Your innovations (didn’t) make me happy: The role of popular governors and mayors on regional welfare

Abstraksi

Regional autonomy in Indonesia encourages the competition at local level to produce innovative governors and mayors. There has been increasing trend of local leaders with cutting-edge and creative approaches. Social media use also supports the popularity of local leaders. Several institutions including government and news network have prize these types of leaders with various types of awards.. The question is whether these popular leaders really enhanced the condition in the regions. Fizbean (1997) in the analysis of Colombian local leaders found that innovative leadership as the results of decentralization in Colombia encourage the program to enhance the capability of community. Sujarwoto and Tampubolon (2014) found in their study on Indonesia that while fiscal decentralization increased the probability of happiness of individuals, political decentralization did not have significant effect on happiness. This paper analyses the role of local leaders in improving local condition based on the comparative analysis on the happiness index, Human Development Index, GDP per capita and inequality between the regions with local leaders who received awards and regions without these awardee. Descriptive analysis results in this paper show that at province level, there has been increasing happiness index in the regions with the awardee local leaders. In terms of Human Development Index, there is no significant different of the index between regions with awardee and non-awardee local leaders. In GDP per capita n inequality, regions with awardee local leaders show lower performance compared to other regions.