Corruption and local democratization in Indonesia: The role of Islamic parties

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Henderson, J. Vernon; Kuncoro, Ari
• 署名单位: Brown University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Indonesia
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2010.01.007
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 164-180
• 关键词: corruption; political economy; democratization; Islamic parties

摘要

Indonesia has a tradition of corruption among local officials who harass and collect bribes from firms. This paper examines whether corruption is affected by local democratization and by the party composition of local assemblies. Democratization occurred in 1999 and decentralization in 2001. We have firm-level data for 2001 and 2004. The 2001 data benchmark corruption at the time of decentralization. We find that corruption declines between 2001 and 2004 overall, but much less so in districts with more secular party as opposed to Islamic party representatives in district assemblies. For a larger sample of districts, correspondingly, we find that corruption in 2004 is more in districts which voted more in favor of secular party representatives in the first elections in 1999. We argue that the effects seem to be causal, over above any effects of changing religiosity and economic circumstances across districts. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.