Institutional Settings and Social Networks of Corruption in the Indonesian Public Sector

Corruption has been proven to occur in different institutional settings. With the spread of corruption at local levels in Indonesia after the introduction of a decentralized democratic regime, this study focuses particularly on corruption involving local public leaders in Indonesia after the implementation of the decentralization policy in 2001. Local government in Indonesia has been experiencing two models of democratic decentralized systems, namely representative democracy (2001-2004) and direct democracy (2005-now). The aim of this study is to unravel the dynamic interactions between conditions of corruption, institutions and actors for the Indonesian case by analyzing whether and to what degree the meta structure of corruption networks differ between these two different institutional settings. We apply a social network approach assuming that corrupt transactions take place because of the social relations between actors (individuals or groups) involved. We hypothesize that changes in Indonesia’s institutional setting have to some extent changed the nature of corruption networks, particularly in terms of the actors, type of relation between actors, and the type of corruption. We distinguish three types of relations that facilitate corrupt transactions: power relations, enabling ties, and profits. We apply this categorization to code the networks of corruption of 190 corruption cases, based on 904 articles as they were reported in Indonesian public newspapers in 2001-2013. Based on the three types of ties, we reconstruct each network of corruption into binary (dyad) networks. By using a relational algebra method we can analyze the meta structures of corruption networks in the two phases of decentralization. Thus, in the end we can determine the relative frequency of the predicted networks, and to what degree the frequency differs depending on context conditions in two different institutional settings (e.g. type of corruption, type of actors, etc.). [The research finding and conclusion are in writing process]