Explaining Divergent Redistributive Reform: Comparative Process Tracing of Indonesia's Healthcare and Pension Reform

ABSTRACT This article examines why reforms extending redistributive programs produce divergent outcomes across policy pillars within the same country under a shared historical‐institutional framework. Using comparative process tracing, it introduces the retail politics mechanism to explain the success of healthcare reforms versus the stagnation of pension reforms in Indonesia's post‐authoritarian democratic transition. The mechanism refers to a causal process in which electoral competition incentivises politicians to prioritise reforms whose benefits are highly visible to citizens and convertible into political gains. Consequently, distributive battles among politicians and technocrats occurred within policy subsystems rather than the regime level, producing an episodic welfare architecture characterised by expansion in some domains and institutional inertia in others. Findings also reveal enabling conditions for the mechanism to operate within each policy pillar—cumulative institutional experience, ideational‐cultural negotiation, and electoral pragmatism. It thus offers insights for refining post‐incrementalist orthodoxy and reinterpreting power resource–bounded welfare state debates by illustrating how the combination of incremental and punctuated models of change is differentially managed across sectors and strategically leveraged by political and policy entrepreneurs.