Outlawing the Spoils? The Illusion of Meritocratising Patronage Bureaucracies through Legal Reforms

The introduction of merit-based personnel management in patronage bureaucracies is, according to several statistical studies, a key contributor to lowering corruption. This puts a premium on understanding how it may be brought about. In a variety of development assistance operations and statistical studies, practitioners and scholars alike have relied on the adoption of merit-based civil service legislation as a proxy indicator for meritocratization. In this paper, I argue that this academic and policy practice is misguided. To support this claim I, initially, derive deductively that merit-based civil service legislation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for meritocratization: it leaves the government’s possibility frontier for both patronage and merit-based personnel management in practice untouched. Subsequently, I provide empirical evidence from Latin America to support this claim. I show, first, that the longevity of countries’ merit-based civil service legislation is largely uncorrelated with indicators of their civil service meritocratization; and second, via a case comparison of Paraguay and the Dominican Republic, that countries may introduce meritocracy in practice without legal civil service meritocratization (Paraguay), and fail to introduce merit in practice despite good practice legal and constitutional reforms (Dominican Republic). Against this backdrop, practitioners and academics would do well to substitute legal reforms in favor of changes in practice as proxy measures of meritocratization in development assistance operations and scholarly works.