Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Institutions, Authoritarianism, and Field Research

    I am part of a neat collective discussion of authoritarian legislatures over at Nate Jensen‘s blog. Nate emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I knew any good research on legislatures and policy outputs in Malaysia or Indonesia (during the authoritarian New Order period). I responded something along the lines of “no, because that’s not who makes policy,” which generated further discussion of what these things are for, and so on. Go read the post: it’s fascinating, with contributions from Courtenay Conrad, Scott Desposato, Barbara Geddes, Victor Menaldo, Thomas Remington, Ora John Reuter, Milan Svolik, Rory Truex, and Joe Wright in addition to yours truly.

    I written a bit about institutions under authoritarianism; in particular, on why scholars of authoritarianism need to be skeptical—or at least careful—about attributing causal power to them. It is the central point in a forthcoming review essay on the institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism, and it also shows up in my book. I can sum up my general views with a quote from the review essay:

    There are few theories that can link authoritarian institutions to anything beyond regime survival and general public policies. But authoritarian regimes do many things besides grow/stagnate and survive/collapse. They decide to murder their subjects or not; to favor certain ethnic groups or not; to integrate with the global economy in various ways; to mobilize, ignore, or “reeducate” their citizens; to respond to domestic challenges with repression, concessions, or both; to insulate their bureaucracies from executive interference or not; to delegate various ruling functions to security forces, mercenaries or criminal syndicates, or subnational political units; and to structure economies in various ways that might support their rule. Authoritarian institutions will tell us little about these outcomes, and if we are to explain variation in these factors across regimes and across time, close attention to other variables will be necessary.

    Why I am so skeptical of institutional approaches to authoritarianism? I think that it comes down to my field experience in Southeast Asia, which was in the end animated around the question of where policies come from (a “dependent variable first” approach) rather than a desire to theorize institutions and estimate their causal effects (an “independent variable first” approach) in two very different authoritarian contexts. This orientation led me to look for the drivers of policy rather than the effects of institutions, so when I see various general claims about the effects of institutions, I filter them through my own country knowledge.

    (I also might just be a contrarian by disposition, but let’s leave that aside for now.)

    This issue—the role of field work in multi-method disciplines like political science—is an interesting topic for further reflection. I hope to produce at least one more post on it soon. Suffice it to say, the field experience that I just described would be considered by many to be old fashioned area studies rather than proper modern comparative politics, which recalls my always popular OMFG Exogenous Variation post from last December.

  • The Shitty Politicians Theory of Indonesian Politics

    Today I had cause to think about a basic question for scholars of contemporary Indonesia. What is the mainstream explanation for policy outcomes in the local level? So, when a regency implements a good policy, or a bad policy, why does this happen? How can we explain it? It was great because it was asked by a non-specialist, who was genuinely curious.

    In trying to come up with an answer, I was kinda stumped. There are plenty of accounts of policymaking in individual regencies that describe rich interactions of political agency, material incentives, historical legacies, advocacy networks, voting and popular mobilization, etc…but they tend to be highly specific to individual contexts. There are also plenty of narratives about why Indonesia as a whole is the way that it is—it is corrupt, it is dynamic, it is Muslim, etc.—but these are not explanations that can explain variation across regencies. There are also estimates of the causal effects of things like direct local elections on policy outputs, but they are designed not to explain outcomes (to tell us “the causes of effects”), but rather to illustrate “the effects of causes,” which can exist even if these effects don’t explain a lot.

    As far as I can tell, the only framework out there that is (1) capable of explaining variation and (2) designed to explain a lot of the variation in local policymaking is something that I will call the “Shitty Politicians Theory of Indonesian Politics.” That is, good policies are implemented because there are good politicians making the decisions to implement them. Bad policies are implemented because of, well, bad politicians. And what explains bad politicians? Bad regencies.

    Now it turns out that I have made this very argument myself, in print, and not that long ago. Of course, we used the phrase “the endogenous deterioration of local governance institutions [that] undermine[s] the supposed development-enhancing promises of decentralized government,” rather than the more colorful equivalent of “shitty regencies elect shitty politicians who implement shitty policies that make the regencies even shittier.”

    Despite my belief that this is in general a useful way to think about local politics in the broadest sense, as a research agenda is deeply unsatisfying. Let me be clear, this is not only a theory of Shitty Politicians and Indonesian Politics, but also Politicians Theory of Indonesian Politics which is shitty. In this framework, basic problems of conceptualization and measurement of the quality of politicians, the quality of policy outputs, and the concrete historical/social/economic fundamentals that drive the selection of the good or bad politicians are largely swept under the rug. What’s more, there’s no room for agency or human action here: no real room for a Jokowi without torturing the theory to death.

    The scholar who can either fix the Shitty Politicians Theory, or who can propose an alternative with real explanatory power for making sense of the diverse experiences of many different locations across the archipelago, will have made a major contribution to both Indonesian studies and comparative politics.