ABSTRACT
In January 2001, the Indonesian government began devolving a wide range of authority to more than 360 district-level governments and assemblies, embracing the long-standing aspirations of local communities to exercise greater control over their own political and economic affairs. Importantly, regional autonomy, or otonomi daerah, conferred on local governments an unprecedented degree of autonomy in the country’s post-independence history. At the core of this transformation was the overhaul and revitalization of local parliamentary politics. In September 1999, a provincial assembly and five district assemblies were formed in Yogyakarta as a result of the June general elections. Many people in the region seemed to expect that the emergence of local assemblies as new loci of power would create and institutionalize more responsive and effectively representative political institutions in the region. However, as this chapter explains, political developments in Yogyakarta for the first couple of years actually diverged from the popular expectations about more democratic-transparent, accountable and responsivepolitical processes. Instead, the regime change at the national level, the following overhaul of the political system and the devolution of authority to local political institutions seemed to have rather occasioned the development of undemocratic political practices in local institutions.
