Kai Ostwald
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Biography
I am an associate professor in the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. I am also the Director of UBC's Institute of Asian Research and the Associate Editor (Southeast Asia) for Pacific Affairs.
I conduct research on political and economic development, primarily in the Southeast Asian countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Myanmar. My work has appeared in numerous outlets and has been funded by SSHRC, NSF, IDRC, the Pacific Rim Research Program, and others.
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Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Ethnic identity is often seen as a driving force that shapes political attitudes and behaviour in diverse societies. Yet, a significant body of work indicates that its effects are more nuanced and conditional than commonly thought. This dissertation extends our understanding of ethnicity’s role in politics by examining three different phenomena in contemporary Southeast Asia.The first study looks at the effects of ethnicity on voting behaviour in post-reform Myanmar. Drawing on a content analysis of parties’ social media posts, a regression analysis of the 2015 election results, and a conjoint experiment held prior to the 2020 elections, I show that ethnicity’s effect on voting behaviour is conditional on group dynamics at the subnational level. Depending on whether ethnic minorities form a subnational majority or minority, this influences the electorate’s interpretation of parties’ ethnic cues as well as ethnic minorities’ cost-benefit calculus when voting. This explains why some individuals might vote across ethnic lines, and why we see intra-group variation in ethnic voting.The second study investigates if ethnic similarities moderate anti-immigrant sentiments when immigrants violate local norms. Results from a survey experiment conducted in Singapore show that when native-born citizens are provided with information about immigrants’ behaviour, ethnicity does not matter. Instead, norm adherence consistently produces a positive and substantive effect on anti-immigrant sentiments. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that native-born citizens’ understandings of the national identity may be more important for shaping anti-immigrant attitudes than the ethnic background of immigrants themselves.The third study examines if ethnic prejudice can be improved in a repressive context. While the existing literature emphasizes strategies that focus on the recategorization of identity boundaries, this chapter proposes an alternative pathway that leverages individuals’ instrumental ivconsiderations. Findings from a survey experiment carried out in post-coup Myanmar show that cognitive-based attitudes towards a severely marginalised group – the Rohingya – improve when individuals are reminded of the Rohingya’s contribution to a shared goal. Furthermore, this effect is driven by individuals who have more at stake in the realisation of the goal.
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This dissertation consists of three chapters investigating different questions under the themes of politics, inequality, and development.Chapter 1 explores whether aid given to regions with greater political accountability is more effective at fostering development. Proposing a novel way to measure political accountability—the distribution of public infrastructure—I account for contextual factors like topography and initial development levels to examine how equitably roads, schools, and health facilities are distributed in Indonesia. I then test if aid generates more economic growth when provided to regions with more equal infrastructure distributions. I find aid has generally inconsequential effects on subsequent development, but greater public infrastructure inequality is associated with higher, not lower, aid efficacy. Chapter 2 explores a new source of soft power that I call the domestic halo effect, which reflects the perceived developmental success of a given country. Using an online survey experiment in Indonesia, I explore if the domestic success of China and the US increases the desire to emulate their institutional styles. They do. Reminders of China’s economic success enhanced preferences for centralized institutions, while respondents prompted on the US’s cultural achievements leaned most towards decentralization. Causal mediation analysis confirmed that this effect acts independently of previously theorized channels. I also find that whether respondents “like” a foreign power —a ubiquitous measure of soft power— does not correlate with institutional preferences, suggesting that concerns over China’s charm offensive shifting public opinion on foreign policies in their favor are potentially overblown. Chapter 3 then examines why those who qualify for social assistance choose not to take it up. Leveraging a comprehensive dataset in Singapore, I find there are potentially 4.5 times as many elderly households who qualify for help but do not receive it as those who do. In other words, a significant proportion of potentially eligible recipients in Singapore are not receiving aid. Further analysis of Singapore’s social assistance history and potential reasons driving this behavior suggest that past public narratives linger on through perceived social rules even after official positions change, pointing to the efficacy of community- and social network-based solutions in increasing take-up.
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Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
This project traces the evolution of policy responsiveness in Singapore using novel text corpora that covers legislative discourse and public opinion from 1955 to 2010. In particular, this article quantifies significant shifts in policy responsiveness that emerged in late 1980s Singapore, and also identifies qualitative changes in the way public opinion is expressed. I propose two primary factors explaining these developments: (1) the rise of new participatory institutions in the late 1980s, namely the Feedback Unit and the Citizens’ Consultative Committees (CCCs), which encouraged the flow of public policy-related information into more controlled, less politically contentious domains; and (2) a transformation in the government’s strategy for addressing policy demands, moving towards private, direct engagements between the government and individuals, a shift brought about by the change in political leadership. This meant that the government began addressing public grievances and policy demands preemptively — before these grievances could be discussed in public or in Parliament, thereby restricting the availability of such information for non-incumbents. I argue that this shift entailed fundamental changes in how public discussion occurs, neutralizing the political nature of most policy demands without silencing them. To quantify these changes in policy responsiveness, the project analyzes over 125,000 public letters in newspapers and 20,000 parliamentary records from 1955 to 2010. These text corpora were assembled through extensive web scraping and OCR, refined via natural language processing (NLP) tools, and then analyzed through semantic embeddings generated by the Ada-002 model. The alignment between public letters and parliamentary records, quantified via calculating Euclidean distance between embeddings, provides a measure of policy responsiveness. Other pieces of evidence are sourced from the archival documents or available biographies of political elites. Overall, the 1980s Singapore presents a case in which increased policy responsiveness is delinked from democratic accountability and democratic contestation. Instead, the broadening of avenues for public policy demands went alongside a strategic redirection of policy-related information flows, ultimately consolidating the incumbents’ authority over this key information channel. The findings of this project, although specific to Singapore’s political history, shed light on the importance of information control for authoritarian resilience.
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Business organizations are increasingly pressured to move beyond conventional sustainable development approaches and embrace transformative change. Within these organizations, internal sustainability change agents play a crucial role in championing sustainability initiatives. These change agents operate within the landscape of organizational cultures, which significantly influence their motivations and actions. This study examines how organizational culture shapes the motivation of sustainability change agents and addresses two research questions: (1) Is there a significant relationship between organizational cultures and the motivation of sustainability professionals to implement sustainability? (2) What organizational culture factors motivate and demotivate sustainability change agents, and how do these factors differ between firms in Canada and Malaysia? To answer these questions, a combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Surveys were collected from 60 sustainability professionals in Canadian firms and 62 in Malaysian firms. Additionally, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 sustainability professionals from Canadian firms and 9 from Malaysian firms. The empirical results reveal a prevailing sense of motivation among sustainability professionals, driven by the nine predefined organizational culture factors. These factors shape organizations' approaches and adaptation strategies to sustainability, influencing the types of challenges faced by sustainability professionals. Notably, organizational culture factors, such as long-term orientation, a unified sustainability goal, and supportive colleagues, consistently motivate sustainability professionals across both countries, underscoring their relevance to sustainability professionals as an occupation, regardless of their specific organizational context or country of origin. The interviews also revealed country-specific motivating factors. In Canadian firms, aspiring to an egalitarian culture, inclusive leadership emerged as a strong motivator. In contrast, Malaysian firms, driven by their collectivist culture, found motivation in top-down approaches and collective efforts aligned with shared values. These findings present opportunities for cross-cultural learning and emphasize the need for context-specific strategies to address the unique challenges faced by sustainability professionals in their respective settings. In conclusion, this study brings attention to the critical role of organizational cultures in motivating sustainability change agents and highlights the significance of organizational culture factors in driving sustainable practices. By understanding these factors, organizations can cultivate a motivated and proactive workforce of sustainability professionals.
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