A Tale of Two Mayors Configurations of Care and Corruption in Eastern Indonesian Direct District Head Elections

In this article, I discuss three rounds of direct district head elections that took place in Kupang, in eastern Indonesia, between 2007 and 2012. The right to vote directly for a district head formed a part of wider processes of state reformation (reformasi) aimed to promote democratization, anti-corruption, and good governance in the wake of former president Suharto's resignation from office in 1998. In spite of such reforms, corruption and clientelism in Indonesian politics persist, leading some scholars to view corruption as the main culprit for Indonesia's failure to transition to a "meaningful" or "liberal" democracy. Eschewing such a view of corruption as a diagnosis for a failure to democratize, I instead ask what productive work corruption, conceived of as a transgression of political care, can do in assessing the consequences of anti-corruption efforts. Political care grounded in recognition, as I will show, is not necessarily tied to a politics of good governance, yet it also does not easily fall under an extension of clientelism. Anti-corruption efforts, then, rather than eradicating corruption, can instead delineate just how much "bad" governance people are willing to put up with as long as they feel seen and cared for.