ARE FORMAL CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS THE MOST MERITOCRATIC WAY TO RECRUIT CIVIL SERVANTS? NOT IN ALL COUNTRIES
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | ANDERS SUNDELL |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12077 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12077
ARE FORMAL CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS
THE MOST MERITOCRATIC WAY TO RECRUIT CIVIL
SERVANTS? NOT IN ALL COUNTRIES
ANDERS SUNDELL
Recruitment to the civil service is, in order to prevent patronage, often centralized and based on
performance in competitive examinations. This approach, albeit slow and occasionally cumbersome,
is generally assumed to be the most meritocratic method of recruitment. However, while some
applicants may have skills suited for a specific position, they may not perform best in a general
examination. As long as the system is not abused, a more flexible recruitment process based on, for
example, interviews and CV screening, may be more meritocratic. It is therefore necessary to weigh
the risk of abuse against the potential gains from more flexibility. Formal civil service examinations
are hypothesized in this article to be the most meritocratic way to recruit civil servants only in
countries where the risk for patronage is high. Analysis of a dataset describing the structures and
characteristics of bureaucracies worldwide lends support to the hypothesis.
INTRODUCTION
An effective public administration that is free from corruption is necessary to implement
government policies and stimulate economic and human development (Mauro 1995;
Holmberg et al. 2009). For this reason, international organizations such as the World
Bank have increasingly emphasized civil service and administrative reform in their
development programmes (Evans 2008). One of the most important aspects of civil
service reform is meritocratic recruitment of public servants, which has been shown to be
conducive to economic growth and corruption prevention, while politicized recruitment
is associated with higher levels of corruption (Evans and Rauch 1999; Kickert 2011;
Dahlstr¨
om et al. 2012a). While it is self-evident that the public sector would benefit from
recruiting the best and the brightest, the way to design procedures that achieve such an
outcome is less clear, and is indeed a classic problem in public administration.
Politicized recruitment, as exemplified by the nineteenth-century spoils system in the
United States, in which the party in power freely distributed public jobs to political
supporters, led to impaired administrative efficiency as well as an administration more
focused on keeping the ruling party in power than executing the popular will (Goodnow
1900, p. 113). To remedy this, the US civil service movement called for centralized open
competitive examinations in the recruitment of civil servants, which were instituted
through the Pendleton Act in 1883. The expansion of the civil service system over the
years helped to drastically reduce the importance of patronage in the United States, as
did similar systems in other countries.
However, the traditional civil service method of recruitment has its drawbacks. Critics
argue that it is too slow, rigid, and complex (Coggburn 2005), and that the civil service
system itself now is more of a problem than was patronage (Elling and Thompson 2006;
Condrey and Battaglio 2007). The civil service of today needs to be able to attract the
best and the brightest and quickly respond to changing conditions and tasks. Public
personnel reform has therefore increasingly spread across the United States (Nigro and
Anders Sundell is in The Quality of Government Institute, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 2, 2014 (440–457)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
RECRUITMENT TO THE CIVIL SERVICE 441
Kellough 2008), and the world, as parts of the ‘Reinventing Government’ and ‘New
Public Management’ paradigms (Kettl 1997). The main tenets of the reforms have been
decentralization and debureaucratization: recruitment is more often handled by the
staffing agencies themselves, and managers are allowed to select candidates not only
on the basis of results of competitive examinations (Lavigna and Hays 2004). All in all,
recruitment in the public sector more and more resembles recruitment in the private
sector.
Flexibility, responsiveness, and competence are the intended outcomes of this process,
and some of the most prominent reformers, such as New Zealand, show good results.
However, decentralized and deregulated recruitment procedures were the basis for the
spoils system in the United States, and led to widespread patronage and inefficiencies in
many developing countries today. This implies that reforms that may enhance flexibility
and responsiveness in some countries merely result in patronage in other countries (Schick
1998).
The hypothesis of this article is simple: When the risk for patronage is high, as it
was in the United States during the nineteenth century, the amount of discretion in
the recruitment process needs to be low in order to prevent abuse. When the risk for
patronage instead is low, as in New Zealand today, more discretion can be allowed
in order to improve flexibility and responsiveness. The factors affecting the risk for
patronage relate to both the demand for patronage as well as the checks on it outside the
civil service system itself. The hypothesis is tested on a dataset containing information
about the bureaucratic structure of 88 countries.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I review the literature on recruitment in the public
sector, mostly drawing on examples from the United States, as it is the country where
the discussion of patronage in recruitment of civil servants has been the most vibrant
historically. The next section describes the datasets and estimation strategy, as well as the
factors that are expected to increase and decrease the risk for patronage. The following
section presents the results of the empirical analysis. The final section concludes.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH AND THEORY
Historically, strict meritocratic recruitment to public offices has been a rare phenomenon.
Mann (1993, pp. 445–46) outlines four alternative ways of obtaining an office: through
heritage, election, purchase, and patronage. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
did meritocratic recruitment increase in importance in the ‘western world’, but in China
tests on knowledge of classical texts for prospective bureaucrats were held as early as 134
BC (Elman 2000).1
Patronage has instead been a very common method of appointment historically, and
continues to be an important factor in electoral democracies. Although the origin of the
term comes from the relation between a plebeian and his patron among the patricians
in ancient Rome (Roniger 1983), in political science literature it normally means the
distribution of public jobs in exchange for political support (Bearfield 2009). The perhaps
most well-known example is the American spoils system of the nineteenth century, in
which the party that had won the election replaced many public employees with their
own supporters. Many were employed in the postal service, which in 1881 employed
59 per cent of all federal employees (Johnson and Leibcap 1994, p. 13). Recruitment
on the basis of political loyalty naturally led to the recruitment of persons that were
underqualified for the position they were to occupy. A report to Congress in 1868 found
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 2, 2014 (440–457)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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