Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism

Mai Hassan (), Horacio Larreguy () and Stuart Russell ()
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Mai Hassan: Unknown
Horacio Larreguy: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Stuart Russell: Unknown

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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.

Date: 2024-11
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Published in American Political Science Review, 2024, 118 (4), pp.1913-1930. ⟨10.1017/S0003055423001338⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04922873

DOI: 10.1017/S0003055423001338

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