Civil Service and Patronage in Bureaucracies

Abstract

How do politicians staff the bureaucracy and what are the policy implications? We develop a dynamic model of personnel policy, bureaucratic quality, and electoral competition. In each period, incumbents choose how much to support patronage and civil service personnel systems. The civil service system is needed to produce public goods, but patronage provides private goods and improves an incumbent’s reelection prospects. Incumbents must also worry about whether opponents will sustain the civil service system following an electoral loss. Our results demonstrate the importance of a cross-party commitment to public goods, along with low costs of civil service hiring, for encouraging good government in equilibrium. The model also suggests that electoral competitiveness has only a limited influence on good government and challenges previous arguments about electoral vulnerability and civil service reform. We finally present empirical evidence regarding our predicted relationship between party system convergence and merit-based hiring.