It was about ten years ago, Eldersveld and Derksen put forward their criticism which says : our knowledge of the nature of local political leadership in modern democraciesbased on systematic comparative scholarship is limited. This makes it difficult to generalize across political systems. Political scientists just have been more interested in their own political system, and in interviewing nationalpoticians than in comparative studies of local leaders (1995:1). In many sense, Eldersveld and Derksen's criticism is still relevant now days, and this book is partly aimed to fulfil that of the gap in scholarly literatures concerning Indonesian local leaders' orientation towardsdecentralization and regional autonomy policies.