Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • The Crowded Market for Experiments

    Chris Blattman just dropped something of a bombshell on experiments as dissertation projects:

    the market [for field experiments] is getting very crowded, and there are a million in the pipeline. So this is a poor product placement. The premium on other types of research is high and getting higher.

    This voices a concern that I’ve been mulling over for years, ever since I completed my first (and only to date) experiment. This was a great second project, but it benefited from being on the early side of the wave of experiments in comparative politics, when the field was much less crowded. It also would have been nearly impossible to pull off as a dissertation project because it required lots of time, a rich network of research contacts in Indonesia, a willingness to coauthor, and a whole lot of luck. It’s also worth noting that as a survey experiment, it was probably easier to conduct than the field experiments that are the subject of Blattman’s post. (And as anyone who has asked me in the past two years knows, I very much do not advise building a dissertation around a survey experiment.)

    But what is most interesting about the quote above is the statement “the premium on other types of research is high and getting higher.” Here I’m not so sure, and I want to know more. What other types? Let’s focus here on the fields of comparative politics and the political economy of development, the audience to which Blattman’s post will most resonate. These fields are certainly not going back to the days in which cross-national regressions are dominant, so it can’t just mean that. I always enjoy reading big and messy structured macrohistorical comparisons, but I don’t detect a big premium on them. So I’m left wondering if others believe there is a growing premium on non-experimental research in CP and PED these days, because I sense that this would be a fairly striking departure from recent trends.

  • Migration and Governance in Java

    I wrote several months ago about a long-term project on the colonial origins of local economic governance in Java, and in particular, on the importance of ethnicity and colonial migration. The first substantial output of that project is now available. Here is the abstract:

    The social exclusion of trading minorities—Lebanese in West Africa, and Indians in East Africa and the Caribbean, Chinese in Southeast Asia—is common across post-colonial states. This paper uses demographic data from the 1930 Census of the Netherlands Indies to study the long term effects of the social exclusion of trading minorities in Java on contemporary economic governance. I show that districts in Java that were densely settled by Chinese migrants in 1930 have more accommodative business-government relations today. To highlight the importance of social exclusion rather than other factors that may differentiate colonial districts with large Chinese populations, I exploit variation in the settlement patterns of Chinese and Arab trading communities in Java, which played comparable roles in the island’s colonial economy but faced different degrees of social exclusion. These findings contribute to recent work on the colonial origins of development, ethnicity and informal institutions, and the historical origins of democratic performance.

    The full working paper is available here. Comments, as always, are very welcome.

    I am particularly excited about the disciplinary border-crossing in this project, drawing on some classical works in Indologie (all the way back to van den Berg 1886!) as well as the theoretical insights from the (not so new) New Institutional Economics. EDIT: Obviously, this recalls my earlier post on Morck and Yeung, economics, and history. The goal is to have history complement my not-so-super-duper regressions.