ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses largely encouraging portrait of Indonesia's democratic growth and performance in its first decade. Indonesia has been a latecomer to democracy during the historic 'third wave' of global democratization. Oddly, it has been in this recent period of global democratic stagnation and recession that Indonesia has emerged and developed as a democracy. On the measures of social and economic development, Indonesia's performance as a new democracy has been reasonably good relative to other emerging-market democracies around the world. Indonesia has also done surprisingly well in terms of democracy and governance. In 1998, Indonesia was in the bottom 10 percent (9.2) of countries in the world in its effectiveness in control of corruption. The picture becomes rather more dramatic, and more positive, when people compare Indonesia's progress on some of the governance scores over the last decade with that of other countries around the world.
