Budgeting Options Using the Ratchet Principle for Indonesian Bureaucracy: A Poststructuralist Approach

This research investigates the existing structure of Indonesian regulations for constructing bureaucrats’ cognitive behavior by carrying out budget ratcheting and praxis. It then analyses the dominant factors influencing Indonesia’s Bureaucracy’s decision to adopt the ratchet principle. It underlines that the Indonesian bureaucracy prefers praxis due to national styles and regulations. Furthermore, the authors reveal that the Indonesian bureaucrats preserve their outcome to save face by leniently ratcheting the budget for this current one. This article uses a post-structuralist methodology demonstrating that praxis is nested in bureaucrat behavior. Then, we conduct in-depth interviews to capture the thinking behind the Indonesian bureaucrats’ cognition. We found four factors influencing the Indonesian bureaucracy’s choice to use praxis: commodification, regulatory ambivalence, undecidability, and expediency. Therefore, this study highlights that budget executors never produce optimum performances due to a misalignment between the budgetary measurements and the execution. In short, the budget’s executors conduct praxis in their cognitive behavior because they have no other choice. This study’s findings have consequences for the political economy, meaning Indonesia’s government must re-engineer most budgetary regulations to control all the behavioral agents. Simultaneously, this re-engineering could drive and empower the bureaucrats’ behavior by transforming their readiness and commitment to change. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.