Meritocracy in the awarding of research grants? Evidence from Social Science Korea

In 2010, the Korean government launched a new funding scheme for social scientists, Social Science Korea (SSK). Contrary to conventional grant programs, the SSK adopted a competition scheme among research teams by eliminating those who failed to pass annual evaluations, while, at the same time, emphasizing cooperation and interdisciplinary research. Substantial research has documented the determinants of receiving research grants in Western countries, but little is known about how these determinants operate in Korean academia. Using results from the stage evaluations of the SSK, we estimate logistic regression models. The results indicate that factors of meritocracy, such as publication record, strongly affect the likelihood of success, but so do political factors, such as a PI obtaining his or her doctoral degree from a foreign institution. The importance of a PI’s gender and age, and of being located in Seoul, is not supported by the data.