The seminar will examine the impact of the transition to direct mayoral elections on service delivery in Indonesia during a period of momentous national democratic reform. We find that direct elections led to a significant decline in local service access. Our results contrast sharply with most theoretical predictions, which suggest that local governments with popularly elected mayors should deliver better service outcomes compared to their counterparts with legislature-appointed executives. Furthermore, we determine that the negative service delivery effects are concentrated in districts that we assess as being relatively more clientelistic. Comparatively less clientelistic districts whose mayors were directly elected performed no differently than districts with local legislature-appointed heads. We conclude that researchers and other observers may need to rethink the relative merits of direct and indirect local government executive elections, at least in environments in which clientelistic practices prevail, such as in Indonesia. The caveat to this general conclusion is that it is based on an analysis of just the initial mayoral terms of office after the introduction of direct elections. Effects over the longer term may well be different. This suggests a potential avenue for future research.