Are Competitive Public Service Exams Counter-Productive? A Survey Experiment From Two East Asian States

Abstract

Public service exams are extremely competitive in East Asia. Does a high entry bar impede people with high public service motivation (PSM) from taking the exam? If so, what kinds of people are interested in taking a difficult public service exam? We employ a randomized control trial (RCT) to manipulate perceptions of exam competitiveness, using 1804 survey responses from online advertisements targeting individuals interested in public service careers in South Korea and Taiwan. OLS regression analyses (adjusted R2 = 0.116, Model 7) with moderation tests show that when exam competitiveness is high (2.5% passing rate), public service positions are attractive to those who have high PSM, high academic competence, and low material desires. When exam competitiveness is lower (5% passing rate), public sector jobs remain attractive to individuals with high PSM, but public organizations become less likely to attract academically competent individuals and may not effectively screen out those primarily incentivized by material rewards. Our findings suggest that a high level of competitiveness in public service exams may have distinct merits, though given the modest explanatory power, we explicitly caution readers against overstating the strength of these findings.