Welfare regime and the patrimonial state in contemporary Asia: visiting Indonesian cases

A systematic understanding of how patrimonial state contributes to the wider-ranging role on a series of welfare configurations in Asia is still lacking. This article, therefore, will investigate this issue with Indonesia as case study. It is argued that Indonesia is one of the Asian countries where patrimonial rules have still been affecting the welfare regime dynamics for many years, even as the institutional structures of the democratic regime have been driving forces of equality. This explanation will be centred on two of the critical conjunctures in the emergence of patrimonial state. The first was during the Dutch colonial period. The second was during the productivist era.