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ID: 191988

Failing the Test: The Countervailing Attitudinal Effects of Civil Service Examinations / Kuipers, Nicholas

Kuipers, Nicholas	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

I surveyed the universe of recent applicants to the Indonesian civil service to study the effects of high-stakes examinations on political attitudes. Leveraging applicants’ scores on the civil service examination, I employ a regression discontinuity design to compare the attitudes of applicants who narrowly failed with those who narrowly passed. I show that the simple fact of failure on the civil service examination decreased applicants’ belief in the legitimacy of the process and levels of national identification while increasing support for in-group preferentialism. Next, I find that applicants who were offered—and accepted—employment in the civil service reported higher satisfaction with the process, greater amity toward out-groups, and higher national identification. Because more applicants fail than pass, these results suggest that civil service examination outcomes may have unintended consequences for social cohesion—particularly in contexts where successful applicants disproportionately hail from specific ethnic, racial, or religious groups.

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Civil Service Examinations

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ID: 186733

Long-Run Consequences of The Opium Concessions for Out-Group Animosity on Java / Kuipers, Nicholas

Kuipers, Nicholas	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

This article examines the consequences of the opium concession system in the Dutch East Indies—a nineteenth-century institution through which the Dutch would auction the monopolistic right to sell opium in a given locality. The winners of these auctions were invariably ethnic Chinese. The poverty of Java's indigenous population combined with opium's addictive properties meant that many individuals fell into destitution. The author argues that this institution put in motion a self-reinforcing arrangement that enriched one group and embittered the other with consequences that persist to the present day. Consistent with this theory, the author finds that individuals living today in villages where the opium concession system once operated report higher levels of out-group intolerance compared to individuals in nearby unexposed counterfactual villages. These findings improve the understanding of the historical conditions that structure antagonisms between competing groups.

Key Words

Conflict ; Indonesia ; Ethnic Politics ; Java ; Opium ; historical political economy

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