Volunteerism after the Tsunami: The Effects of Democratization

Abstract

 Ari Kuncoro (corresponding author) is professor at University of Indonesia; email: arik@cbn.net.id; address: LPEM-UI Jalan Salemba 4 Jakarta Pusat 10430 Indonesia; phone: 62-21-314-3177; fax: 62-21-319-34310. J. Vernon Henderson is a professor at London School of Economics; email: J.V.Henderson@lse.edu.uk. Tiago Freire is a lecturer at Xi'an JiaoTong-Liverpool University; email: tiago@tiagofreire.com. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (SES 0416840), which made this project possible and continuing support from National Institute of Health NIH (R01 HD057188). We thank Ifa Isfandiarni and Zakir Machmud of the University of Indonesia for their efforts in supervision of the survey. The work has benefited from very helpful comments by Andy Foster and, for an early version of the paper, by seminar participants at LSE, Berkeley, and Minnesota. Manabu Nose, Yongsuk Lee, and Shiva Koohi contributed helpful RA work at points in the project. We also benefited from the comments of the three referees and of the editor, which led us to focus the paper on the effects of democratization and helped greatly with exposition. 2Volunteer labor in traditional societies is a key part of village life. There is no paid local public labor force to collect litter and sweep the roads, maintain village lands and pathways, and build and repair coastal barriers and irrigation and aquaculture channels.There is also no public labor force to repair or renovate village-provided public buildings such as mosques and village and fishermen's halls. Buildings like schools and health care facilities are government provided. At times, there are construction monies for villageprovided buildings such as halls or mosques from outside sources. However, repairs, maintenance, and renovation are a different matter. In Indonesia, such local public labor What is the effect of democratization on volunteerism? A priori, given work by Dalbo, Foster, and Putterman (2010) 4 Later, in a section on controls, we will suggest specific hypotheses that our data may relate to.We start by describing the unusual context. Then we present a model of volunteerism, discuss the estimating framework, and analyze results. THE CONTEXTWe look at the extent of destruction from the tsunami, aid delivery, and aspects of democratization relevant to the investigation. To keep a sequence of events, we start with items related to our controls, before turning to democratization. Table A2 in the appendix gives statistics on village characteristics we use in estimation. For these questionnaires, in the majority of cases, the official interviewee is the village head, who is also the respondent to the PODES, a tri-annual census of Indonesian village populations and facilities. But often multiple village officials were present and village heads were not shy about asking other prominent villagers to supply or confirm information. 5The tsunami devastated coastal cities and villages. under 50% of the population survived; in the expanded set used in the pap...

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Making Politics Work for Development: Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement

“…Indonesia provides further suggestive evidence of this tension between local collective action to solve local problems versus holding leaders accountable for using their positions of leadership to service the community. Freire, Henderson, and Kuncoro (2011) provide evidence that the introduction of democratic elections at the village level in Indonesia led to a replacement of traditional village leaders drawn from the village elite, and a simultaneous reduction in volunteer labor that village elites previously mobilized for building local public infrastructure.…”