follows. The first section develops the
paper's arguments in relation to the literature on clientelism and civil
service reform. I then discuss the historical backdrop to civil service
reform in Indonesia. The subsequent sections rely on fieldwork mate-
rial to identify continuities and changes in the relationship between
civil servants and the now‐elected district heads. The final section
concludes and highlights implications for civil service reform.
BERENSCHOT
2 | BUREAUCRATIC REFORM IN
PATRONAGE DEMOCRACIES
Political clientelism refers to the practice of exchanging of personal ben-
efits (money, jobs, and privileged access to public services) for electoral
support (Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007). The provision of state resources
can be termed clientelistic when recipients perceive these benefits to
be contingent on their willingness to provide electoral support (Hicken,
2011; Stokes, Dunning, Nazareno, & Brusco, 2013). The term “patronage
democracy” has gained currency to describe democracies where elec-
toral mobilisation primarily takes such a clientelistic form (Chandra,
2004). Here, the word “patronage” refers to the material benefits and
favours that politicians provide in exchange for electoral support.
In patronage democracies, a merit‐based bureaucracy is difficult
to institute because politicians face strong incentives to develop and
maintain tight control over the appointments and promotions of civil
servants (Cruz & Keefer, 2015; Grindle, 2012; McCourt, Alarkoubi, &
Bana, 2006). Studies on civil service reform increasingly highlight
how the pervasiveness of clientelistic practices generates collective
action problems that bedevil reform initiatives (Blunt, Turner, &
Lindroth, 2013; Hodder, 2014; Nunberg & Taliercio, 2012; Srivastava
& Larizza, 2013). These studies have in common that they all argue
that knowledge about the informal, inner workings of politics is essen-
tial to develop more effective policies that can “work with the grain”
(Booth, 2011) of prevalent incentive structures.
This literature offers two main reasons for why bureaucratic reform
is difficult to enact in patronage democracies. First, for politicians who
rely on clientelistic practices to mobilise electoral support, bureaucratic
appointments are an important means to reward supporters (e.g.,
Kopecký, Mair, & Spirova, 2012). Politicians need to use their discre-
tionary control over such “jobs for the boys” (Grindle, 2012) to entice
and reward supporters. Second, in clientelistic political arenas, the
appointment of loyal bureaucrats is an important instrument for politi-
cians to strengthen their control over the distribution over state
resources. Politicians need the cooperation of bureaucrats to circum-
vent or ignore the formal procedures and criteria that stipulate an
impersonal distribution of state benefits. Bureaucratic appointments
help to obtain that cooperation. The appointment of loyal bureaucrats
serves politicians to manipulate the implementation of state policies to
direct state benefits to supporters (Golden, 2003; Piattoni, 2001).
There is a third, equally important reason why clientelistic politics
impedes bureaucratic reform: When bureaucratic actors are influential
vote brokers, politicians face strong incentives to use bureaucratic
appointments as a means to cultivate their campaign support. When
bureaucratic networks possess strong discretionary control over the dis-
tribution over state resources, they can accrue status and influence over
voting behaviour. Democratisation processes incentivise politicians to
wrest this control and influence away from bureaucrats: Politicians need
to use bureaucratic appointments as both carrots and sticks to gain con-
trol over resources and to entice bureaucrats to provide electoral support.
In the following, I use the term “discretionary control” to refer to
the capacity to influence the allocation of state resources. In patronage
democracies, political success depends to a large extent on a capacity
to influence the distribution of state resources. To be able to use state
resources to reward or entice voters in a clientelistic manner, politicians
BERENSCHOT
need to find ways to abolish or manipulate the formal, policy‐described
manner of distributing state resources. This manipulation requires
some degree of control over the implementation of such policies. This
makes (the establishment of) discretionary control an important deter-
minant of political success. Political parties compete against each other
to establish this control. And they also compete with, particularly,
bureaucrats who also derive considerable benefits from their control
over resources. The outcome of this competition differs from country
to country. Particular trajectories of state and party formation enable
different kinds of actors to gain the upper hand in this competition.
Shefter (1977) has influentially argued that when bureaucracies are
completely autonomous and independent of political control, there can
be no clientelistic politics. Yet Shefter did not reckon with the possibility
that autonomous bureaucrats themselves engage in clientelistic
exchanges. As we shall see, an important legacy of the New Order—
Indonesia's period of authoritarian rule under Suharto (1965–1998)—is
that this capacity of Indonesian political parties and politicians to influence
the allocation of state resources is relatively limited. This discretionary
control rests relatively strongly in the hands of bureaucratic actors who,
during this period of authoritarian rule, became accustomed to distributing
state resources in a clientelistic manner. As we shall see, this history has
turned Indonesian state representatives into influential electoral agents.
3 | CIVIL SERVICE REFORM AND THE NEW ORDER
Bureaucratic reform has been an important element of the policy
agenda of successive post‐Suharto governments. Spurred on by public
pressure and foreign donors, new laws—such as law 43/1999 on civil
service, law 32/2004 on local governance and most recently law 5/
2014 on bureaucratic reform—have been adopted to establish a more
merit‐based system of appointing and promoting civil servants. These
laws outline new performance appraisal instruments, institute a civil
service commission tasked with recruitment for the top echelons,
and pave the way for the appointment of outsiders to bureaucratic
positions. A new Ministry for Manpower and Bureaucratic Reform
was tasked with implementing these measures. At the same time, a
massive decentralisation process has given local governments more
budgets and more freedom to carry out their own reforms (Nordholt
& Klinken, 2007). Some local politicians have displayed commitment
for bureaucratic reform by adopting measures like “fit‐and‐proper
tests,” which require bureaucrats to pass certain benchmarks before
being appointed to more senior positions. Particularly Jakarta's previ-
ous governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”) made himself popular
with voters by engaging in unannounced spot checks and posting his
subsequent scolding of underperforming bureaucrats online.
Such reform measures were badly needed. During Suharto's
authoritarian regime, a bureaucratic career was relatively safe as long
as civil servants supported Golkar and pleased their superiors. The
phrase rajin malas pendapatan sama (“the diligent and the lazy get
the same salary”) was commonly used to describe the incentive struc-
ture, whereas the expression asal bapak senang (“as long as the boss is
happy”) captures the work ethic. Loyalty to one's superiors and skilled
internal politicking were considered more important for career
advancement than actual performance.
137
During the New Order, the Indonesian State was described as a
“bureaucratic polity” where “the bureaucracy [is] not accountable to
other political forces such as political parties (...) [P] arties, to the
extent that they exist at all, neither control the central bureaucracy
nor effectively organize the masses at the local level” (Jackson,
1978, p. 4). State resources were tightly controlled by the army and
a powerful and centralised bureaucracy that seemed mainly concerned
with serving its own interests (Anderson, 1983). As political parties
and other outside pressures were too weak to impose discipline, the
state was seen as a “powerhouse” (Schiller, 1996) that dominated all
other societal interests (see also Barker & Van Klinken, 2009).
For analytical purposes, it is useful to compare such descriptions
with the way in which Gunnar Myrdal famously described Third World
states in, particularly, South Asia. He considered countries like India
and Bangladesh as having “soft states” because of strong influence
of outside social forces over the everyday functioning of the bureau-
cracy. In these countries, politicians could use their control over
bureaucratic appointments to undermine the regulatory capacity of
the state (Myrdal, 1968). Not so in New Order Indonesia. Indonesian
state institutions were seen as a “state‐for‐itself” as it could largely
focus on serving their own interests—not unlike the extractive, aloof
nature of its predecessor, the colonial state (Anderson, 1983). The
political party vehicle of the New Order, Golkar, was largely controlled
by the bureaucracy and the army. Its dependency on the bureaucracy
meant that the party never succeeded in establishing a capacity to dis-
cipline or control civil servants. Not only were most Golkar candidates
drawn from the bureaucracy, but the local government also basically
manned its local branches (Liddle, 1985).
Government officials played an important role in maintaining sup-
port for Suharto's regime. Their capacity to withhold access to impor-
tant resources, in combination with the status associated with their
position, meant that civil servants as well as village heads were gener-
ally considered capable of delivering a sizable portion of the votes at
the time the New Order's controlled elections. Under Suharto, it was
quite common for the civil service to use their control over the imple-
mentation of government programs as a means to maintain support
for themselves and to quell resistance against the New Order. Local
state representatives were prone to present any provision of such
benefits as entailing an obligation to reciprocate these favours—by
supporting either Golkar or themselves (Antlöv, 1995).
This lack of outside pressure gave civil servants and state repre-
sentatives considerable freedom to engage in various forms of rent
seeking, effectively imposing an informal tax system in most sectors
of the economy (McLeod, 2008). As long as orders from above were
faithfully executed and their superiors were kept happy, civil servants
faced little restraint—and often open encouragement—to supplement
their meagre budgets and salaries by exploiting state power.
Observers (Crouch, 1979) used the term “neo‐patrimonial” to describe
the ways in which senior officials used their discretionary powers over
the distribution of state resources to gain supporters and wealth and
to cement their own position. Although Suharto's regime had achieved
substantial economic growth and welfare gains, when Suharto stepped
down in 1998, it had become apparent that the character of bureau-
cratic appointments was damaging for both bureaucratic capacity
and public service delivery (Rohdewohld, 1995).
138
For the purpose of this paper, two features of this very brief
description of the New Order bureaucracy are particularly important.
First, Indonesia embarked on its democratisation process with a
bureaucracy that enjoyed high levels of discretionary power over the
distribution of state resources. Indonesia's bureaucracy had remained
largely independent of outside control from, for example, political
parties. Second, an important heritage of Indonesia's recent authori-
tarian past is the practice of local state representatives to use state
resources to shore up political support. Their control over state
resources turned civil servants and the village and neighbourhood
heads into influential local leaders, capable of delivering a considerable
number of votes. To illustrate how this particular inheritance shapes
the current interaction between civil servants and the now‐elected
district heads, we will now turn to North Lampung. In this rural and
relatively poor district, an unpopular incumbent, Zainal Abidin, lost
the 2014 election for district head against a low‐ranking bureaucrat,
Agung Mangkunegara.
4 | B U R E A U C R A T S A S CA N V A S S E R S
When Zainal Abidin's campaign caravan pulled up in one of Lampung's
many remote villages, he was not welcomed by party members.
Instead, when he—and the trailing researcher—got out of the car, we
were welcomed by local members of Zainal's tim sukses (“success
team”), the Indonesian term for the largely ad hoc campaign organisa-
tions that candidates build up around them (see Aspinall, 2014). These
tim sukses are usually made up of a varied mix of personal friends, fam-
ily members, professional contacts, and also community leaders and
heads of local organisations. A candidate with good prospects gener-
ally also attracts a large pool of local level volunteers who help out
with basic campaign tasks, often with the hope that this support will
translate into a favour—budgets for improving village amenities, a gov-
ernment contract, or a job—after the elections. Zainal had a tim sukses
in almost every village we visited. Before we arrived, they had put up
the stage, handed out the water to guests, and prepared the food that
would be served. These tim sukses members wore Zainal's campaign
t‐shirts that carried his picture and campaign slogan (lanjutkan!i.e.,
“continue!”), but it did carry any party logo's. Zainal had an impressive
coalition of political parties supporting him, yet only some of these tim
sukses members identified themselves as party members.
Instead, Zainal Abidin's election campaign relied heavily on the
district's bureaucratic apparatus. At these village‐level campaign
events, Zainal was generally introduced by the village head who never
failed to mention the budgets and programs Zainal had granted to the
village. I regularly met department heads, police officials, and subdis-
trict heads (camat) who were expected to talk about Zainal's programs.
During this particular campaign event, for example, the head of the
public works department went around handing out official letters
proving that Zainal Abidin had allocated a budget for the electrifica-
tion of that particular village.
These bureaucrats did more than attending campaign events.
Many of them were members of his tim sukses. They were also
involved in actual door‐to‐door campaigning, going around visiting
family members, friends, and dependents to remind them of the need
BERENSCHOT
to vote for Zainal. One of the village heads I followed pasted campaign
stickers of Zainal Abidin above the door of each house where he felt
he had convinced the inhabitants. At another village, the village head
had gone as far as hanging a campaign poster of Zainal Abidin above
the door of the village office—sparking an official complaint from the
campaign team of his adversary Agung, after which the poster was
duly removed. A head of the education department justified his own
campaign involvement by saying “In this election, we are all
incumbents.”
In fact, as the head of Zainal's campaign team acknowledged (I will
call him Fermin), the involvement of civil servants and village heads
formed a cornerstone of Zainal's campaign strategy:
The incumbent district head makes use of his civil
servants, from his civil servants to the village heads.
They become part of his campaign team. Bureaucracy
should be apolitical, but they are manipulated by the
incumbent. Particularly the pejabat [civil servants
holding a higher‐level, fixed position), the department
heads, the section heads, the sub‐district heads
(camats), they are all co‐opted. They need to protect
their position, so they want the incumbent to win.
Fermin's strategising helps explain why interviewed civil servants felt
that they “were all incumbents.” If Zainal lost the elections, civil ser-
vants in senior positions would risk being transferred or, worse still,
be dinonjobkan, the Indonesian term for civil servants who are not
assigned to any official position. “Nonjobbed” civil servants would still
draw a small salary but they lose the (considerable) perks and side
incomes that come with a position. The fear of losing these benefits
gave the sitting subdistrict heads (camats) and department heads con-
siderable interests in Zainal's victory.
Particularly the most local representatives of Indonesia's govern-
ment, the village heads and neighbourhood heads (called RT and RW
heads), have become highly sought‐after brokers in Indonesia's post‐
Suharto patronage democracy. As elected and respected community
problem solvers, their role in controlling access to government pro-
grams has increased. This provides them with a power to influence
local electoral outcomes that is enjoyed by few other actors. In theory,
a sitting district head has less leverage over such village and
neighbourhood heads. They are not civil servants. They are elected
by villagers and the district head cannot transfer them. Yet, as Fermin
described, there are other pressure points available: “The village heads
often also want to join [the campaign] because of the money that they
get from the government structure. If they do not support the bupati,
the budgets [for infrastructure and public services] might be pulled
[from the village].” Rumour had it that Zainal Abidin had organised a
large gathering of all the village heads of North Lampung where he
promised them 50 million rupiah (approx. 4000 USD) if their village
delivered a large majority. And for those village heads who would still
not support Zainal, a subtle form of intimidation was applied. One vil-
lage head described the pressurising he experienced as follows: “It is
difficult for the village head to remain neutral [during elections]. That
is because the budget comes from the district government (…) And
the bupati has intel, he follows the village heads. If someone does
not support him, he tries to find a fault in the implementation of a
BERENSCHOT
program. The police will be instructed to arrest him. I know a village
head who ended up in jail in this way.”
5 | I N C U M B E N T B U R E A U CR A T S
This direct involvement of civil servants and village heads in election
campaigns is also observed in other parts of Indonesia (e.g., Buehler,
2009; Ngusmanto, 2016). Yet it is actually illegal. In reaction to
Suharto's instrumentalisation of the bureaucratic apparatus, a clause
in law 32/2004 on Regional Government forbids civil servants from
providing campaign support to candidates during election campaigns.
The campaign involvement of civil servants is even more remarkable
in comparative perspective. In most countries, election campaigns
are organised and staffed by party members and personal supporters,
not by civil servants (see Stokes et al., 2013). Yet in Indonesia, perhaps
together with a few countries like the Philippines and Thailand (see
Arghiros, 2001), parties are relatively marginal in the organisation of
election campaigns and organisation of clientelistic exchanges,
whereas local state representatives are relatively prominent.
So what explains this illegal and, comparatively speaking, unusual
prominence of Indonesia's bureaucratic apparatus in election cam-
paigns? The answer to this question lies in the considerable discretion-
ary control that civil servants still exert over state resources, and the
influence that, as a result of this control, civil servants still exert over
voters. As highlighted above, during Suharto's New Order, most state
resources flowed through the bureaucracy with little grassroot pres-
ence for political parties. This pattern endures. Although some frag-
mentation has occurred, much discretionary control over the
distribution of state benefits still rests in the hands of bureaucratic
networks (Aspinall, 2013). Teachers and school principals can deter-
mine the school admissions that can determine the future of students
(Rosser & Fahmi, 2016). Local health workers, together with village
heads, make important decisions about who will get fast treatment
of a doctor along with subsidised healthcare (Berenschot, Hanani, &
Sambodho, 2018). Village heads can influence the selection of recipi-
ents of welfare programs and cash transfers (Mulyadi, 2013). A little
higher up in the bureaucracy individuals like the camat (subdistrict
heads) or the department heads still control the rich fountain of gov-
ernment projects, grants, licences and subsidies on which many small
businesses and their workers depend for their livelihood. Though in
theory all such programs and services are implemented according to
impersonal rules and criteria, in practice, they often involve
favouritism, bribes, and exchanges of favours. In this sense, the
imprint of Indonesia's authoritarian regime can still be observed: Civil
servants still hold the key to access important resources and benefits.
Because of this considerable discretionary control over state ben-
efits, state representatives possess a considerable capacity to deliver
votes. In the context of a largely clientelistic political arena, this discre-
tionary control over the provision of welfare programs, public services,
and government contracts (etc.) constitutes important political capital
because civil servants (and village heads) can use the provision of
these state benefits to influence voting behaviour. Pak Fermin, for
example, discussed the political influence of the local bureaucratic
apparatus in the following terms: “People follow them [civil servants
139
and village heads], because they need them to get their KTP (identity
card) or, for example, if they get married. So their loyalty can be forced
(terpaksa).” Fermin's formulation hints at an element of threat: If voters
went against the preferred candidate of their village head or subdis-
trict head, their access to state benefits might be curtailed.
This influence of local state representatives is not just based on
fear, however. Their influence is also bolstered by the feelings of grat-
itude and social obligations that the provision of state benefits gener-
ates. By providing access to welfare programs, awarding an
infrastructure grant to a village, or simply helping to arrange an iden-
tity card, local state representatives accrue a form of hutang budi or
“moral debt.” Their involvement in providing access to such benefits
generates a sense of obligation among recipients that they should
reciprocate at election time. As a local academic observer put it in
an interview: “If people do not vote according to their wishes [of civil
servants] and their advice then they will feel dilecehkan (‘abused’ or
‘offended’). There is reciprocal relationship between people that will
consequently be damaged [if this advice is not followed].” Such con-
siderations also regularly surfaced in the considerations of voters dur-
ing interviews. For example, one voter discussed his attitude towards
vote buying in the following terms: “we take money from all [the can-
didates], but we usually vote for the one close to pak [mr.] RT [the
neighbourhood head]. Because he is close to us, and he manages
things for us.”
With such observations, I do not mean to imply that bureaucrats
and village heads possess full control over voting behaviour. Voters
often do not heed their advice or they might be swayed by opinions
of other leaders such as religious leaders or customary leaders. In local
elections, the bureaucratic apparatus is just one among many social
networks that candidates tried to mobilise to obtain support (see
Aspinall & Berenschot, 2019; Aspinall & Sukmajati, 2016; Erb &
Sulistiyanto, 2009). For example, Agung—who, as a challenger, could
hardly rely on the bureaucratic apparatus—incorporated a more varied
mixture of his own extended family, customary leaders and the net-
works of his supporting parties into his campaign—which enabled
him to win the elections. My point, however, is that in comparison
with such alternative networks, Indonesia's local bureaucratic appara-
tus remains a relatively strong instrument for electoral mobilisation
because their discretionary control over state benefits lends local state
representatives considerable influence.
6 | A P O L I TI C I S E D B U R E A U C R A C Y
This electoral importance of the local bureaucratic apparatus is, I
argue, a key obstacle for bureaucratic reform in Indonesia because it
incentivises politicians to use bureaucratic appointments as a means
to obtain and maintain the support of civil servants and, through them,
village and neighbourhood heads. The travails of Taufik, a staff mem-
ber of the North Lampung fisheries department, can serve to illustrate
this relationship between bureaucratic appointments and the charac-
ter of election campaigns. When I first met Taufik, he was full of anx-
iety. It was the week before the district‐head elections, and Taufik
kept asking me who I think would win. He had been openly supporting
the challenger Agung and was worried that his career would suffer if
140
Agung lost. He lamented how most of his colleagues had been
supporting the incumbent, Zainal Abidin, to protect their jobs. When
Agung actually won the elections, Taufik's anxiety was not yet over:
In his remaining 2 months in office before Agung's appointment, Zainal
Abidin effected a big transfer of a large number of civil servants. This
practice is referred to as rolling pejabat or the “rolling of officials.” This
“rolling” was perceived as an attempt to reward and punish bureau-
crats for their (lack of) support. Taufik was transferred to a remote vil-
lage, 20 km from the district capital.
But that sacrifice had paid off. After Agung took office, he quickly
returned Taufik to the district capital and made him subdivision head.
When I interviewed him just after the transfer, he seemed happy with
himself for his decision to get involved in politics:
Your career can develop through political involvement,
not through working. Throughout the coming five years
when they [i.e. Agung] are still in office my career will
be good. After that I have to make another effort [i.e.
during elections] or I could be dumped. Now I can give
orders to [my superior] while he used to give me orders.
He is my senior [and still] I can give him orders.
According to Taufik, his promotion had little to with performance, and
all the more with his decision to support the challenger Agung during
the district head elections. Taufik's strategising and particularly his
delight needs to be interpreted in the context of the considerable
sums of money that civil servants often have to pay to ensure a pro-
motion or a transfer to a particularly “wet” position—something he
could avoid by supporting Agung. The purchase of bureaucratic office
remains a common practice in post‐Suharto Indonesia. During the
New Order, such fees were already the norm, but research suggests
that Indonesia's democratisation process has been accompanied by
an increase of such fees (see Blunt et al., 2012a; Kristiansen & Ramli,
2006). In early 2017, in an investigation of the national Corruption
Eradication Commission into graft in Klaten district in Central Java, it
emerged that the local district head had been collecting fees, ranging
from 5 to 15 million rupiah (about 1200 USD) for postings to adminis-
trative jobs in local health centres to up to 400 million (30,000 USD)
to head certain local government bureaus.1
This practice of levying fees on bureaucrats is an important driver
of rent seeking and corruption. As civil servants generally put them-
selves in considerable debt in order to pay such fees, they face consid-
erable pressure to recoup this investment through the solicitation of
pungli (“wild fees,”i.e., bribes) from citizens and businesses. The size
of these fees and their apparent increase over the last decade are
closely related to the cost of election campaigns. The advent of direct
elections for district heads and governors has forced politicians to
engage in expensive election campaigns. As political parties hardly
contribute, candidates largely need to shoulder these costs themselves
(Mietzner, 2013; author). As a result, incumbent regional government
heads often levy fees on bureaucrats as a way to recover the costs
of their election campaigns.
1
“Suap Bupati, Ini Daftar Harga Jabatan di Pemkab Klaten,” Tempo, January 6,
2017. At: https://m.tempo.co/read/news/2017/01/06/078833341/suap‐
bupati‐ini‐daftar‐harga‐jabatan‐di‐pemkab‐klaten
BERENSCHOT
These practices motivate civil servants like Taufik to become
involved in an election campaign. This involvement might reduce the
costs of getting a promotion. Such exchanges might lead to other, less
supportive bureaucrats losing their position—who might have invested
a considerable amount of money to obtain that position. The result is
that particularly district head elections generate considerable anxiety
and internal divisions within local bureaucracies. Fermin describes
these divisions as follows:
the non‐structural civil servants tend to support the non‐
incumbents. Because they hope that if the incumbent
loses, the positions will be changed. The civil servants in
structural positions defend their position and the non‐
structural are hoping for a better position. (…) As they
say, “beda pendapat karena berbeda pendapatan” (“a
difference of opinion because of a difference in salary”).
Fermin refers to an important distinction in Indonesia's bureau-
cratic apparatus. With “structural,” he refers to civil servants or PNS
(pegawai negeri sipil) in management positions (“pejabat”) such as heads
of departments (kepala dinas) or subdistrict heads (camat). They face
strong incentives to support the incumbent during elections to safe-
guard their positions. This is different for staff members in junior posi-
tions (like Taufik) and as well as civil servants in “nonstructural” or
functional positions (usually involved in technical or specific low‐paid
tasks such as teaching and public service maintenance). As Fermin
pointed out, for this diverse group of junior bureaucrats, the electoral
victory of a challenger might lead to the kind of career leap that Taufik
experienced.
In this light, it is important to emphasise that these clientelistic
appointments do not only take place at the initiative of politicians—
a common assumption in the literature on clientelism (e.g., Kopecký
et al., 2012). Many bureaucrats, like Taufik, associate themselves with
an election campaign at their own volition, as a conscious strategy to
boost their career. Some of the civil servants I encountered put their
own money into an election campaigns, reasoning that the money
they spend on vote buying would serve to curry favour with the dis-
trict head. After the elections, such efforts serve to pressurise the
district head or governor to provide the desired promotion. This is
why after the elections winning candidates often find themselves
reeling under the constant lobbying of bureaucrats. The new district
head Agung admitted as much when I interviewed him about his
bureaucratic appointments: “There were not many civil servants
who dared to support me [during the elections], only my family mem-
bers. But look how the rolling has worked out. It is fifty‐fifty [i.e. the
ratio between appointments of his supporters and Zainal's]. Only in
some cases, when there are indications of misconduct, have I
removed some of Zainal's people. Nowadays many people are disap-
pointed with me, [they say] ‘Why have certain people not been
appointed?’”
These internal tensions are generating nostalgia for the certainties
that civil servants enjoyed during the New Order. Even civil servants
who opt to remain neutral during election still experience considerable
anxiety at the prospect they might lose their position to supporters of
the winning candidate. As one of Taufik's colleagues in North
Lampung's fisheries department said:
BERENSCHOT
During the New Order there was no internal conflict
because everybody supported Golkar [Suharto's political
party]. Then, to get a promotion, the advice of the head
of the department was enough. He gave the letter and
the [district head] signed it. Now if the department
head wants to promote someone, it is not guaranteed
that the district head will agree. Because it depends on
[this person's] political activities. If a civil servant does
not support and vote for the winner, that is gawat
(“grave”) and dangerous. You can lose your position.
What emerges is chaos and confusion if a new [district
head] comes in. What happens is that people are often
not used any more, they are non‐jobbed.
This kind of anxiety is acute during election campaigns, as bureaucrats
worry about how the election result might influence their income and
career opportunities during, at least, the coming 4 years. The situation
hardly improves in the months after the elections, when bureaucrats
fiercely lobby winning candidate to secure promotions. As Taufik
described the situation in his department 3 months after the elections:
“Right now, the government does not work. None of us work. Only 10
percent [of civil servants] supported Agung while eighty percent sup-
ported Zainal [the incumbent]. My friends are saying, ‘for what should
we work if we are all non‐jobbed tomorrow?’ Right now we cannot
work. People are just marking time.” As another senior civil servant
in Lampung remarked perhaps somewhat overly nostalgically, “before
[i.e. during the New Order] the people were placed in position accord-
ing to their skills and knowledge. Now a non‐technical person gets a
technical position. Here [in the fisheries department] we have a law
graduate, and a graduate in religious studies.”
In making such transfers of bureaucrats, district heads and gover-
nors have benefited from the new regulatory frameworks that were
adopted as part of Indonesia's decentralisation process. When, after
1999, local governments were entrusted with more budgets and reg-
ulatory freedoms, regional government heads also acquired much free-
dom to move civil servants around between jobs (while their freedom
to appoint new civil servants is actually quite limited). The new Civil
Service Law (UU ASN 5/2014) attempts to curtail this discretionary
freedom of regional government heads. This law established civil ser-
vice committees with the authority to oversee recruitment and pro-
motion of senior civil servants. Furthermore, a recent instruction
from the Ministry of manpower forbade district heads and governors
to transfer civil servants until 6 months after their inauguration as
regional head.2 As my fieldwork was conducted before these new reg-
ulations came into effect, I could not observe their impact. It is none-
theless notable that regional government heads and parliamentarians
have actively resisted the installation of these committees, claiming
them to be unnecessary.3 The observations reported in this paper—
particularly concerning how regional government heads regularly
ignore or circumvent existing regulation—suggest that
2
See http://www.menpan.go.id/berita‐terkini/4437‐sebelum‐6‐bulan‐kepala‐
daerah‐dilarang‐ganti‐pejabat
3
See “KSP: Komisi Aparatur Sipil Negara Masih Diperlukan,” Kompas, Jan 23,
2017. http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2017/01/23/17535021/ksp.komisi.
aparatur.sipil.negara.masih.diperlukan
141
implementation of these new policies will be an uphill struggle in the
coming years. As Grindle (2012) observed in the United States and
Latin America, political actors can delay the actual implementation of
such reforms for decades if they do not serve their interests.
7 | C O N C L U S I O N S : C I V I L SE R V I C E R E F O R M
AND DISCRETIONARY CONTROL
In this article, I discussed how and why democratisation processes
sometimes fail to foster a more merit‐based bureaucracy. Focusing
on district‐level politics in Lampung, Indonesia, I showed that historical
patterns of control over state resources generate incentives that pre-
vent politicians from engaging in merit‐based bureaucratic appoint-
ments. Indonesia's democratisation process unfolded in the context
of a bureaucratic apparatus with a, in comparison with political parties,
relatively strong control over the distribution of state resources. This
legacy is forcing politicians to use bureaucratic appointments as a
means to obtain campaign support and to develop control over state
resources.
These arguments tie into a growing perception that approaches
associated with “New Public Management” are of limited use to deal
with the challenges facing reformers in developing countries
(Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2015) as technical fixes and institutional
designs often fail to have the desired impact on prevailing incentive
structures. In this paper, I provided an approach to incorporate infor-
mal dimensions of politics more explicitly into analyses of these
incentive structures. Reform initiatives need to deal more explicitly
and effectively with the often fierce competition over discretionary
control over state resources that democratisation processes unleash.
It is not only in Indonesia that democratisation process spark largely
hidden, subterranean competition between bureaucrats and politi-
cians over the spoils of office. Politicians are trying to establish firmer
control over the implementation of policies and government pro-
grams, which boosts their electoral chances. For their part, bureau-
crats face powerful financial reasons to resist such political
meddling. In this ongoing competition over control over state
resources bureaucratic appointments are a powerful instrument that
might in Indonesia tip the balance in favour of politicians in the com-
ing decades. Until that time, politicians will prefer loyal bureaucrats
over capable ones.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Edward Aspinall and Gerry van Klinken for their support and
helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am very grateful to Syarif Abadi
for unequalled fieldwork assistance.
FUNDING
the
This research project was funded by grants from the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie voor
Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Veni Grant 451‐12‐013) and a SPIN
grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
(Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Grant
SPIN3‐JRP‐56).
142
ORCID
Ward Berenschot http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5459-0785
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How to cite this article: Berenschot W. Incumbent bureau-
crats: Why elections undermine civil service reform in Indone-
sia. Public Admin Dev. 2018;38:135–143. https://doi.org/
10.1002/pad.1838