The curbing of corruption by formal and informal accountability at the Indonesian local governments: Learning from Yogyakarta City

According to the compilation of Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by Transparency International Indonesia on 2006, 2008 and 2010, 85 percent of the Indonesia local governments got a score less than 5 with meaning highly corrupt. However, there are exceptions such as Yogyakarta City. Yogyakarta is one of the areas with relatively low levels of corruption in its local governments in 2006 (5.59), 2008 (6.33), and 2010 (5.81). So, what does Yogyakarta do differently? One of the reasons for the differences in corruption level might be that, where it is widely supposed that corruption is negatively related to accountability, increased accountability is mostly implemented by formal mechanism. Special for Yogyakarta is that it, next to such formal ways of accountability, makes extensive use of informal ways to improve accountability. As such, the success of Yogyakarta as one of the Indonesian regions with the lowest levels of corruption is interesting to study in that it might provide additional insight in existing theoretical perspectives on accountability