Indonesia is planning to rewrite the laws that govern its elections. New bills on parliamentary elections, and on district and gubernatorial elections, are in the works, and drafts are expected to reach parliament within the year. Most of the public conversation so far has been about things like electoral thresholds, meaning the minimum share of the vote a party needs before it can win seats or field a candidate, and about whether regional legislatures, rather than voters, should pick governors and mayors. One question, though, has stayed largely in the background, even though it shapes the quality of government long after the ballots are counted. How much does it now cost to run for office?In terms of background, Indonesia is one of the world’s largest democracies, a presidential republic with a lively multiparty system. Since the reforms that followed the end of the Soeharto era, Indonesians have directly elected not only their president and national legislators, but also the leaders of their regions: provincial governors, and the bupati and walikota who head the country’s regencies and cities. Those regional contests, known as pilkada, are the focus of this piece. Each is fought by a pair of candidates, a prospective district head running with a deputy. To reach the ballot, candidates almost always need the backing of a political party, or more often a coalition of them; standing as an independent is allowed but rare. That dependence on party backing, as we will see, is where much of the money begins.The findings here come from a research project that looks at campaign costs in both India and Indonesia, two large and diverse democracies. Quite a few similarities, and a few of the fixes we suggest are borrowed from India itself. Over the past year, we surveyed 478 candidates from the 2024 district head elections (pilkada) across 10 provinces. We also sent 14 researchers into the field to follow 42 candidates on the campaign trail. The twist in our method is simple. Instead of asking candidates only about their own spending, which people tend to play down, we asked them to estimate what their rivals spent. That cross-checking helps correct the chronic under-reporting that has long made Indonesia’s official campaign records hard to trust. The most important thing to take from all this is not despair. It is that these high costs are not baked into direct elections. They are the result of particular policy choices, and choices can be made differently.How much does a campaign cost?Winning candidates in the 2024 district head elections in Indonesia spent about IDR 27.4 billion on their campaigns. That is roughly US$ 1.6 million, or around Rs 15 crore. Add in the payments candidates make to secure a party’s backing, the so-called political dowry (mahar politik), and the average for winners climbs to IDR 36.8 billion: about US$ 2.1 million, or Rs 20 crore. To see how large that is, consider that it comes to roughly 468 times what an average Indonesian earns in a year, which is about Rs 4 lakh.These are big numbers by international standards too. Per voter, a winning candidate’s spending works out to more than US$ 10. That is higher than the per-voter figures we recorded for the other countries in our comparison, including Liberia (US$ 7.18), Ghana (US$ 1.24), Pakistan (US$ 0.80) and Kenya (US$ 0.74). The comparison is rough, since these are district head races rather than parliamentary ones, so it is best read as a broad signal rather than a precise ranking.Almost none of this shows up in the official record. The spending figures candidates file with the General Elections Commission (KPU) rarely go above IDR 3.5 billion, about Rs 1.9 crore. That is a small slice of what our survey suggests they really spend.Money and winning also track each other closely. In 78% of the races we looked at, the biggest spender won. Within a single district, every extra IDR 1 billion a candidate spends beyond local rivals is linked to roughly a 0.8 point gain in vote share. None of this proves that elections can simply be bought, and spending more is no guarantee of victory. But it does suggest that the ability to spend improves the odds. One common assumption that our data does not bear out is that spending spikes mainly in close races. The tightness of a contest shows no clear link to how much candidates spend.Why does cost matter for governance?The worry here is less the size of the bill than what tends to happen next. A candidate who spends tens of billions of IDR to win office has a strong reason to earn that money back once in power. And where the money came from in the first place shapes how that plays out.The survey finds that it comes from two main places. Nearly half, 49.2%, or about IDR 13.7 billion per candidate (roughly Rs 7.4 crore), comes from the candidate’s own wealth or family. Another 26.4% comes from business donors. Political parties chip in only about 5.4%, and ordinary citizens a mere 2.2%.Both of the big sources usually expect something in return. Business backers often want access to contracts, permits, or a helpful decision down the line. Candidates who fund themselves feel pressure to recover the outlay through their control of public resources. Also read: Why are Indonesians Rioting Against Their Government?That helps explain a pattern that keeps recurring: between 2004 and 2024, some 171 district heads and 441 national and regional legislators were convicted of corruption. Greed may play a part, but a lot of this looks less like personal appetite and more like a predictable response to how campaigns get paid for.Where does the money go?Let us break down where the money goes. It turns out, the visible campaign of rallies and billboards are only a small part of the budget. Publicity, events and organisation together add up to relatively little. The heavy spending sits in four places:The largest by far is money and goods handed straight to voters. This will not surprise anyone who follows Indonesian elections, but the survey puts a number on it: handouts are the single largest spending category, at 41.3% of budgets on average and 47.1% for winners. Cash and food alone make up 28.7% of all budgets, about IDR 8.3 billion per candidate (Rs 4.5 crore), and 33.8% for winners. Scaled up across the country, vote-related handouts in the 2024 pilkada come to an estimated IDR 12.9 trillion. That is around Rs 7,000 crore, or roughly 7% of Indonesia’s annual health budget. Our fieldwork suggests this has become routine, with many voters now expecting a payment from more than one candidate.The second is political dowry. Even though paying a party for its endorsement is illegal under both the Election Law and the Regional Election Law, an estimated 87.8% of candidates do it, at an average of IDR 6.9 billion (about Rs 3.7 crore). That is about a quarter of total campaign costs. Add it up across all 1,557 candidate pairs in 2024 and it comes to roughly IDR 9.4 trillion – about Rs 5,000 crore – nearly 75 times the annual state subsidy parties receive.The last two drivers say more about the system than about the candidates. Because parties cannot muster many volunteers, candidates build and pay for their own campaign teams, which eats up about 10.7% of costs. And because many candidates do not trust the vote count, they hire people to watch over polling stations, adding another 9.2%. More trust in the process, or livelier party organisations, would take a bite out of both.Why do these costs exist and how might they come down?Put it all together and you can see a system whose own rules keep pushing costs up. The requirement that candidates line up a coalition of parties to qualify is what creates the market for political dowry. A high bar of proof makes vote buying hard to prosecute; as things stand, handing out cash is effectively legal unless a prosecutor can show a vote was asked for in return. Spending limits for district races are set so high that they barely restrain anyone. And state funding for parties is thin, at about IDR 1,000 per vote, a little over Rs 5, which covers an estimated 1.5% of what parties actually need. In Germany that figure is around 35%, and in France about 50%.The hopeful word in all of that is “rules”. Rules can be changed. Our main recommendation is a modest, procedural one: that the government set up an independent commission of legal and political experts to design a coherent package of reforms, rather than leaving the rules to be patched together piece by piece. From the evidence, four directions stand out.Curtail vote buying: Lowering the standard of proof would make handing out cash prosecutable without having to show an explicit deal. Rapid-response monitoring teams, modelled on India’s “flying squads” (which pair officials, police, and a video team, backed by a public reporting app like C-Vigil), could give enforcement real teeth. And changing how election supervisors (Bawaslu) are appointed and rotated would loosen their dependence on the very local elites they are meant to watch.Broaden where the money comes from: To lean less on personal fortunes and business donors, the country needs healthier sources of funding. State subsidies could be raised and, just as important, handed out democratically. One idea is a “democracy voucher” that lets every taxpayer send a fixed public sum to a party of their choice. To keep it from turning into patronage by another name, it would have to be double-blind and tied to audited, transparent accounts.Tighten the rules on campaign finance: Spending limits could be reset to match what campaigns really cost, and donation records could be made searchable by the public, as they are in many countries. Even where enforcement is patchy, a clear limit sets a shared standard.Look at the electoral system itself: The debate tends to boil down to a straight choice: keep direct elections, or hand the pick of regional heads back to local legislatures. That second route mostly moves the money from voters to councillors and weakens leaders’ accountability. A third option is worth a serious look: a “fused” local parliamentary model, where the top candidate of the party that wins the most council seats becomes district head. It would cut the number of expensive elections and take some of the air out of political dowry, while still letting voters hold leaders to account.None of this is easy, and every option comes with trade-offs that need careful thought. That is exactly why an expert commission makes sense, and why the discussion should rest on evidence rather than hunches. The rewrite of the election laws is a real chance to do that: to treat the cost of campaigns not as some fixed fact of life, but as a problem that good policy can solve.Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) Leiden. Mada Sukmajati is a lecturer at the Department of Politics and Government, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Vignesh Rajahmani is a postdoctoral researcher in Indian and Indonesian politics at KITLV, Leiden, a research affiliate at the King’s India Institute, and a visiting scholar at the SOAS University of London, South Asia Institute. Iqra Anugrah holds the MSCA Seal of Excellence in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin, a researcher at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES).This article is a version of “The Price of Power: Campaign Finance and Vote Buying in Indonesia’s 2024 Elections,” a report produced through a collaboration between UGM (PolGov) and KITLV Leiden as part of a wider study of election campaign costs in India and Indonesia.Full Report: https://www.kitlv.nl/assets/files/the-price-of-power.pdf Note on figures: All IDR amounts are taken from the report, which values the US$ at 17,600 IDR. We convert them to INR in two steps, first to USD at that rate, then to INR at about 95 to the USD (the approximate mid-2026 rate). In effect, IDR 1 billion works out to roughly INR 54 lakh, or about INR 0.54 crore. All INR figures are rounded and should be read as approximate, and exchange rates shift over time.