Merit, Discrimination, and Democratization : An Analysis of Promotion Patterns in Indonesia's Civil Service
What effect does democratization have on meritocratic practices in the civil service? Democratization increases performance incentives within the bureaucracy. This leads to more meritocracy for individuals with performance-enhancing characteristics...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/553841563200368439/Merit-discrimination-and-democratization-an-analysis-of-promotion-patterns-in-Indonesias-civil-service http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32201 |
| Summary: | What effect does democratization have on
meritocratic practices in the civil service? Democratization
increases performance incentives within the bureaucracy.
This leads to more meritocracy for individuals with
performance-enhancing characteristics, such as educational
attainment, which cross-cut political cleavages. When
politicized cleavages align with civil servants'
performance-enhancing characteristics, democratization
increases discrimination. The author test this argument
using administrative data from Indonesia that covers the
full universe of career histories of all 4 plus million
currently active civil servants. The author exploits the
exogenous timing of Indonesia's democratization in
1999, paired with an individual-level panel data design, for
identification purposes. The author finds strong evidence
that democratization amplified the positive effects of
educational attainment on career advancement but
simultaneously worsened the career prospects of female and
religious minority civil servants. We replicate these
patterns for the staggered introduction of direct elections
at the district government level. The gender and religious
minority penalties are strongest for promotions at the
lowest levels of the administrative hierarchy and for
employees of departments under the leadership of
conservative Muslim parties. Increased female leadership in
the bureaucracy does not alleviate these penalties. |
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