This is my last week at NUS. Starting in July, I’ll join the Department of Politics at Princeton as an Assistant Professor. I’m sad to leave friends and colleagues in Singapore but I’m also really looking forward to this next chapter. Go Tigers!!!
Governments across the world use exams to select civil servants. In this new
@apsrjournal
article, I consider how the outcomes of these high-stakes exams might be affecting the attitudes of applicants, focusing on aspirants to the Indonesian civil service...
My dissertation “Meritocracy Reconsidered” won the Mancur Olson prize from
@apsatweets
for best dissertation in political economy!! I’m really humbled and flattered by this recognition.
In this new
@WorldPol
article, I explore the origins of out-group intolerance in Indonesia, arguing that the colonial era opium concession system has had an enduring effect in structuring contemporary animosities...
I finished my PhD this week! I used to joke that finishing graduate school seemed to involve neither carrot nor stick. But there was definitely lots of help along the way. Thanks to everyone who supported me!!
In our new piece just out at
@pacificaffairs
, with
@risa_toha
and
@nathanaeldotid
, we explore the drivers of Prabowo’s landslide victory in the recent Indonesian presidential election, focusing on the youth vote. Read here:
Whenever I felt this way during grad school I reminded myself that Armageddon and Deep Impact were basically the same film. Each came out within 2 months of one another in 1998 and both made over $300m at the box office. Does the trick!!
Do other PhD students stress about someone else publishing their dissertation argument in an article before they can finish the dissertation? Not sure how to describe this feeling, but coming across related articles can be nerve-racking
Pumped to see this finally out in
@poppublicsphere
. Alison and I started working on this project my first semester of graduate school (!)
Using both admin data and interviews, we explore the reasons that smaller cities tend to have better access to public service facilities.
NEW:
@nathanaeldotid
and
@KuipersNicholas
introduce HI-RES SIKAP, a new online survey that allows researchers to examine short-term shifts in Indonesian public opinion:
Join us at the Kahin Center on Thursday at 12:30pm for a discussion on "Meritocracy Reconsidered: Bureaucratic Selection and Nation-Building in Indonesia."
@KuipersNicholas
of
@NUSingapore
will host!
Details:
We’re calling for nominations of the best papers on Southeast Asian politics presented at APSA 2021. Nominate yourself! Papers are eligible in either an (1) open category or (2) emerging scholar category (3 > yrs since phd).
To what degree do politicians accurately perceive the level of importance Indonesian voters attribute to environmental concerns? You can find the recording and slides of
@KuipersNicholas
fascinating ISG in this link:
So proud of my good friend
@NeilOBrian4
on being awarded a Carnegie fellowship!! Stay tuned for his book coming out later this year on the roots of polarization in the US
Check out this piece by
@thedailyseth
and
@BurhanMuhtadi
in which they develop some new survey measures to capture old axes of resentment in Indonesia. A useful resource for anyone doing surveys in Indonesia. Read it!!
I’m proud of this paper and the work that went into it. But there are unanswered questions that I hope to address in future work: e.g., are these results a generic effect of all forms of selection—or are they specific to meritocratic selection?
We’re calling for nominations of the best papers on Southeast Asian politics presented at APSA 2021. Nominate yourself! Papers are eligible in either an (1) open category or (2) emerging scholar category (3 > yrs since phd).
Happy to see my new paper, "Election Cycles and Global Religious Intolerance," appear in
@PNASNews
today. Hugely grateful to a crack team of
@UCSDnews
undergrads, above all Jiayi Li and Toni Liria-Sala, for their outstanding RA work.
Yg tertarik mengenai peningkatan pajak melalui reform administrasi vs tariff di Indonesia. Rekomendasi paper ini mulai di adopsi
@KemenkeuRI
th 2022.
Berikut paper
@mayara_pfs
@Ben_Olken
@rema_nadeem
dan saya di American Economic Review 2021
access link
I interpret the findings as consistent with a broader critique of meritocratic selection: people who fail the exam appear frustrated, believing the process was unfair, and even reporting lower levels of national identification. Meanwhile, the winners appear self-satisfied.
I use variation inherent in Indonesia’s nested and sequential hiring procedure to isolate the effect of winning vs. losing. Using this approach, the absolute effect of winning appears 2-3x bigger than the effect of losing. But 20x more people fail the exam than pass.
nice recap of work by
@mrgunalan
on the extreme demand for govt jobs in india. resonates with what's happening elsewhere in places like china and indonesia
Highly competitive examinations for public service recruitment in
#India
have detrimental economic effects.
Today on VoxDev,
@mrgunalan
(
@azimpremjiuniv
) highlights the key policy implications from this new research:
Fulcrum Commentary by
@BurhanMuhtadi
- ... the decision as to who will run with Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo to be his vice-president will most likely lie with none other than a former president who is Ganjar’s party boss.
#Indonesia
@ISEAS
Using these boundaries, I show that individuals who reside in areas where the opium concessions operated report higher levels of out-group intolerance today, as compared to nearby areas where it had been outlawed.
This was divide-and-rule: the Dutch farmed out the sale of an addictive substance to redirect local frustrations towards an intermediary group. But the sale of opium was outlawed in pockets across Java.
Interesting new poll from SMRC on the presidential race. The dates seems important here. I wonder how the results would look if surveying had carried into last week when Golkar and PAN swung their support to Prabowo. My guess is very little impact.
Ganjar Rebound
Hasil survei nasional tatap muka SMRC terbaru: 31 Juli-11 Agustus. Jumlah sampel 5000.
Tertutup tiga nama:
Ganjar 35,9%
Prabowo 33,6%
Anies 20,4%.
Yang belum tahu 10,1%.
Head to Head
Ganjar vs Prabowo:
Ganjar 41,5%
Prabowo 44,5%
(selisih suara antara keduanya
On behalf of the Southeast Asian Politics Related Group (
@seaprg
), Kikue Hamayotsu and I will begin reviewing nominations on July 31st. Submit nominations here:
@realosamet
@ElvinOngPolSci
has a book titled opposing power that you should consider!!
i also love the recent paper(s) by
@mdtrinh_
on statistical obfuscation in vietnam.
Please consider submitting your abstract/paper to this apsa pre-conference on bureaucratic politics. We encourage submissions from across subfields and world regions! Those who wish to attend can sign up as well
Calling all bureaucracy & poli sci scholars! Coming this August - a fantastic
@APSAtweets
pre-conference at USC.
Submit your abstract + extended intro/PAP/working paper here. Interest in attending/discussing also welcome:
Deadline April 20.
🚨🚨Only 2 more days before our early bird registration rates for the
#ipsaNUS
Methods School expires on 15 April! Register now to save on your course registration fee! Normal registration rates kick in on 16 April and end on 31 May.
@ipsa_aisp
@NUSingapore
@NUS_PoliSci
@worldpol
The Dutch would lease the monopolistic right to sell opium, with the winners of the auctions almost always being ethnic Chinese. Its scale was massive: at its peak, nearly 18% of Dutch revenues came from these leases.
In July 2020, with the help of the civil service agency, we sent emails to everyone who applied for a government job in 2019, asking for their participation in an online survey. Using these responses, I compared the attitudes of people who passed to those who failed.
I learned a lot while working on this project, not least from some excellent research on the opium trade in colonial Southeast Asia. Check out Empires of Vice by
@DianaSueKim
and Opium to Java by Jim Rush!
@saadgulzar
Thanks for the boost, Saad! Sorry to hear about the Pakistan collaboration. I think
@mrgunalan
is trying to do something similar in India. In theory it's a very replicable research design, which I mention briefly at the end of the paper
The main inferential difficulty with this project was in disentangling the twinned countervailing effects: are the observed differences in attitudes across winners and losers attributable to, say, the sting of failure or the aggrandizing effects of success?
@DanSpoko
@APSAtweets
i just spent like 5 minutes googling and i actually have no idea where on the internet this dissertation is. i'll email you a pdf lol
@saadgulzar
@mrgunalan
My sense is that institutional appetite for sharing even anonymized administrative data is shrinking in Indonesia and elsewhere... Opaque new data privacy laws and little perceived upside for public officials making this sort of research difficult
@tribsantos
I think it’s an interesting open empirical question! My speculative view is that examination failure is unique in localizing blame (and resentment) in the applicants themselves. But applicants who fail under patronage, for eg, can externalize blame elsewhere.
🚨Big news!🚨
Yesterday the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) started releasing *individual level* data from their recruitments under their new Open Data Policy:
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