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Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2024

MAI HASSAN Open the ORCID record for MAI HASSAN [Opens in a new window] ,
HORACIO LARREGUY Open the ORCID record for HORACIO LARREGUY [Opens in a new window]  and
STUART RUSSELL Open the ORCID record for STUART RUSSELL [Opens in a new window]
MAI HASSAN*
Affiliation:
MIT, United States
HORACIO LARREGUY*
Affiliation:
ITAM, Mexico
STUART RUSSELL*
Affiliation:
World Bank, United States
*
Corresponding author: Mai Hassan, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, MIT, United States, mhass@mit.edu.
Horacio Larreguy, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, ITAM, Mexico, horacio.larreguy@itam.mx.
Stuart Russell, Economist, The World Bank, srussell2@worldbank.org.
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Abstract

Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians’ incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hiring and different abilities to realize those preferences. We develop a theoretical model of each actor’s relative leverage and relative preferences for different types of public sector positions. We empirically examine our theory using the universe of payroll data in Kenyan local governments from 2004 to 2013. We find evidence of both patronage and bureaucratic favoritism, but with different types of bias concentrated in different types of government jobs, as our theory predicts. Our results highlight the inadequacy of examining political patronage alone without incorporating the preferences and leverage of the bureaucratic managers who are intricately involved in hiring processes.

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Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 118 , Issue 4 , November 2024 , pp. 1913 - 1930
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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