Jakarta – Indonesia's legal frameworks fail to enforce transparency in the use of public funding for electoral campaigns by political parties, while abuses are rampant and remain unaddressed due to the limited authority of oversight bodies – a new study has found.
Washington-based Global Integrity, which disclosed the result of its study last week, puts Indonesia at the 25th place out of the 54 countries surveyed in its "Money, Politics and Transparency Integrity Indicators" study – conducted between 2013 and 2014.
Georgia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico and the United States – in respective order – are the top five performers in the survey, which examined countries' legal frameworks on public funding for political campaigns and how the laws are implemented. At the bottom of the list are Malaysia, Botswana, Sri Lanka, Solomon Islands and Malawi.
Not all known developed democracies perform well in the study. Germany and Sweden, for example, ranked 32nd and 37th, respectively. Russia, on the other hand, finished at the 20th place.
Indonesia recorded a moderate score of 65 in terms of the legal aspect. In comparison, the United States scored 71 and Malaysia scored 26. When it came to the practical aspect, Indonesia's score dropped to 47. Here the United States recorded 67 points and Malaysia 15.
Global Integrity acknowledges that Indonesia's political finance framework makes public funding available for parties. The money is distributed according to how many votes were received by each party during the previous election. Unfortunately, the law does not guarantee public access to information.
"In practice, obtaining information on how much funding parties received is nearly impossible, as doing so requires filing information requests with parties themselves," Global Integrity says on its website.
The organization also highlights "third-party actors," namely non-political party, non-candidate actors who solicit contributions and/or make expenditures directly related to an electoral campaign.
"Third-party actors exert influence during campaigns, but as their independent political activities are not regulated by law, little information on their actions is available," Global Integrity says.
The study also scrutinizes the issue of unregulated spending by Indonesian political parties, saying: "Spending during campaigns is not capped. Nevertheless, the MPT evidence indicates that actual spending during the campaign season far outstrips the figures reported by parties."
Unequal media coverage, regular abuses of non-financial state resources to support re-elections of public officials, as well as weak regulations concerning wealth reports by candidates and public donations, are among other things highlighted in the Indonesian section of the report on the survey result.
Indonesia's law fails to address these abuses, with the country's two election oversight bodies, namely the General Elections Commission (KPU) and the Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu), being largely toothless.
"Both agencies are independent, with appointees possessing sufficient merit for their positions, but lack the capacity to completely carry out their functions," Global Integrity comments. "In practice, Bawaslu does conduct investigations transparently, and KPU does impose sanctions, but violations continue to occur."
"The KPU's sanctioning authority is limited to administrative fines, and is too weak to deter repeat violators. The limited authority of the oversight bodies hamstrings their ability to meaningfully enforce many political finance regulations," it adds.
The survey report came out just a few weeks after the Indonesian government disclosed a plan to raise state subsidies for the country's political parties by at least 900 percent.
"We are proposing [that the subsidies] be increased 10 to 20 times from where it is today," Home Minister Tjahjo Kumolo, a politician with the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), said last month.
"If for example, the PDI-P receives Rp 2 billion [annually], in the future we will receive Rp 20 billion," he added, claiming though that the subsidy increase would not be a priority plan of the government.