The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics.
Nicholas Kuipers is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Presidential Young Professor at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a predoctoral scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Before graduate school, Nick worked in Jakarta at Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting, a political consultancy specializing in public opinion surveys.
Nick’s research is focused on comparative politics, political economy, and public policy and has been published in outlets including American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has a particular interest in the bureaucracy and a regional interest in Southeast Asia. His current research is specifically concerned with understanding the consequences of institutions that govern political and bureaucratic selection.
Citation from Award Committee
Nicholas Kuipers’ “Meritocracy Reconsidered” impressed the selection committee by posing an interesting question, extending the existing literature on civil service reform, and drawing on a wide range of evidence to validate its causal claims. Kuipers grounds the dissertation in an empirical puzzle. He observes that civil service appointments in Indonesia led to repeated and at times violate public outbursts. He employs this puzzle to problematize the conventional wisdom that shifting from clientelistic to a meritocratic civil service selection is crucial for maximizing economic growth and building a modern state. The dissertation qualifies this received wisdom. It shows that merit-based civil service selection can act at cross purpose with state building in ethnically heterogenous post-colonial states. It demonstrates that competitive, merit-based entrance exams often privilege ethnic groups that either are politically dominant or socio-economically privileged. Entrance exams thus are never entirely neutral. They often reinforce existing ethnic and economic divisions and impede horizontal forms of solidarity that are necessary for nation building. The dissertation shows that Indonesia’s departure from a merit-based system and inclusion of clientelistic practices offers a middle path of contributing to the dual goal of state and nation building.
Kuipers offers a carefully crafted comparative historical argument. It draws on historical sources, survey data, and entrance exam data to validate its causal claims. He also provides a theoretically unusually rich and well-grounded argument that spells out the causal logic in great details and leaves few black boxes. Furthermore, Kuipers addresses the limitations of a single case study. He uses contemporary and historical shadow cases to explicate the argument’s external validity. Finally, Kuipers extends the existing, and still largely Western centric, literature to the Global South. He favors building on existing theories over what Jeffrey Checkel called the “gladiatorial style of hypothesis testing where one hypothesis has to slay all others.” Kuipers shows that carefully theorizing combined with multiple causal inference strategies can produce research that is problem driven, conceptually innovative, and methodologically rigorous.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Marcus Kreuzer (chair) of Villanova University, Dr. Moises Arce of Tulane University, and Dr. Vineeta Yadav of Pennsylvania State University.
