Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • The Evolution of Indonesia’s Political Economy in One Amazing Figure

    My colleague Sharon Poczter and I are finishing up a new paper that analyzes the career backgrounds of a large sample of Indonesian political elites. This means cataloguing thousands of careers on elites’ CVs in order to classify them into various types, such as military, private sector, and so on. Because we have such a rich source of data, we can also analyze phenomena such as individuals with multiple types of employment over their lifetime; the predictive power of gender, religion, partisan affiliation, and education; and differences in career patterns over time.

    The last bit means exploiting differences in career histories based on elites’ ages (or implied ages for elites who have died). This is a crude form of cohort analysis, and it allows us to ask if older political elites tended to have different career paths than younger ones. We do this by fitting a series of logistic regression models predicting whether an individual has one of four types of backgrounds—private sector, bureaucracy, government, and military—using with a cubic polynomial of age as the main predictor alongside a series of demographic and political covariates. Here, we’ve plotted the predicted probability that an elite of a particular age has each of the four employment types. We’ve also included 95% confidence intervals. The result is striking.
    margins

    Among older elites—those who rose to prominence under the New Order—military and bureaucratic backgrounds predominate. Among younger elites, who we can infer rose to prominence under the late New Order period or under democratic rule due to their age, private sector backgrounds predominate. This isn’t exactly the “Rise of Capital” that Richard Robison described: he considered the links between indigenous capital and the state to be much tighter than what this figure is describing, and I am not aware of his predicting a decline of military and state as avenues to political power alongside the rise of capital. But the findings are related, and they help to make sense of how Indonesia’s political economy has changed over the past fifty years.

  • When Your Epistemology Won’t Cooperate with Reality

    Via @betsylevyp, I came across a new paper by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow on race and causal inference. It’s excellent, well worth a read.

    The title of this post is not a critique, not exactly. It’s a reflection on the problem that Sen and Wasow confront. The issue that the currently dominant theory of causality in most social science—which is really an epistemology of causality rather than a theory of it—defines causality in terms of differences between outcomes in a unit that occupies both treatment and control states. This entails that the unit could in principle occupy both treatment and control states. In other words, manipulability is the foundation of studying causal effects. This “causation requires manipulation” framework is usually associated with the Rubin causal model but has a much longer pedigree in philosophy.

    Our problem is that race—and other things like gender, height, etc.—is not manipulable. That means that no matter how perfect the design, the difference in outcomes between two different racial groups cannot be interpreted as “the effect of race.” This bothers many people, mostly philosophers, but also me. It suggests that our epistemology of causality must be somehow mistaken. We should be able to ask questions of the type “what is the effect of race on Y?” Reality demands it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stayed up late debating this point.

    Sen and Wasow solve the problem by appealing to a constructivist conception of race, which renders some aspects of race manipulable. It’s a smart move and one that I endorse. But I am just as eager to read a thorough critique too. One preliminary thought is that their constructivist understanding of race is situationalist, so what we manipulate is not race itself or the sticks the constitute it, but the conditions under which race is understood, encountered, produced, etc. That strikes me as somehow different than manipulating the un-manipulatable.