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Bureaucratic behavior in developing countries remains poorly understood. Why do some public servants -yet not others -work hard to deliver public services, misuse state resources, and/or participate in electoral mobilization? A classic answer comes from Weber: bureaucratic structures shift behavior towards integrity, neutrality, and commitment to public service. Our paper conducts the first survey experimental test of the effects of bureaucratic structures. It does so through a conjoint experiment with public servants in the Dominican Republic. Looking at merit examinations and job stability, we find that Weber was right -but only partially. Recruitment by examination curbs corruption and political services by bureaucrats, while enhancing work motivation. Job stability, by contrast, only decreases political services: tenured bureaucrats are less likely to participate in electoral mobilization. Examinations thus enhance the quality of bureaucracy (motivation and lower corruption) and democracy (electoral competition); job stability only enhances the quality of democracy. Forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies

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Conventional wisdom posits that patronage jobs are distributed to supporters in exchange for political services. But why would public employees comply with the agreement and provide political services after receiving the job? Departing from existing explanations, I argue that patronage employees engage in political activities because their jobs are tied to their patrons’ political survival. Supporters’ jobs will be maintained by the incumbent, but not by the opposition. Supporters, then, have incentives to help the incumbent, which makes their original commitment to provide political services a credible one. Using survey experiments embedded in a survey of 1,200 Argentine public employees, I show that patronage employees are involved in political activities and that they believe their jobs are tied to the political success of the incumbent.

Sensitive survey techniques (SSTs) are frequently used to study sensitive behaviors. However, existing strategies for employing SSTs lead to highly variable prevalence estimates and do not permit analysts to address the question of whether the use of an SST is actually necessary. The current article presents a survey questioning strategy and corresponding statistical framework that fills this gap. By jointly analyzing survey responses generated by an SST (the crosswise model) along with direct responses about the sensitive behavior, the article's framework addresses the question of whether the use of an SST is required to study a given sensitive behavior, provides an efficient estimate of the prevalence of the sensitive behavior, and, in its extended form, efficiently estimates how individual characteristics relate to the likelihood of engaging in the behavior. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an examination of gender differences in proclivities towards corruption in Costa Rica.