The research, conducted by Ahmad Khoirul Umam of Paramadina University in Jakarta and M. Adil Khan of the University of Queensland, draws on documentary analysis and 25 semi-structured interviews with former KPK commissioners and investigators, government officials, anti-corruption activists, journalists and academics, conducted in two phases between February 2020 and March 2026. The authors use a political-settlement framework to explain a puzzle that has long troubled scholars of comparative governance: why do anti-corruption agencies that begin with strong legal mandates and broad public legitimacy so often lose their autonomy over time, even as formal democratic institutions remain intact? Their answer is that institutional durability depends less on statutory powers than on the shifting balance of power between reform coalitions and entrenched political-economic interests.

The historical record the authors assemble is striking. Indonesia’s first anti-corruption initiatives date to the late 1950s, when the Retooling State Apparatus Committee, known as Paran, attempted wealth audits of officials under President Soekarno. It was dissolved in 1964, undermined by officials loyal to the president. A subsequent operation under General Nasution targeted corrupt state companies and recovered assets, but collapsed under elite resistance. The final attempt of the era, the High Command of Retooling Revolutionary Apparatus, was chaired by Soekarno himself and stagnated amid growing tensions between the army and the Communist Party. Under Soeharto’s New Order, the pattern repeated. The Corruption Eradication Team, established in 1967 and revived in 1982, was powerless against corrupt forces. The Commission of Four, set up in the early 1970s under former Vice President Mohammad Hatta, collapsed after just six months, hampered by legal restrictions on disclosing its findings. Operasi Tertib, launched in 1977 under Admiral Soedomo, initially processed 1,127 cases involving 8,026 suspects within four years, but it too dissolved when its investigations reached grand corruption involving coalitions of political and economic forces at the highest levels of government.

The study situates these failures in Indonesia’s broader political economy. Under Soekarno, scholars have characterised the system as patrimonial, with corruption shaped by a highly concentrated patronage structure at the centre of politics. Under Soeharto, market-oriented reforms inspired by the Washington Consensus stimulated private sector expansion but also created powerful oligarchies, with strategic sectors captured by politically connected business groups linked to the president’s family, close associates and large conglomerates. These elites enjoyed preferential access to licences, credit, public contracts and off-budget funds, turning Indonesia into a classic case of crony capitalism. Every anti-corruption agency established under Soeharto perished for lack of genuine political, financial and infrastructural support. The lesson, the authors argue, is that anti-corruption bodies were tolerated only so long as they avoided the core networks of power, and were neutralised the moment investigations reached senior elites.

The fall of Soeharto’s regime in 1998, amid mass demands for an end to corruption, collusion and nepotism, appeared to change everything. The reform era produced a wave of legal innovation: a People’s Consultative Assembly decree mandating wealth disclosure by state officials, Law No. 28/1999 on clean government, the State Officials’ Wealth Audit Commission, the Ombudsman Commission, and a joint anti-corruption team coordinated by the Attorney General that proved ineffective and was dissolved. The proliferation of agencies did not automatically reduce corruption; scholars cited in the study note that overlapping jurisdictions often produced inefficiency. What mattered was the creation in 2002 of the KPK under Law No. 30/2002, designed as Indonesia’s apex corruption control agency with investigative and prosecutorial authority that no conventional law enforcement body possessed.

During President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s decade in office, the KPK enjoyed strong institutional support and relative political space. It pursued major cases against ministers, governors, legislators, senior bureaucrats and law enforcement officials with unprecedented success, and survived confrontations with the police in the so-called Cicak versus Buaya episodes of 2009 and 2012, as well as repeated attempts to revise its founding law between 2007 and 2014. Presidential protection, the study finds, was decisive in allowing the commission to maintain a meaningful degree of autonomy. But its very success changed the incentive structure of dominant political actors. As one anti-corruption activist told the researchers, the KPK came to be framed by political elites as a wild and uncontrolled little tiger that had to be tamed.

The taming came in 2019. Shortly after that year’s elections, parliamentary parties and the government consolidated support to revise Law No. 30/2002, completing the amendment process in just 13 days with limited public scrutiny, at a moment when post-election accountability pressures were weak. Student protests erupted nationwide under the banner Reformasi Dikorupsi, or Reform Corrupted, but fractured opposition and repressive responses blunted the backlash. A senior journalist at the Kompas media group told the researchers that the revision was conducted both openly and secretly, beyond public awareness, with the stated pretext of strengthening the KPK while its real aim was to cripple the agency’s power and authority. The new law, No. 19/2019, reclassified the KPK as part of the executive branch, converted its investigators into civil servants, restricted its investigative authority through the introduction of a termination instrument known as SP3, and created a politically appointed Supervisory Board with power to approve sensitive investigatory actions such as wiretaps and searches.

The operational consequences were measurable. The number of KPK red-handed operations involving high-profile targets rose from 17 in 2016 to 30 in 2018, then collapsed to 7 in 2020, 6 in 2021 and just 5 in 2024, with a modest recovery to 11 in 2025 after a change of leadership. Overall enforcement followed the same curve: the commission handled 57 major cases with 216 suspects in 2018 and 62 cases with 155 suspects in 2019, but only 15 cases in 2020 and 18 cases involving 49 suspects in 2024. The sharp rise to 116 cases in 2025, the authors caution, does not represent recovery, since interview evidence indicates the caseload shifted toward routine corruption involving regional bureaucrats and lower-level officials, while politically sensitive cases involving big names, big power and big money largely disappeared from the docket. Indonesia’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which climbed from 20 in 2004 to a peak of 40 in 2019, fell to 34 by 2022 and 2023 and stood at 34 again in 2025, a pattern the authors read as decline followed by stagnation in perceived public-sector integrity.

The study also documents the political capture of the commission’s leadership. The appointment of Firli Bahuri as chairman in 2019, alongside commissioners with controversial backgrounds, fuelled allegations of political interference, and the controversial National Insight Test dismissed highly professional investigators on accusations of radicalism, a test critics widely questioned on scientific validity and viewed as politically motivated. Ironically, Bahuri himself was later named a suspect in a corruption case involving the Minister of Agriculture. Interviewees consistently interpreted the cumulative effect of these reforms as steering the KPK away from high-risk elite investigations toward lower-level prosecutions with less political fallout, a process the authors describe not as institutional abolition but as institutional domestication: agencies that remain formally independent and continue processing cases, but gradually lose the operational autonomy needed to investigate politically influential actors.

The Indonesian case, the authors argue, carries lessons far beyond Southeast Asia. Comparable patterns of elite backlash have weakened Sri Lanka’s bribery commission, the Philippines’ Office of the Ombudsman, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, and anti-corruption agencies in Bangladesh and Bhutan, typically through legal amendments, executive intervention, budgetary pressure and reputational delegitimisation. By contrast, the relative resilience of Hong Kong’s ICAC and Singapore’s CPIB shows that durable anti-corruption institutions depend on an ecosystem of sustained political commitment, meritocratic administration, judicial independence and broad public trust. The study’s central conclusion is that institutional autonomy is not a legal guarantee but a constantly negotiated political equilibrium, and that anti-corruption reform is inherently non-linear: successful enforcement produces counter-mobilisation by threatened elites, generating recurring cycles of expansion, contestation and partial rollback. The greatest threat to anti-corruption agencies in emerging democracies, the authors conclude, is not abolition but domestication, and protecting independence requires sustained reform coalitions, active civil society and independent media capable of raising the political cost of elite interference.

Subject of Research: The political drivers of the rise and decline of anti-corruption agencies, focusing on Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission

Article Title: The rise and fall of anti-corruption agencies in Indonesia’s emerging democracy

Article References: Umam, A. K., & Khan, M. A. (2026). The rise and fall of anti-corruption agencies in Indonesia’s emerging democracy. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1793988. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1793988

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1793988

Keywords: anti-corruption agencies, Indonesia, KPK, elite capture, institutional autonomy, democratic accountability, political settlements, comparative governance, Global South, corruption, oligarchy, democratic backsliding