Research

Selected working papers (drafts available upon request).


Casas, Julieta. "Parties, Patronage, and the State: New Paths to Bureaucratic Reform." Under review. 

 

Patronage—the selection of government officials at the discretion of a political actor—is ubiquitous among democracies. Yet, some countries managed to curb it over time while others failed. Under what circumstances do democratic governments reduce patronage and establish professional bureaucracies? The paper argues that the success of bureaucratic reform is rooted in the type of patronage regime. Although all countries had some form of patronage, substantial differences in their firing practices can significantly impact the reform’s outcome by creating opportunities for the emergence of political entrepreneurs interested in bureaucratic reform or precluding such opportunities. Drawing on state-building scholarship in comparative politics and political development in American politics, I introduce a theoretical framework that accounts for successful and failed bureaucratic reform attempts. I apply the theory to the U.S. and Argentina, providing original archival evidence. The article elucidates the longstanding puzzle of bureaucracy professionalization in democratic contexts, generating new insights for contemporary debates on state-building.


Casas, Julieta. "Exceptional or non-European? Placing American Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective." Under Review.


American Political Development (APD) scholars have long sought to escape notions of American exceptionalism in their studies. Yet, few procedures have been developed for this task. In this article, I present a framework to place the American political trajectory in a comparative perspective. This involves both evaluating how the U.S. failed to converge over time with cases with different initial conditions and how it succeeded in diverging from cases with similar initial conditions. I examine the APD debate on state-building, highlighting that these efforts have mainly used the first strategy. This has led to a focus on an empirical or counterfactual comparison between the U.S. and European states, emphasizing American exceptionalism. I propose that the next step for comparative APD research involves positioning the American state in relation to European and Latin American states. This approach has positive methodological implications for counterfactual reasoning by introducing a larger set of plausible alternative histories. It also has important theoretical implications: evaluating the APD received wisdom with this new reference framework transforms our interpretations of traditional theories of political development.



Casas, J., Coyoli, J., Driscoll, B. "A New Dataset on Civil Servant Examinations, 1789-2020."


Critical outcomes like economic development (Besley et al., 2022; Dincecco & Katz, 2016), human rights protection (Englehart, 2009), and public service provision (Aneja and Xu, 2024; Oliveira et al., 2024) are largely determined by a government’s administrative capabilities. A key method for governments to enhance their administration is to implement civil service examinations for the recruitment of public officials (Dahlström 2012; Egerberg et al. 2017; Evans and Rauch, 2000). Exams guarantee that hires are based on talent instead of other non-meritocratic criteria, such as loyalty to individuals or a political party. However, most countries in the Global South struggle to introduce exams for civil servants. Why do some countries successfully implement civil servant exams while others fail? This project presents a collaborative initiative— a time-series cross-sectional dataset of 164 countries on exams for civil servants (DECS)—to collect and harmonize large-scale comparable data on civil service reform. Existing measures of civil servant exams are limited to expert surveys. Two distinct features of our dataset—the objective nature of our measure of meritocratic recruitment and the coverage between 1789 and 2020 make it particularly useful for quantitative research on civil service reform.


Casas, Julieta. “Clerks, Directors, and the Pioneering Survey of American Public Servants: A Reassessment of the Early U.S. Bureaucracy.” (Data-collection phase)


What was the character of the nineteenth-century American bureaucracy? Does it match the traditional vision of an army of partisan clerks in American political development? Or does it show professionalizing tendencies? To answer these questions, I explore a pioneer survey of American public servants. In 1868, Senator Jenckes surveyed 446 U.S. government officials supervising 12,819 employees. The questionnaire includes various aspects of the background and demographics of bureaucrats, their salaries and motivations, and aspects of their recruitment, retention, and promotion. It also includes their opinions on making the civil service more efficient. Among the interviewed, 362 bureaucrats and 11,561 subordinates strongly advocated for civil service reform, including implementing competitive examinations. The systematization of these original data promises to shed new light on the largely unexplored character of the early U.S. bureaucracy. 



Other writing