Social Capital and Meritocracy: Civil Service Examinations in China, 1400-1580

Enying Zheng, Peking University
Pengtao Deng, Peking University
Lei Zhang, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Using information on 12,427 students who passed 46 civil service examinations (CSEs) between 1400 and 1580 in Ming dynasty China, we tested the relative effects of human, social, and cultural capital on exam outcomes. In particular, we explore an understudied institutional design of this CSE system, namely, the strict yet selective enforcement of anonymous evaluation in one component examination, but not in another. Our findings suggest that human capital mattered greatly for the CSE outcomes, partly confirming its meritocratic features. Anonymous evaluation enforced in the metropolitan examination (ME) rendered social capital proxied by the bureaucratic rank of a student's father or of his three preceding generations and its mobilization an insignificant factor for outcomes, again supporting the meritocracy view. Cultural capital measured by the number of brothers being intellectuals had a positive effect on ME outcomes, likely through peer effect or tacit knowledge diffusion. On the contrary, social capital had a strong and positive effect on PE performance, which was not anonymously graded. The effect of cultural capital became insignificant. Our research contributes to the effect of anonymous evaluation in attenuating social capital effect.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 68. Institutions and Elite in China