The Effect of Managerial, Political, and Public in Interest on Budget Performance : The Role of Budget Discipline, Budget Approval, and Accountability as Mediators in Indonesia Local Government

This study attempts to explain the local government budget of Indonesia in three perspectives: managerial, politic, and public interest. By using the multiple regression analysis, nine hypotheses have been tested. The finding of this research shows that budget discipline, budget approval and accountability are the mediating variables to produce budget performance, but in different level. The independent variables that are local fiscal capacity, budget ceiling and priority, and national priority, in the managerial perspective not all have an impact on the budget
performance since the existence of the budget discipline, except budget ceiling and priority. From the political perspective, the approval process should be considered as a crucial process to mediate, intergovernmental transfer, local government prerogative and the role of local politician towards the budget performance. In the perspective of public interest, the accountability becomes a crucial factor that able to mediate financial reporting system, audit system and budget oversight towards the budget performance. The local government budget is vulnerable due to dominant of political power and this causes the implementation of the systems was not reliable, and cannot be subject to the regulation, especially for budgeting systems and accounting standards. Meanwhile the behavior of the local government budget tends to ignore the expectation of majority voters. Other findings, suggests that decentralization brings a different result, at different levels of local government. The provincial governments seem to gain the benefits of decentralization is better, compared with regency and city. Fiscal capacity of provinces are able to increase by leaps and bounds compared to the regency and city governments, as expected, and as a manifestation of the implementation of decentralization policy. However, the county and city governments have not been able to improve their fiscal strength, but is still struggling to afford their routine administration