The Merit of Meritocratization

Abstract

Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees’ competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.

Money matters: The role of public sector wages in corruption prevention

“…Turning to the expert‐coded wage measures, we see in model 4 that there is no meaningful relationship between competitive wages for senior civil servants and corruption, a result that is in line with previous research (Rauch and Evans ; Dahlström et al ).…”

“…As such, an important aspect concerns the point of reference for wage levels. To this end, scholars have compared wage levels for civil servants with manufacturing wages (Van Rijckeghem and Weder ), GDP per capita (Treisman ), as well as private sector managers with similar responsibilities (Rauch and Evans ; Dahlström et al ). All are reasonable operationalizations, but they imply different assumptions about how wages matter.…”

“…Finally, to be able to compare our results with previous research that has focused on wage levels among senior civil servants (Rauch and Evans ; Dahlström et al ), we also include a variable for wages among senior public employees. For this variable, we use another question in the same expert survey asking whether senior officials have wages that are comparable with those of employees in the private sector.…”

No law without a state

“…Rauch and Evans, 2000;Dahlström et al, 2011), we consider there can be historical legacies of more (or less) governmental abuse in those countries that consolidated patrimonial (or bureaucratic) state infrastructures. The causal mechanisms would be the same as the ones discussed in this recent literature on bureaucracy and corruption 4 and echoes those by Weber: a merit-based bureaucrats represent a check on rulers because their time horizons and career incentives depends less on fulfilling rulers' (generally short-sighted) goals than in countries with more patrimonial-type bureaucracies.…”

“…4 See speciallyDahlström et al (2011) for a lengthy exposition of the different arguments that public administration scholars, as well as political economists, have developed to link a meritocratic bureaucracy and constraints to rulers' abuses.…”