Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • We Are…KPK!

    Jokowi’s young presidency is in the midst of a serious political crisis. Here is Andreas Harsono from Human Rights Watch.

    On Friday, members of Indonesia’s National Police – widely considered one of the country’s most corrupt government institutions – arrested Bambang Widjojanto, deputy chairman of the official Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK. (For the record, Widjojanto was an intern with Human Rights Watch in the 1980s.)

    That arrest was remarkable not just because the National Police have been a long-time target of the KPK’s anti-corruption efforts. The timing also smacked of political revenge, as the arrest occurred just nine days after the KPK declared Commissionaire Gen. Budi Gunawan — President Joko Widodo’s sole candidate for National Police chief – to be a graft suspect.

    In a country rife with official corruption, KPK is one of the very few political institutions that has garnered the public’s trust. That fact has made it a target, as Indonesia’s most powerful people seek to weaken or destroy the institution (on the previous KPK scandal of 2009, see Ehito Kimura, Christian von Luebke, and Simon Butt).

    This post, though, isn’t about this latest KPK crisis. It’s about the headline on the cover of Indonesia’s weekly magazine Tempo: KPK Adalah Kita.
    kpk-adalah-kita

    KPK Adalah Kita literally means “KPK Is Us.” At first glance, this looks like a simple appropriation of Je suis Charlie, another fun little instance of today’s globalized media landscape. But that’s not the right interpretation. KPK Adalah Kita actually harkens back to Indonesia’s presidential campaign in summer 2014. Specifically, to this:

    Jokowi-JK-Adalah-Kita56

    Jokowi adalah kita [= Jokowi is us] reflected the notion that Jokowi represented regular Indonesians, not the elite political classes. Perhaps a more accurate translation would be “Jokowi is one of us.” And the image of the gecko confronting the crocodile, scorpion, snake, and other creepy crawlies on the Tempo cover is harkens back to the last KPK scandal, during which the following image circulated widely.

    Cicak-vs-buaya

    The gecko (cicak) here is next to the crocodile (buaya), and this reads “I am the gecko who bravely battles the crocodile.” A more evocative translation that resonates with English speakers might be “I’m the little guy who bravely fights against the machine.” It’s bad news for Jokowi’s presidency if he is now viewed as part of the machine.

    This is Part 1 of two posts. Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will get into the weeds about translating KPK Adalah Kita as “We are KPK” versus “KPK is us.” Stay tuned…

  • The Legacies of Authoritarian Rule in Indonesia

    My colleague Sharon Poczter and I have just completed a new paper on the legacies of authoritarian rule in Indonesia. Here is the abstract.

    Democratization has fundamentally changed the formal institutional structure of Indonesian politics, but a wealth of contemporary research has demonstrated that the informal mechanisms of power and influence have survived the transition. This paper uses a unique, hand-collected dataset of information on Indonesia’ political elites over the democratic transition to empirically catalogue the changes and continuities in Indonesian politics since democratization. Our results provide quantitative evidence for substantial change in Indonesia’s political economy over the past half century, with the simultaneous rise of capital and decline of military and the state as avenues to political power at the national level. Our evidence also suggests that the origins of this transition pre-date democratization itself.

    There are lots of interesting findings, but to me, the most significant one is the last sentence.

    Marc Bellemare would call this a “determinants of…” paper. He’s right. There is a danger with a paper such as this:

    The issue with “determinants” papers is that they put the ox before the cart, i.e., the author decided to have a bit of fun playing with data, found some interesting partial correlations, and then retro-fitted a story to fit the facts.

    This is not exactly the case here. Our findings about the rise of capital really are consistent with a long line of research on Indonesia’s political economy. The real problem would have emerged if our data had not been consistent with that established interpretation of Indonesian politics. What story would we have told then?

    I also see a difference between a partial correlation between a policy outcome and covariate that is used to inform policy analysis—Marc’s worry—and a partial correlation between two socioeconomic variables that used to describe the variation that we observe in a particular social setting. As we are doing the latter, we heed Marc’s advice in describing the limitations of our findings, and I think that that should suffice for all but the most obstreperous reviewers.