Book Project

Building Bureaucratic Capacity: The Political Origins of Civil Service Reforms

How governments are administered is a critical determinant of socio-economic outcomes like economic development, inequality, human rights protection, and public service provision. Research shows that a fundamental way in which governments can improve their administrations is by introducing civil service reforms. However, most nascent or unconsolidated democracies struggle to introduce these reforms. Theories of political development suggest that these states often struggle with building professional, accountable bureaucracies because of the order of its institutional sequence: they democratized before building the state (“democracy first”path).  In contrast, I argue that this sequence can lead to positive outcomes under certain conditions. In the book, I show how small but ultimately momentous differences in the patronage system’s firing practices at the rise of mass politics set nascent democracies into different bureaucratic development paths leading to opposite outcomes: civil service reform success or failure. I analyze the patronage system’s firing practices, constituent patterns, and the outcome of civil service reform efforts to show how the firing practices of the patronage system in place contribute to the mobilization of different constituencies for reform and create or preclude significant yet little-acknowledged opportunities for civil service reform. 

This research uses mixed methods. The quantitative component consists of newly systematized data on broad patterns of civil service reform across the Americas and a dataset that tracks the hiring and firing of public employees at the federal level in the case studies. The project also employs in-depth case studies of the processes of civil service reform in Argentina, the U.S., and Chile in the nineteenth century, featuring original archival evidence.

My book workshop is scheduled for May 2025.