Resource distribution, state coherence, and political centralization in Indonesia, 1950--1997

Scholars of Indonesian politics have devoted more attention to the rise of authoritarianism since the 1950s than to the concomitant centralization' of political power. In this regard, the study of Indonesian politics has mirrored broader trends in the field of comparative politics. These two characteristics of political power can be distinguished, and doing so has practical importance for the analysis of political strategies and outcomes. Since political power can be concentrated not just in the state as opposed to society, but in a national authority rather than regional ones, democratization is not the only strategy for dispersing power. It can also be redistributed among subnational centers.;Drawing on theories of state formation and transformation prominent in historical sociology, I develop an institutionalist model of state-society relations that explains intertemporal variations in the level of political centralization in terms of two variables: the regional breadth of the state's fiscal base, and its internal coherence. The model suggests that as the internal coherence of the state increases, and the breadth of the state's fiscal base narrows, conditions for the construction of a centralized state are enhanced.;Applied to Indonesia, the model highlights two periods in which political and economic conditions fostered centralization and a third in which they made increasingly costly the Soeharto regime's efforts to maintain a high degree of centralization. It calls special attention to the effect of economic liberalization since the mid-1980s on the state's fiscal basis. For the first time, the Indonesian state came to depend heavily on revenues extracted from commercial and industrial activities spread throughout much of the country, rather than natural resource exports from a small number of sparsely populated regions.;Empirically, this study offers a rich source of data on regional politics and center-region relations in Indonesia. Theoretically, it provides a fresh approach to understanding the political effects of economic reform as well as analytical reasons to pay closer attention to subnational variations in economic outcomes. Extensive case studies of East Java and Riau illustrate inter-regional variations in the level of political centralization.