The Journey of Merit in Indonesia: Civil Service Promotion System in Civil Service Act

Recently, Bureaucratic Reform became one of Indonesia administrative reform strategy. Civil service as the importing agent of bureaucratic is need to be reformed for making good governance and good public services. Historically, Indonesian Civil Service Act has been created and reformed for couple times, the first one it calls Law of No.8, 1974 about The Principle of Employee Affairs; the second calls Law of No. 43, 1999 as the reform of the act before; and the last one is Law of No. 5, 2014 about Civil Service Apparatus. Between the three of the Acts, the last one, The Act of Civil Service Apparatus became the most daring act for stating the merit system be the bases of the management civil service system. When administrative reform is defined as a political process which is designed to compromised bureaucracy and other systems in community, the process itself would never be free of political interference. It's a challenge for bureaucracy to run of the Act, the newest form of management system for civil servant, based on merit system. Because one of the act goals is to build civilian personnel who have integrity, professional, neutral and free from political interference, free from corruption, collusion, and nepotism and be able to organize a public service to community. This paper objective is analyzing the merit system in the three of act, specific on promotion system. Research was done with literature study, data collection using interviews with the key persons (such as policy maker, and the ministerial officials). Qualitative analysis is used to process the data. The result of this study show the comparisons of the three acts on civil service promotion system, and the important factors to build merit in the civil service promotion system.