Combining Patronage and Merit in Public Sector Recruitment

Abstract

When do politicians in developing democracies prioritize meritocratic recruitment over patronage hiring for public sector jobs? I distinguish between menial and professional positions and argue that the former are valuable for sustaining party machines, while manipulating the latter can undermine state performance. Accordingly, politicians will interfere to ensure their co-partisans are hired to menial positions but select professional bureaucrats based on meritocratic criteria. I test my argument using novel bureaucrat-level data from Ghana (n = 17,942) and leverage a change in the governing party to investigate hiring patterns. The results suggest that partisan bias is confined to menial jobs. The findings shed light on the mixed effects of electoral competition on patronage identified in prior studies: competition may dissuade politicians from interfering in recruitment to high-ranked positions, but encourage them to hire partisans for low-ranked positions.

Colonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality in Africa

“…On the other hand, the indicator only accounts for about 25% of the overall effect of colonial education. This is consistent with the argument that considerations other than patronage, such as human capital, can also be important (Brierley, 2020).…”

Personal or Party Roots of Civil Service Patronage? Ministerial Change Effects on the Appointments of Top Civil Servants

“…The contexts that display frequent changes to state administrative structures, especially when accompanied by highly polarized party competition, provide elected politicians with incentives to use state administration jobs to further their political goals. This has certainly been the case in many countries of Eastern Europe (e.g., Meyer-Sahling & Veen, 2012), Latin America (e.g., Scherlis, 2013), and Africa (e.g., Brierley, 2020). As we explain below, the settings with loose rules of bureaucratic recruitment and promotion provide further encouragement to state exploitation by means of patronage.…”

Political Distortions, State Capture, and Economic Development in Africa

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is less systematic evidence of this in African countries, as policies protecting bureaucrats still appear to be widely below desired levels (as reported in the context of electrical power by Rodriguez 2017), although there has been an increasing focus on technical qualifications. While Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya have civil service exams for entry and promotions, most bureaucratic appointments in Ghana are discretionary, for instance (Brierley 2021). And while changes in Kenya's 2010 constitution gave more control of cabinet and senior positions to the legislature, it is unclear whether that is necessarily welfare-improving (Opalo 2019).…”