Rent-seeking Practices in the Budget Policymaking Processes at Local Government: Case Studies in Indonesia

This paper tries to analyze and utilizes qualitative document content analysis as a means of understanding rent- seeking practices in fiscal policymaking processes. This study revealed that rent-seeking practices in fiscal policymaking in Malang City, Malang Regency, and Batu City, Indonesia, involved the practices of bribery, corruption, collusion, lobbying, negotiation, and transactional politics between regional leaders, bureaucrats, private actors, and political brokers. Rent-seeking practices trough informal policymaking have a strong positive correlation to corruption. It shows that corruption resulted from rent-seeking practices in fiscal policymaking in Malang City, Malang Regency, and Batu City. Transactional politics, negotiations, bribery, collusive relations, and lobbying were also involved in rent-seeking, ultimately resulting in corruption. Therefore, the new thesis of this research is that transactional relations, negotiation, collusion, bribery, and political lobbies between regional heads, bureaucracy, parliamentary politicians, brokers, and businessmen trigger corruption in the formulation of regional budget policies. This research confirms that the practices of rent-seeking take place through informal budget policy formulation, such a transactional relations, negotiation, collusion, bribery, and political lobbies that result in acts of corruption in budget policies.