Political accountability and public service delivery in decentralized Indonesia: Incumbency advantage and the performance of second term mayors

• Published in: European Journal of Political Economy Vol. 64; p. 101910
• Main Authors: Lewis, Blane D., Nguyen, Hieu T.M., Hendrawan, Adrianus
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01-09-2020; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Access; Accountability; Advantages; Budgets; Comparative studies; Decentralization; Discontinuity; Health education; Incumbency; Incumbency advantage; Indonesia; Infrastructure; Local elections; Local government; Mayors; Political accountability; Political economy; Public services; Service delivery; Term limitations; Term of office; Voters; Voting; Indonesia; Service delivery; Incumbency advantage; Local government; Political accountability; Indonesia
• ISSN: 0176-2680; 1873-5703
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101910

To what extent do voters hold local elected leaders accountable for public service delivery in fiscally and politically decentralized environments, as theory suggests should be the case? We examine political accountability and service delivery in subnational Indonesia, through the lens of mayoral incumbency advantage. We apply regression discontinuity methods to a unique data set on local elections to identify the causal impact of incumbency on election outcomes and relate those effects to changes in citizen access to local public services. We find that voters in Indonesia are, in general, very willing to return incumbents to office compared to their counterparts in other countries. We also determine that the incumbent advantage is conditional on advances in local service provision: as service access expands more quickly, voters are more likely to vote incumbents back into office. Finally, we find that electorally successful incumbents—second term mayors—spend substantially less on education and health and more on infrastructure, manage their budgets less prudently, and deliver public services neither more nor less effectively than their first term equivalents. We conjecture that term limits and the attendant lack of electoral incentives leads to the disappointing second-term mayor performance.
•Indonesian voters return mayoral incumbents to office at very high rates.•As public service access expands more quickly, incumbents’ advantage rises.•Second-term mayor performance is somewhat worse than that of first term mayors.•Ultimately, Indonesian voters’ faith in incumbents seems unfounded.