Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Bureaucrats, Services, Citizens

    Together with Jan Pierskalla and Audrey Sacks, I have recent completed a new review essay on bureaucracy and service delivery, a copy of which is available here. Here is the abstract:

    This essay reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. We survey classic topics and themes such as the developmental state, principal-agent relations, and the efficient grease hypothesis, and link them to new research findings in political science, sociology, and economics. We identify the concept of embeddedness as an important yet still underexplored framework that cuts across disciplines and which may be used to understand bureaucratic performance and service delivery. Looking forward, we outline a framework for conceptualizing bureaucratic action by exploiting variation across time, space, task, and client, and identify promising areas for further research on the bureaucrat-citizen encounter in developing countries.

    In working through the literature here (and without speaking for my co-authors), the most striking conclusion for me is how little cumulative knowledge we have about how bureaucracies and frontline service providers affect the political lives of citizens outside of the advanced industrial economies. As we note, channelling Charles Goodsell from way back in 1981, “most politics is not electoral politics, and the vast majority of experiences that citizens have with the state are not electoral in nature. The face of politics for most citizens, instead, is a bureaucrat.” While reading the literature, I found myself hearkening back to our demoralizing experiences renewing our visas in the South Jakarta immigration office in December 2004. But even that experience is not a good parallel for public school teachers and frontline health workers as the “face of the state” for the average person.

    Given the growth of social protection, decentralized service delivery, and related programs in the global development agenda in recent years, political scientists have a lot to learn, and ought to have a lot to contribute.

  • Indonesia’s Total Defense System

    A powerful op-ed in yesterday’s Jakarta Post by Ristian Atriandi Supriyanto from ANU indicts the 2015 Indonesian Defense White Paper for its “superficial” treatment of Indonesia’s maritime security challenges. But more importantly, it identifies a disturbing emphasis on bela negara as central to Indonesia’s strategic defense outlook.

    I have been critical of bela negara before. One common set of responses that I received at the time was that this program wasn’t going to be taken very seriously by most Indonesians, that it lacked a clear funding mechanism, and so forth. That much may still be true, but it is meaningful that the national strategic defense policy currently devotes such attention to bela negara. From the introduction to the English version of the white paper (pdf here), we read the following description

    National defence is managed in a total defence system to achieve its national goals. The system is essentially a defence involving all citizens in accordance with their roles and functions. The involvement of every citizen in national defence is in-line-with the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. A State Defence Programme, or defined as Bela Negara programme, is implemented within the next decade and expected to reach 100 million citizens who are militant. This programme will continually develop the needs of national defence.

    Concepts like citizens having “roles and functions” are reminiscent of corporatist ideology under Indonesia’s New Order. Remember, Golkar literally means “functional groups.”

    This atrocious graphic—once you look past its atrociousness—summarizes how defense policy involves ordinary Indonesians. Screen Shot 2016-06-15 at 8.28.23 AM Watch this space for more on what bela negara means for Indonesian democracy.