6 THE BUREAUCRACY

A thorough assessment of the relationship between the Indonesian presidency and the bureaucracy must begin by emphasizing a simple but important fact: they are separate, competing actors. While it is tempting to view the bureaucracy as an intrinsic part of government and thus not worthy of consideration as an actor that presidents need to lobby, punish, and domesticate, such an approach would mean ignoring the delicate power relations between the two institutions and omit a crucial arena of coalitional presidentialism. The Indonesian bureaucracy typically has a clear idea of what it wants from presidents in exchange for cooperation, and presidents know what they need to do to secure it.

A rich literature exists worldwide on the politically, empirically, and theoretically contested relationship between politicians and the bureaucracy (Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In the political realm, presidents try to ensure that bureaucracies act as nothing else than the implementing arm of the executive. Bureaucracies, by contrast, aim to protect their autonomy, arguing that they act as the servants of the state, not the government of the day. But hidden behind these protestations of autonomy are deep-seated vested interests of the bureaucracy itself and self-serving claims of embodying the state. Empirically, it is hard to ascertain the precise dynamics between the government and its bureaucracy. Is a government truly governing, or are its instructions ignored and re-interpreted by the bureaucracy? Even in Western democracies, the answer to this question is not self-evident, but it becomes even murkier in patronage-oriented, younger post-authoritarian states. And finally, in the theoretical arena, scholars have been unable to say what the ideal relationship between the executive and the bureaucracy should be. Some authors (e.g., Dasandi and Esteve 2017) have pointed to the dangers of bureaucracies becoming independent actors, while others insist (as many bureaucracies do) that a more autonomous bureaucracy produces better policy outcomes (Rasul and Rogger 2018). It is this contested field that presidents and bureaucracies step into when trying to establish their relationship.

In younger presidential democracies, we are more likely to find bureaucracies that are both the subject and object of politicization. On the one hand, presidents must find ways of enforcing the loyalty of the bureaucracy with a mix of threats and rewards. On the other hand, bureaucracies face the task of forming alliances with the president to protect as much as possible of their autonomy and vested interests (this is what Dasandi and Esteve call the “collusive” model of political-bureaucratic relations). Indonesia is no exception in this regard. Its bureaucracy has been widely viewed as one of the least reformed institutions to emerge from authoritarianism (Aswicahyono and Hill 2015), with many of its old practices (such as higher-ranking bureaucrats asking for fees from subordinates for promotions) surviving democratization. Throughout the process of democratic reform, senior bureaucratic leaders have tried, with significant success, to prevent fundamental change to the way they operate. They have stabilized and destabilized governments, depending on the situational goal they sought to achieve. Thus, this book situates the bureaucracy as an interested political actor, not as a neutral apparatus, as idealized in much of the literature on Western democracies (Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). It operates neither as a group that dominates elected officials nor as an agent dominated by them. Rather, it thrives in an atmosphere of mutual interpenetration. In the Indonesian case, this interpenetration is achieved through coalitional presidentialism that stipulates the benefits and obligations of both sides.

To be sure, the Indonesian bureaucracy has a less centralized leadership structure than, for example, the military and police. As a result, articulating its interests vis-à-vis the president is more complex. But the bureaucracy united in times of crisis to defend collective interests that its leaders felt were threatened, using organizations such as the Indonesian Civil Servants Corps (Korpri) and the National Civil Service Agency (BKN). These organizations, which are institutionally entrenched in the government, can both lobby within the administration for changes to unfavorable policies and mobilize outside protests. The bureaucracy’s representatives in cabinet can, at times, also be utilized to take up the case of bureaucratic interests. Accordingly, the bureaucracy has numerous mechanisms available to act as a coherent institution and make its voice heard in the all-important negotiations with the president.

This chapter discusses the bureaucracy’s role in presidential coalitions, following the order of sections in previous chapters. The first section describes the powers the bureaucracy can use when negotiating with the president. These powers center around the threat of omission (that is, the possibility of the bureaucracy not carrying out the government’s orders) and—conversely—the promise of passionate deliverance (that is, the prospect of the bureaucracy not only obeying orders but strongly working for the government’s success). In addition to policy implementation, this can also imply assistance in elections, which is technically banned but practically widespread. As explored in the second section, presidents possess equally strong powers vis-à-vis the bureaucracy; they hold the supreme appointment authority for upper echelon administrators and can direct funds or withhold them. The display of their respective powers usually results in a settlement between presidents and the bureaucracy, detailed in the third section. Based on this settlement, the bureaucracy gets representation in cabinet, and its red line of vested interests—in its case, the practice of selling jobs and favors—is largely respected. Presidents, in return, obtain guarantees that their government will not be sabotaged. The fourth section offers a case study that focuses on the revision of the civil service law in 2013. The first draft of the law threatened key interests of the bureaucracy, leading it to mobilize against the bill. Fearful of the bureaucracy’s insubordination, Yudhoyono agreed to address its concerns. Consequently, the coalitional relationship between the president and the bureaucracy was restored.

The Power of the Civil Service

The Indonesian civil service was the bureaucratic backbone of Suharto’s New Order regime from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, complementing the repressive resources of the armed forces (Emmerson 1978). Suharto kept the size of the military limited because he feared a challenge to his rule from another general. But he aggressively pushed for the expansion of the civil service. In 1963, three years before the New Order came to power, there were 608,000 civil servants; this number grew to 1.6 million in 1974, 2.7 million in 1984, and around 3.5 million at the time of Suharto’s fall (Bresnan 1993, 105; Tjiptoherijanto 2008, 42). The civil service enforced the regime’s policy of bringing society into line with uniform administrative and political standards, leveling the significant cultural differences in the country’s societal organization before 1966. For instance, from Aceh to Papua, villages were squeezed into the same administrative framework, regardless of their different traditions. This approach allowed for greater control of society, which the bureaucracy was in charge of executing. The bureaucracy also formed a key component of Golkar, Suharto’s electoral machine, and mobilized its members for the party at election times. The civil service continued to grow after Suharto’s resignation, ballooning to 4.5 million members before cuts were made to excess staff to bring the number down to 4.2 million by 2020 (Pratama 2020). While 23 percent of these were civil servants directly attached to the central government, 77 percent were formally under local administrations but remained answerable to the central government in Jakarta (BKN 2020).

Under democracy, attempts were made to depoliticize the bureaucracy (Pierskalla, Lauretig, Rosenberg, and Sacks 2021, 266). Civil servants could no longer be members of parties, and penalties were imposed on those found assisting candidates in elections. Similarly, the decentralization of the service made it harder for a national leader to monopolize it, with civil servants more tied to a governor, district head, or mayor than to a president. Despite these depoliticization campaigns, the civil service continued to face interventions by politicians—and it still sought to infiltrate the political sphere as well. Its unity, too, was only partially undermined by regional fragmentation; it sustained a significant level of central organization and corporate identity. One major reason for this is the survival of some of the New Order’s institutions for managing the civil service. Chief among them is Korpri, which—despite several attempts at its dissolution—remains operational as a link between the government and the civil service and as a bureaucratic lobbying group vis-à-vis presidents and their agencies. Importantly, heads of the post-Suharto Korpri have typically been (as under the New Order) senior civil servants in the Ministry of Home Affairs, which retains oversight of the majority of Indonesia’s bureaucracies attached to local administrations. Korpri, which continues to have representation offices in most government agencies nationwide, thus remains engrained in the politics of government and still commands an organizational structure that can be used for mobilization and communication purposes.

While Korpri is nominally an independent organization for civil servants, BKN is the state’s official management body for civil service affairs (Tjiptoherijanto 2018). It is directly positioned under the president but is coordinated by the Ministry for the Utilization of the State Apparatus and Bureaucratic Reform. It sets the rules for civil service recruitment and determines the technicalities of salaries and hierarchical advancement. In reality, however, Korpri and BKN often coordinate their activities and viewpoints on matters affecting the status and privileges of the civil service. Hence, the heads of Korpri and BKN are powerful voices in defending the interests of the civil service against attacks from inside and outside of government.

With more than four million civil servants placed in key positions of the state, bureaucratic interest groups such as Korpri and BKN have considerable political leverage (Berenschot 2018). Presidents depend on citizen satisfaction with public service delivery if they want to sustain high approval ratings. Studies have shown that “the impact of a negative experience with a public agency is much more pronounced than the effect of a positive one” (Kampe, de Walle, and Buckaert 2006, 387). Thus, bureaucracies that—intentionally or unintentionally—do not professionally discharge their duties can massively damage citizens’ trust in presidents and their government. Conversely, if public services are delivered satisfactorily, presidents stand a significantly better chance at the ballot box than in the case of civil service dysfunction. Beyond guaranteeing basic citizen satisfaction with the incumbent, bureaucracies also have—in some polities and contexts—the option of actively boosting the government’s election chances. In mid-2008, for example, Yudhoyono rolled out a US$2 billion cash assistance program to compensate poor citizens for reduced fuel subsidies. For Yudhoyono, who was behind in the polls at that time, the handouts were a stunning success. Photographs of housewives happily waving banknotes into cameras were omnipresent in the media, and Yudhoyono quickly overturned his deficit in the polls (Mietzner 2009b). Arguably, any serious logistical problems with the cash delivery would have damaged Yudhoyono at a time when he could least afford it. But it did not come to that—the bureaucracy carried out its task without much disruption.

Many examples exist of Indonesian bureaucrats refusing to support—or of them directly sabotaging—their political superiors. During the Wahid presidency, some senior bureaucrats stopped taking commands from him once they had concluded that he was certain to be impeached. In the post-2004 presidential system, acts of open defiance are rarer (due to the integration of the bureaucracy into coalitional presidentialism mechanisms); however, cases at the local level routinely provide warnings to presidents of what could happen to them if they were to face a hostile bureaucracy. At the provincial and district level, the most senior bureaucrat is the regional secretary [sekretaris daerah], who heads the local apparatus of civil servants. Conflicts between the secretary and the governor or district head are common, often paralyzing local government and sometimes leading to legal proceedings. In January 2018, for instance, the secretary of the district of Cirebon refused to accept his removal, mobilizing the rest of the bureaucracy against the district head (Aryani 2018). The conflict was discussed widely in the news, distracting from the government’s agenda and damaging its reputation. Similarly, the secretary of Bekasi city reported the mayor to the police in July 2018, accusing him of incompetence, lack of understanding of how the bureaucracy works, and smearing his (the secretary’s) name (Niman 2018). Once again, the conflict fed weeks of unflattering reporting by news outlets. In both the Cirebon and Bekasi cases, political ambitions on the part of the bureaucratic chiefs played a role in the turmoil, driving home the point that their accommodation in a political settlement must be a high priority for executive leaders.

Senior bureaucrats hold a range of roles and powers that, in turn, tend to produce considerable patronage resources and personal wealth. High-level civil servants oversee the process of internal promotions; organize, and often chair, the panels for project tenders; and handle the details of budget formulation and implementation. All these powers can be monetized, making many top-level bureaucrats as affluent as their police or military counterparts. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, then the head of Yudhoyono’s monitoring agency UKP4, estimated in 2013 that the trade in bureaucratic positions was worth at least US$1 billion a year. “It’s a big business,” he explained. “Bureaucrats are victims and actors in this. They get squeezed by their political superiors for funds, so they recoup that money by extorting their own subordinates” (interview, Jakarta, December 5, 2013). Taufiq Effendi, the former minister for the utilization of the state apparatus, confirmed this pattern. “It’s a vicious cycle,” he said. “Politicians have to pay for their elections, so they turn to people below them [in the bureaucracy] for funds. The bureaucrats then turn to the level below them, and so forth” (interview, Depok, November 28, 2013). Getting specific, the head of the State Civil Service Commission (KASN), an oversight body, stated in 2017 that regional secretary posts are typically sold for Rp 1 billion (US$71,000), while lower-level leadership posts go for between Rp 200 to 400 million. “Not only higher-ranking positions are traded, but all civil service posts,” he maintained, adding that the practice is most prevalent at the local level (Firmanto 2017).

The financial prowess of bureaucrats has increased their bargaining powers vis-à-vis elected officials and has furthered the interpenetration between the two spheres. While routinely subject to attempts by elected officials to politicize (and extort) them, bureaucrats have also entered politics and directly sought political power. In the 223 local executive elections held in December 2015, 26.8 percent of the candidates were active and retired civil servants (Aspinall and Berenschot 2019, 192). The Cirebon and Bekasi cases were entangled in such electoral competitions between civil servants and politicians who—in non-election times—rank above them. In addition to the material resources that allow them to launch strong campaigns, civil servants are often popular with voters because of their supposed non-partisanship and their experience in governance (both of which are normally cornerstones of their electoral branding). At 27.7 percent, the success rate of the civil servants running in 2015 was higher than that of business representatives, 17.7 percent of whom won their races. Thus, civil servants are powerful not only because of their formal prerogatives that can be used to support or destabilize elected officials (and collect significant resources) but also because they can emerge as potential challengers to professional politicians themselves. This includes the president, who needs to make constant judgments about who might challenge him or her for political authority, both in election times and outside of them.

Consequently, Indonesian presidents need to have the civil service on their list when assembling their coalitions. It is insufficient for them to simply entrust oversight over the bureaucracy to aides tasked with enforcing the professionalism of the state apparatus. As a political actor with a host of interests, the bureaucracy expects to be given a level of participation in governance and resource distribution that reflects its importance to sitting presidents. Seeing how the military and police obtained such status in presidential coalitions, the civil service has demanded equal treatment—which includes seats at the cabinet table, protection of material privileges, and respect toward red lines that should not be crossed. But presidents have not only accepted this proposition; they have also utilized their powers to discipline the civil service, limit its expectations, and ensure its loyalty as a coalition partner.

Presidential Powers over the Bureaucracy

As in the case of the military and the police, the president’s most important instrument in controlling the civil service is his or her appointment powers. The 2014 Civil Service Law situates the president as the “holder of the highest authority in [determining] the policy, professional oversight, and management of the civil service.” This means that the president is superior to each civil servant. While some of his or her powers are delegated to subordinates, the source of the latter’s authority continues to rest in the presidency. A 2020 government regulation further strengthened the president’s direct appointment powers. It stipulated that in cases of violations of appointment procedures in the civil service, the president can cancel the automatic delegations to subordinates and pull the appointment decision to the presidential level (Adyatama 2020). It also specified that the president can decide to do so even if no violation occurred; all the president has to do to justify an appointment without involving delegates is to certify that such a step is taken “in order to increase the effectiveness of governance” (Adyatama 2020). Thus, presidents can intervene in the appointment of civil servants to remove office holders they view as obstructing “the effectiveness of governance,” or to place civil servants in these positions that are seen as supporting this effectiveness. In realpolitik language, the president can dismiss disloyal civil servants and replace them with loyalists if he or she wishes to do so.

Even without invoking these special powers, the president sits at the apex of the regular appointment process for high-level civil servants. These include the heads of ministerial bureaucracies, non-ministerial government agencies, and other state-controlled entities. In this process, the agencies involved first conduct their internal selection process through an appointment panel, and the three top-ranked candidates are subsequently submitted to the Final Assessors Team [Tim Penilai Akhir]. The team is chaired by the president, with the vice president as deputy chair. The president’s cabinet secretary is the team’s secretary who oversees the administrative aspects of the selection. The state secretary, minister for the utilization of the state apparatus and bureaucratic reform, and the head of BKN are permanent members of the team, while ministers from the departments affected by appointments can be named as non-permanent members. The state intelligence agency and other government bodies can, if asked, submit assessments of the candidates to the team. Although the team formally operates as a collective, it is self-evident that the president’s vote carries the greatest weight. This is particularly the case if presidents take an active interest in the details of the appointment process, or have particular favorites they would like to advance. In such cases, the team endorses the president’s call. In his two stints as vice president of both Yudhoyono and Widodo (2004–2009, 2014–2019), Jusuf Kalla was known to aggressively push for his nominees, successfully using occasional presidential disinterest in the process. However, presidents tend to strengthen their direct role in senior bureaucratic appointments during their second terms—both Yudhoyono and Widodo did so, profiting from greater familiarity with the process compared to their early presidential careers.

The 2020 decree on presidential special powers in bureaucratic appointments indicated Widodo’s increasing interest and authority in this arena, but there were other signs of this trend, too. When Widodo replaced the minister for state-owned enterprises Rini Soemarno with Erick Thohir in 2019, he also pushed for a change in how the leaders of state-owned enterprises were selected. During her tenure, Rini made direct appointments and then had them endorsed by general shareholders meetings, using the dual status of state-owned enterprises as both businesses and state agencies (Situmorang 2019). Thohir, by contrast, announced after his appointment that he would transfer the selection process to the authority of the Final Assessors Team, effectively handing it to the president. “The president instructed that appointments in state enterprises have to go to the Final Assessors Team. All of them,” Thohir said, making clear who had initiated the change (Kumparan 2019). Widodo, who increased the role of state-owned enterprises during his presidency as part of his development plans, made extensive use of his new role and directly chaired numerous sessions of the team that reshuffled senior positions in the enterprises. Only a week after the change in the procedure was announced, Widodo presided over a team meeting that appointed, among others, new leaders in key state banks. Thohir made no secret that Widodo had made several picks before the team had formally been in session. “The directors of [two large state banks] have already been decided by the president,” Thohir told journalists in November 2019, “if you like to know the names, ask him” (Kumparan 2019).

The president’s changes to bureaucratic procedures highlight the regulatory powers of the head of state vis-à-vis the civil service. On their initiative, presidents can introduce measures that either advance or run counter to the vested interests of the bureaucracy and its members. As most such steps can be taken in the form of presidential or government decrees, they do not require the legislature’s approval (and much less of the bureaucracy itself). For instance, the president’s 2020 consolidation of his appointment powers was done through Government Regulation 17 of 2020 that changed Government Regulation 11 of 2017—both signed by Widodo. For larger reforms to the bureaucracy, the president can initiate and co-promulgate laws in cooperation with the legislature. This was the case in 2013, when Yudhoyono’s government deliberated a new civil service law with parliament. The draft threatened core interests of the bureaucracy (more on this below). In mobilizing opposition to the draft, the bureaucracy challenged but also implicitly acknowledged the president’s powers over its institutional agenda. Accordingly, much of the opposition was directed toward the president and his representatives in the deliberation rather than the legislators that held an equal share of responsibility for the passing of the law. The outcome of the process—the 2014 Civil Service Law, a compromise between the president and the bureaucracy—highlighted the powers of both sides and re-calibrated their mutually accommodating relationship.

The president’s budgetary authority is also of great importance to the bureaucracy—as is his or her influence over law enforcement agencies. The state budget approved jointly by the president and the legislature is the source of the bureaucracy’s patronage opportunities. As in the case of the military and the police, the president can determine the size of those funds and make it easier or harder to access them in legal and illicit ways. If bureaucrats get caught up in corruption cases involving the misuse of state funds, presidents can offer protection—or choose not to. In June 2015, Widodo’s then-chief of staff Luhut Pandjaitan told a meeting of law enforcers that the president was concerned about the many bureaucratic decision makers charged with corruption, as he feared this would slow down development. “We don’t want people who take policy decisions to be brought to trial so that they become anxious to make decisions,” Luhut insisted (Sholeh 2015). “That’s why in this meeting [I explained] that those who make decisions shouldn’t easily be accused of violating the law.” This was music to the ears of bureaucrats who chaired project tender panels and got subsequently charged with siphoning off funds. Bureaucrats also benefitted from Widodo’s later weakening of the KPK—civil servants made up one-fifth of all cases in the anti-corruption agency between 2004 and 2020, and they constituted the third-largest group of suspects (KPK 2021). After the 2019 changes to the KPK law, in 2020 the number of bureaucrats charged by the KPK dropped to its lowest level since 2016, and its proportion of overall cases to below 10 percent.

Finally, presidents have the power to shape the image, reputation, and standing of the bureaucracy in society, thus influencing its ability to continue its traditional operations. For many presidents, it is tempting to shift blame for their policy failures by accusing the bureaucracy of not accurately carrying out their orders. Presidents who choose this option prioritize their own political interests over that of the bureaucracy, leading to substantial damage to the latter. Widodo, for instance, demonstrated this presidential power during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he routinely blamed unnamed officials on the ground for the continued spike in cases and deaths—while most experts agreed that the failures were a result of Widodo’s policies rather than of incompetent grassroots actors. Widodo’s campaign was successful for him but damaging for the bureaucracy: in an April 2021 survey, 67 percent of respondents expressed satisfaction with Widodo’s management of the pandemic, while only 44 percent had confidence in the work of the health ministry’s apparatus (Indikator 2021, 33–24). In July of the same year, Widodo warned civil servants that they are “not officials who should ask being served, who act like officials in the colonial era in times past. This can’t happen again, the times have changed” (CNN Indonesia 2021b). He left unexplained who and what exactly he meant, but he had highlighted once again his capacity to either protect or attack the bureaucracy, depending on his political interests of the day. In turn, this capacity to make credible threats has been kept in store by presidents as one of the instruments of enforcing the bureaucracy’s loyalty.

In consequence, while bureaucracies have significant powers to extract concessions from the president, and in many ways hold the key to the stability and success of an administration, the president can also put pressure on the civil service by granting or withholding benefits and protections. This means, on the one hand, that the president cannot feel assured of the automatic support or professional neutrality of the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the civil service cannot rely on the president generously rewarding it for its role in governance. The president’s expectation of loyalty, and the bureaucracy’s demand that its interests be shielded, hence become elements of intense and routine negotiation between the two sides. Coalitional presidentialism offers the institutional framework for these negotiations and their outcome. The next section analyzes how this outcome is achieved, and how it has helped Indonesian presidents to sustain their rule while accepting that it also limits their ability to initiate reform.

The Bureaucracy in Presidential Coalitions

As with other actors that presidents tie into their coalitions, using presidential appointment powers is one of the most frequently used strategies to contain opposition and incentivize cooperation in the bureaucracy. A central element of this strategy is the placement of loyalists in key posts. As noted, presidents can appoint the upper echelons of the bureaucracy through their role in the Final Assessors Team. One case in which the president made direct use of this authority was the appointment of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama as the chief commissioner of Pertamina, the state oil company, in November 2019. Purnama had been Widodo’s deputy governor in Jakarta, and in 2014, became governor when Widodo took up the presidency. Recall that in 2016 Islamist opposition to the re-election campaign of Purnama, a Christian of ethnic Chinese descent, exploded on the streets of Jakarta. Widodo tried to protect Purnama, but the pressure became so strong that the president allowed the police to charge Purnama with blasphemy—this accusation had been the formal justification for the Islamist street mobilization (Peterson 2020a). Purnama eventually lost the election and was sentenced to two years in prison. Upon his release in January 2019, the president considered new positions for his former deputy. Purnama’s reputation as a no-nonsense administrator with low levels of tolerance for bureaucratic dysfunction and office abuse (Hatherell and Welsh 2017) made him, in Widodo’s eyes, an ideal candidate to be placed in one of the state’s most important, but also most unruly, enterprises.

Purnama’s appointment initially created much commotion in the giant state company. Even when his possible selection was only a rumor, the union of Pertamina employees expressed opposition. Arguing that Purnama lacked the necessary credentials for the post and that his appointment would violate bureaucratic protocol, the union threatened legal action should Purnama become chief commissioner (Ismoyo 2019). But for Widodo, the protest was a sign that Purnama was the right choice: as the president’s direct representative in the company’s bureaucracy, he could keep the latter in check, negotiate over its interests, and ultimately enforce its adherence to the goals formulated by the president. When Widodo met with Purnama officially after his appointment in December 2019, he asked him to turn Pertamina into a profitable company that could help Indonesia overcome its notoriously entrenched trade deficit—which was partly due to the large volume of oil imports (Ishanuddin 2019). Over time, resistance to Purnama in Pertamina’s bureaucratic ranks declined, as he promised greater opportunities for lower-ranking staff. He set up a “team of transformers” whose task was to accelerate the careers of young, promising staff (Rosana 2020). At the same time, he cut the credit card limits of the most senior staff, which he claimed previously reached up to Rp 30 billion (US$2.1 million) (Bestari 2021). In short, he applied a carrot-and-stick approach that was in line with Widodo’s overall strategy for the bureaucracy’s role in his coalition: he wanted to provide sufficient incentives for the majority of civil servants to remain loyal, while demonstrating enough powers of punishment to disincentivize disloyalty and mismanagement.

Another aspect of the president’s appointment powers as a strategy of coalition-building with the bureaucracy is the granting of cabinet representation. Bureaucrats have traditionally been given a share of the non-party contingent in cabinet, with two to three seats held by bureaucrats in Yudhoyono and Widodo cabinets. These bureaucratic ministers represent the president’s interests in the bureaucracy but also voice the aspirations of the civil service to the head of state. One example of this pattern is Basuki Madimuljono, often described as Widodo’s favorite minister (Ningrum 2019). As minister of public works and housing in both Widodo cabinets, he was responsible for the president’s main policy initiative in his ten years in office: that is, the upgrading of Indonesia’s infrastructure. Basuki had entered the ministry as a civil servant immediately after graduation from university and worked himself up the bureaucratic ladder. At the time of his ministerial appointment, he was a director general with three and a half decades of experience in the department. As minister, he became an active lobbyist for Korpri, perpetuating the civil service narrative as being at “the front line of the effort to cultivate the oneness and unity of the nation” (PUPR 2020). He was known to have exclusive access to the president, reflecting Widodo’s interest in Basuki’s portfolio (which included the planned relocation of the capital from Jakarta to Kalimantan, the president’s idea) but also delivering ample opportunities for the minister to communicate the thinking of the bureaucracy on critical issues.

Some senior bureaucrats have entered cabinet through party channels, further strengthening the glue that holds presidents, parties, and non-party actors such as the civil service together in one coalition. Siti Nurbaya Bakar, for instance, joined the civil service at the age of twenty-three in 1979. She spent most of her early career in the development planning agency of the province of Lampung on Sumatra before becoming head of the planning bureau at the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1998 (Nurbaya 2021). In 2001, she was promoted to the post of secretary-general in the ministry—in many ways, the most important position in the bureaucracy as it has oversight over the millions of civil servants placed in local administrations. After four years on the job, she took up the position of secretary-general of Indonesia’s senate, the DPD. The DPD turned out to be a weak body, but Siti used the time at its helm to mingle with the elite of its powerful sister body, the DPR. Upon retirement in 2013, she became a politician in the Nasdem party, headed by the media tycoon Surya Paloh. She entered the first Widodo cabinet in 2014 as minister for the environment and forestry, and continued to hold this post in the president’s second term. In office, Widodo appreciated her willingness to defend the president’s policy of prioritizing economic investment over environmental concerns; in 2020, she portrayed Widodo’s pro-business Omnibus Bill, which dismantled many environmental protections, as a pro-environment measure, drawing criticism from activists (Agustina 2020). Her technocratic efficiency and loyalty, internalized in her decades as a civil servant, made her a presidential favorite.

Timely salary increases for the civil service are also a significant component of the coalition dynamics between the president and the bureaucracy. We already discussed how Widodo increased the salary for the police and the military just ahead of the 2019 elections. Separately, but relatedly, he also announced a salary increase for the civil service—plus a big bonus (a thirteenth and fourteenth monthly wage) that would be paid out in April 2019, the month of the election. Unlike police and military members, civil servants hold voting rights, but they are not allowed to visibly support a particular candidate or party. At the time of Widodo’s salary announcement, opinion surveys showed that Widodo was behind in the civil service vote. In a survey published in February 2019, Widodo was trailing his opponent Prabowo 40 to 44 percent among bureaucrats (BBC Indonesia 2019). While this was an improvement over the 2014 election, when the gap between the two men had been around 30 percent in Prabowo’s favor, it still created nervousness in the palace. Widodo’s use of his budgetary powers for a last-minute salary increase was arguably designed to give him the edge over Prabowo, and it came packaged in some unusually sweet-mouthed praise for the civil service. “The speed of the services rendered by bureaucrats is improving by the day,” the president flattered (Damanik 2019). The government later claimed it lost the 2019 elections among civil servants—it used this argument against Prabowo’s accusations that the president had unduly mobilized the civil service (Asmara 2019).¹ Whatever the actual outcome, it is clear that the president used his fiscal authority to woe civil servants as they went to the ballot box.

As in the case of other actors, public events are important sites for demonstrating and negotiating the coalitional relationship between the president and the bureaucracy. As mentioned, Widodo frequently used these sites for both praise (close to an election) and reprimands (when he wished to underline his authority). While presidents appropriate public events with the civil service to re-calibrate the conditions that tie the bureaucracy to their government, the civil service utilizes them as arenas for voicing demands and pledging loyalty. In November 2018, for example, Widodo attended the forty-seventh anniversary of Korpri—an event most presidents put as a must-go commitment into their calendar. At the gathering, Zudan Arif Fakhruloh, the chairman of Korpri (and at the same time a senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Home Affairs), confronted the president with an unexpected request. For Korpri’s anniversary, he said, “we expect a present from you, Sir. One of the presents for which civil servants all over Indonesia have waited anxiously is a government regulation on the organization of Korpri” (Ihsanuddin 2018). The expression of this request was met with thunderous applause by the thousands of civil servants present at the ceremony. To soften the aggressiveness of the demand, the Korpri chief followed up with a pledge of increased loyalty and performance: “if this government regulation has been completed, you, Sir, can trust that we at Korpri will fly even higher, run even faster, and jump even longer.”

The promulgation of a government regulation as a foundation of Korpri has been a goal of crucial importance for the civil service corps and its ambition to represent the bureaucracy’s vested interests through a coherent organizational actor. At the time of the 2018 event, Korpri’s institutional anchoring was shaky: its strongest claim to a permanent position in Indonesia’s legal-political hierarchy was a 1971 presidential decision that was now widely seen as outdated. A 2004 government regulation signed by Megawati had stipulated a code of ethics for the corps without reaffirming its post-Suharto existence, while the 2014 Civil Service law referred to a civil service corps but did not mention Korpri. In fact, the Ministry of Home Affairs had announced in 2012 that Korpri would be dissolved, or at least renamed (Liputan6 2012); yet the organization continued to exist long after that, albeit with an unclear status. Hence, Fakhruloh’s public confrontation of Widodo on the issue went to the heart of the bureaucracy’s relationship with the president. A renewed government regulation would entrench Korpri as the president’s sole negotiation partner over the interests of the civil service, while its continued absence was set to weaken its position in such high-level negotiations. Fully aware of this dynamic, Widodo was in no hurry to accelerate the drafting of the Korpri decree, and at the time of writing, it has yet to be issued. As a result, it remains a key bargaining chip that the president could use should the loyalty of the civil service come under more serious questioning than during the 2018 ceremony.

In the history of the alliance between presidents and the bureaucracy in post-2004 coalitional presidentialism, there has been only one instance in which the relationship was close to a breakdown. At that point, all the techniques of coalition-building and maintenance—the placement of presidential allies in the civil service; the inclusion of bureaucrats in cabinet; the use of the budget to incentivize loyalty; or the celebration of the alliance at public ceremonies—seemed to be insufficient to prevent a major crisis between the two sides. At the end, however, the principle of compromise that is so central to the concept of coalitional presidentialism prevailed, and the bureaucracy returned to the table of joint government. The case that carried such conflict potential was the deliberation of the 2014 Civil Service Law. Due to its importance, we turn to its detailed discussion in the next section.

The 2014 Civil Service Law

The passing of the 2014 Civil Service Law resulted from both President Yudhoyono’s interest in creating a more professional civil service and his hesitancy to take potentially confrontational measures to actually achieve this goal. In his first term, he had remained passive on the issue, noting that the bureaucracy was often uncooperative. A legislator of his party recalled that “the president frequently complained to us in the party [during his first term] that he found it difficult to implement his policies because the bureaucratic apparatus blocked, delayed, or sabotaged them; he told us he would use his second term to address the problem and clean up the bureaucracy—he wanted it to be a professional and reliable partner for the incumbent president” (interview with Khatibul Umam Wiranu, Jakarta, February 24, 2014). In 2009, therefore, Yudhoyono added “Bureaucracy Reform” to the name of the Ministry for the Utilization of the State Apparatus, and in May 2010, he set up the Steering Committee for the Reform of the National Bureaucracy, chaired by Vice President Boediono. He also created the Independent Team for the Reform of the National Bureaucracy, which consisted of academics, business practitioners, and former bureaucrats. Moreover, Yudhoyono’s post-2009 speeches repeatedly defined bureaucracy reform as a cornerstone of his government.² According to a bureaucracy expert advising the government, Yudhoyono sought to replicate the success of the National Performance Review in the United States, which had been mandated by President Bill Clinton and overseen by Vice President Al Gore in 1994 (discussion with Prijono Tjipto Herijanto, December 12, 2013).

Despite this rhetoric by the president, it was parliament that took the initiative to revise the existing civil service law (Law 43/1999 on the Principles of the Civil Service), which was seen as part of the reason for the stasis in bureaucratic reform. Concretely, it was Taufiq Effendi, the minister for the state apparatus in Yudhoyono’s first term and a member of Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party, who actively pushed the issue. Frustrated with his lack of success as minister in moving bureaucratic reform forward, he used his post-2009 position as deputy chair of the domestic affairs commission of parliament to revive his plans of rewriting Law 43/1999. In this, Taufiq received encouragement from senior academics concerned with bureaucracy reform. One of them, Sofian Effendi, told Taufiq, “now you have the big chance to do what you couldn’t do as minister” (interview, Jakarta, November 28, 2013). Subsequently, Taufiq explored two avenues for a comprehensive revision of Law 43/1999: first, he used his contacts in the State Administration Institute (LAN)—a research and education body for the bureaucracy—to initiate a first draft for the revisions; second, through his parliamentary commission, he assigned four senior professors (Eko Prasojo, Prijono Tjipto Herijanto, Miftah Thoha, and Sofian Effendi) to come up with a draft. While the LAN draft never made it far, the team of four presented its draft—an entirely new bill—in late 2010.

At the heart of the concept developed by the four scholars was the creation of a new Civil Service Commission (KASN). Consisting of a mix of independent experts and government representatives, the KASN was supposed to have direct appointment authority for the most senior echelons of the bureaucracy. In addition, it was to oversee the recruitment mechanism for the lower ranks. With this, it was hoped, the cycle of selling positions in the civil service could be halted. Other proposals advanced by the team of four included a strict application of the merit principle in all bureaucratic appointments and a change in the professional status of civil servants. For decades, Indonesia’s bureaucracy had been notorious for its inflexible appointment procedures, with positions only available to candidates who had reached a specific rank (McLeod 2005). Even ministers found it impossible to appoint the staff they wanted because of these rigorous regulations. The draft of the team of four would have loosened these restrictions and made the competence and prior performance of candidates the main criteria for filling vacancies. The professors also proposed changing the civil service status from an internal government service [status kedinasan] to a profession. This change, if implemented systematically, would have changed the civil service from a corps institutionally tied to the government apparatus to a vocation. As such, its representative body—Korpri—would no longer have been an intrinsic part of government but an association of service providers to central and local administrations. According to Taufiq, “many officials in the Home Ministry particularly objected to this suggestion—it threatened to rob them of their closeness to power and its holders” (interview, Depok, November 30, 2013).

Predictably, the bureaucracy expressed strong opposition to the draft. The opposition was led by three main actors: the secretary-general of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Korpri, and BKN. To begin with, the secretary-general of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Diah Anggraeni, was exceptionally powerful. Concurrently head of Korpri and of the internal bureaucratic networks of the ministry, she could also rely on her family connections with Sudi Silalahi, Yudhoyono’s state secretary and most trusted aide. Hence, she felt politically protected enough to attack her opponents in the deliberation process openly. This included confronting her superiors in the government hierarchy, such as Boediono. There was much at stake for Anggraeni: a KASN with full appointment powers would have taken away her authority in selecting senior bureaucrats at the national and local level, removing the ministry’s most lucrative source of patronage. Similarly, a strict implementation of the merit principle would have made the traditionally closed class of career bureaucrats vulnerable to challenges by professionals. That Anggraeni was able to challenge these two initiatives was also due to her allies’ numerical dominance: in the technical deliberation teams (which the government had set up to engage in discussions with parliament on the draft), representatives of Korpri, BKN, and the ministry’s various offices far outnumbered the delegates from other government agencies and parliament.

Korpri, for its part, was especially opposed to the proposal of the team of four to turn Korpri from a governmental into a professional body. This would have drawn a clearer demarcation line between government and the civil service subordinated to the former, and it would have ended the practice of Korpri officials receiving handsome government salaries. As in other areas, Diah Anggraeni was the most vocal opponent of this idea, using her ex officio post as head of Korpri to justify her intensive lobbying and activism. Conversely, BKN was most concerned about a potentially powerful KASN. Under existing regulations, BKN oversaw most aspects of civil service management, including the recruitment system, dismissal procedures, and retirement schemes. Like the Ministry of Home Affairs, BKN had its roots in the Dutch colonial state. Then called the Dienst voor Algemene Personele Zaken (DAPZ), it transferred its bureaucratic apparatus to the newly independent state in 1949. Under Suharto, much of the patronage surrounding civil service appointments had been channeled through BKN and its affiliated offices. However, all of this was threatened by the team of four’s proposal to hand over the management of civil service recruitment to KASN—essentially, BKN would have been made redundant. Thus, Diah Anggraeni, Korpri, and BKN formed a formidable alliance to fight against the proposed law, defending their respective sectoral interests but also the broader institutional privileges of the civil service as a whole.

The protest of the bureaucracy included both internal and external mobilization of resistance. Internally, Anggraeni obstructed the discussions within government and between the executive and parliament. Externally, she encouraged actors such as the Association of Indonesian Municipality Governments (APEKSI) to express their opposition. Touring the regions, she told local bureaucrats that the Civil Service Bill would expose them to competition from professionals. As a result, the associations sent delegates to Jakarta to protest against the bill, even if Anggraeni took a softer line in the official negotiations. Said one official at the office of Boediono, who tried to mediate the conflict: “this made dealing with Anggraeni so difficult—even after she reluctantly agreed to something in a formal meeting with us, she often just turned around and mobilized her political allies against this very same agreement” (confidential interview, Jakarta, December 2, 2013). Clearly, Anggraeni combined her control of key sections in the state with an effective use of Indonesia’s post-1998 protest culture. Anggraeni proved far savvier in mobilizing support groups than her reformist rivals. Although Eko Prasodjo, one of the authors of the reformist draft, was appointed deputy minister for the utilization of the state apparatus and bureaucratic reform in October 2011, he seemed powerless against Anggraeni’s influence. I Made Suwandi, the Ministry of Home Affair’s director general of general governance, noted at the time that “Eko and his group didn’t court the regional associations, that was a big mistake; Anggraeni had by far the superior networks” (interview, Jakarta, December 4, 2013).

Boediono and other officials reported to Yudhoyono that the bureaucracy would “rebel” if the initial draft of the civil service law were to be passed (confidential interview, Jakarta, December 2, 2013). The notoriously risk-averse president feared for the stability of his government and coalition and moved to de-escalate the situation. Initially, he thought that his subordinates could handle the situation, but in May 2013 he took direct control of the deliberations. This was prompted by the news of an increasingly angry bureaucracy and a newspaper column written by Sofian Effendi, in which he had criticized the president for not taking action. Yudhoyono suddenly called for a cabinet meeting on the bill on May 14, the day after Effendi’s piece was published. This was the first cabinet meeting on the bill after more than two years of discussions, and the president immediately demonstrated that he was determined to drop the reformist draft and settle for a compromise. After Eko gave a detailed presentation on the draft bill, Yudhoyono dragged the debate back to philosophical principles; he asked eleven questions, such as “What kind of civil service do we need for Indonesia?” Opening a web dictionary on his iPad, Yudhoyono read the definition of “bureaucracy” to his cabinet. In two further cabinet meetings, on May 23 and July 16, 2013, Eko tried to answer the president’s questions. It became obvious in those meetings, however, that he bill’s opponents had strongly influenced the president. Yudhoyono emphasized that he rejected the extensive powers given to the KASN and that the appointment of civil servants still had to be based on seniority.

Eko and his team accepted Yudhoyono’s decisions without further debate, realizing that the president had endorsed many of the arguments put forward by the Ministry of Home Affairs. “Once I heard the president [in cabinet], I knew that it was pointless to push the issue further,“ Eko recalled (interview, Jakarta, December 3, 2013). As a result, when the government asked to resume deliberations with parliament in July 2013, Eko carried Yudhoyono’s mandate to seek a significantly diluted version of the bill. The KASN, for instance, was no longer to be a civil service appointment body but an oversight agency. According to one parliamentarian, “the government amputated the legs, arms, and finally the entire body from the KASN, leaving only the eyes, for monitoring purposes; it’s a disgrace” (interview with Gamari Sutrisno, Jakarta, November 29, 2013). Some of the strongest supporters of the initial draft in parliament, including Taufiq, had since left the legislature, making the deliberations much less contentious than at the beginning of the process. In a joint team of government and parliamentary staffers, the bill’s technical details were debated. In this team, the power balance was obvious: in one session attended by the author in November 2013, around twenty government team members—all experienced bureaucrats—faced off with two representatives of parliament, who struggled to stay on top of the issues. After the first draft had been comprehensively watered down, the bill was passed in December 2013.

In sum, Yudhoyono had avoided a major conflict with the bureaucracy by giving in to its demands and, despite minor reforms, maintaining the overall status quo in the relationship between the president and the civil service. Nothing was more abhorrent to Yudhoyono than the notion of “chaos” that could undermine the harmony of the ruling coalition and, by implication, governance. In Yudhoyono’s eyes, he had done what was necessary if a president wanted to ensure a smooth process of government. Superficially, the Civil Service Law of 2014 provided some evidence that reform was occurring, but it left the general infrastructure of bureaucratic power intact. The new system still allowed for extensive trading of positions—and while Korpri continued to fight for more formal recognition well into the Widodo presidency, its de facto role as the bureaucracy’s lobbying group vis-à-vis the government continued. Most importantly, however, the conditions of the bureaucracy’s membership in the presidential coalition had been renegotiated, ultimately satisfying both sides. Widodo was able to pick up from where Yudhoyono left this presidential-bureaucratic coalition in 2014, and through maneuverings and deals, he cemented the alliance further.

Much of the literature on the role of the bureaucracy in politics has focused on either the president’s endeavors to firmly subordinate the civil service or the quest of the latter to maintain its autonomy. But in patronage democracies such as Indonesia, the relationship between the two is closer to what Dasandi and Esteve (2017) called a “collusive” alliance. Several aspects of the Indonesian case stand out in this regard. First, the bureaucracy is a political actor with a host of vested interests. At best, its claim of institutional neutrality constitutes an ideational pretext for rejecting the intervention of politicians into its affairs; at worst, it is a self-interested mechanism to protect the illicit funding channels that feed the patronage dynamics in the civil service. Second, interpreting the role of the bureaucracy within the framework of Indonesia’s coalitional presidentialism offers a nuanced picture of the mutual interpenetration of politics and the bureaucracy. Presidents insert themselves into the bureaucracy by placing loyalists in its ranks, while bureaucrats exploit their role in administration to defend their interests—and many use their wealth to enter politics themselves. Hence, while the bureaucracy is politicized in many ways, politics is also bureaucratized (Berenschot 2018). Third, the bureaucracy—beyond its lobbying power through Korpri and other bodies—has a permanent seat at the cabinet table as part of a larger coalitional deal that presidents offer to the civil service to institutionalize their cooperation.

Consequently, just as the literature on bureaucracy and politics can inform us of the core interests of both sides, so can the coalitional presidentialism scholarship add to the studies on politicized civil services. If we understand the bureaucracy, as in the Indonesian case, as one of many members of presidential coalitions, the boundaries between the president and the civil service become less rigid. This, in turn, allows us to situate the relationship not as one in which the president controls the civil service, or the latter occasionally refuses to follow directives; instead, we can conceptualize it as one that involves complicated give-and-take arrangements and continuous renegotiation. It is worth noting again that most established democracies of the West would perceive such patterns as an appalling diversion from the Weberian notion of a state-serving bureaucracy, and much of the literature (not coincidentally originating in the West) would agree. But this is precisely where the Indonesian case can deliver a reality check on how many bureaucracies in younger democracies work; there, the model of a “collusive” coalition is more prevalent than even Dasandi and Esteve assumed. Somewhat optimistically, Yudhoyono modeled his bureaucratic reform effort along the lines of the Clinton initiative headed by Gore; however, that attempt fell apart as the power of civil service lobbyists confronted the president. As one of the authors of the reformist first draft of the civil service law remarked, Yudhoyono’s fear of a potential bureaucracy backlash led him to refrain from giving his deputy “Boediono the full powers that Al Gore had—in fact, Boediono was granted none” (discussion with Prijono Tjipto Herijanto, December 12, 2013).

Integrating the bureaucracy into coalitional presidentialism studies also sheds new light on the difficulty of civil service reform in Indonesia and beyond. The slow pace of change in this arena is not just the result of the massive size of the apparatus and the archaic rules that have traditionally governed it. Rather, bureaucratic elites have succeeded in defending, and presidents have been reluctant in attacking, privileges that the civil service has set as red lines in political negotiations. The bureaucracy’s self-funding, predatory appropriation of state budgets, and entrenched patronage practices are chief among them, but conservative views of what and who constitutes the state are also included. Presidents have accepted these red lines because they fear not doing so would posit the bureaucracy outside of their coalitions and thus threaten the stability of their rule. The civil service, for its part, has allowed just enough reform for the president to be able to credibly claim that some change has been achieved. Other than that, both sides have endorsed an arrangement that permits the government to operate effectively while providing guarantees for the continued supply of major benefits to civil servants. Drastic reform, in this equation, always carries the risk of creating instability, and therefore is inherently antithetic to coalitional presidentialism.

7. Local Governments