Political Dynasty and Welfare Growth at the Indonesian District

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-436-5_25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Political Dynasty; Local Politics; Welfare Growth; Oligarchy

Abstract

Familial oligarchy has been a growing topic of debate and discussion in the politically decentralized Indonesia. The ruling of the Constitutional Court in 2015 that fails to prevent this phenomenon has contributed to the issue. On the one hand, democracy offers non-discriminatory treatment for political candidates in the local election, but on the other hand this has prevented free competition and true elite circulation. Bodies of literature has highlighted the link between political dynasty and development in Indonesia however results are inconclusive. This study aims to investigate the macro-level impact of political dynasty in Indonesia. We gather district-level data from Statistics of Indonesia (BPS) for the periods of three years before and after the local election, with election data provided by KPU. The main interest variables in this research are poverty share and per capita expenditure as the proxy of welfare growth. Recently developed Staggered Difference-in-Difference model is applied to estimate dynasty’s long-term effect. As the control group we choose (1) regions where political dynasty failed to win the election, and (2) its neighboring districts which are not affected by political dynasty. Results show that in general there is a negative tendency on poverty (ranging between -0.1 and -0.25 percent) and per capita expenditure (range between -1 and -2 percent) in regions trapped under dynastic regimes. However in most of the result the parallel trend assumption, which is essential in measuring the treatment effect under Difference-in-Difference, is violated. The finding calls first for a thorough heterogeneity check to unveal a more precise estimate and secondly for encouraging larger discussion to revisit the ruling of Constitutional Court on political dynasty in Indonesia.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Bangkit Aditya Wiryawan
AU  - Teguh Yuwono
AU  - Nur Hidayat Sardini
AU  - Rofi Lutfiani
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/07/01
TI  - Political Dynasty and Welfare Growth at the Indonesian District
BT  - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Indonesian Social and Political Enquiries (ICISPE 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 286
EP  - 293
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-436-5_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-436-5_25
ID  - Wiryawan2025
ER  -