Moving Away from Patronage: A Feedback Approach

Abstract

Patronage appointments in government are a continuing issue in many administrative systems. Especially for countries in Latin America and Africa patronage is considered a major impediment to developing more effective administrative systems. A great deal has been written describing patronage and discussing the causes for patronage, but much less research has addressed the dynamics of moving away from patronage to more merit-based systems. This paper reviews the patronage literature and then develops a dynamic feedback model for movement away from patronage. The model links the quality of the services provided by the government, the nature of the political party system, and levels of trust to patronage. The model uses several reinforcing and balancing feedback loops to demonstrate the possible dynamics of change in administrative appointments.

"Politicization of Public Administration in Romania and its Consequences for Governance in Turbulent Times"

“…The goals of politicization vary across administrative traditions and political systems (Ebinger, Veit and Fromm, 2019), and politicization has both positive and negative consequences (Bach, 2020;Kim, Jung and Kim, 2022). The main motivation to influence civil servants' appointments is to ensure partisan allies (Bach, 2020) and the responsiveness of civil servants to steer better policy-making, implementation, and evaluation (Peters, 2012;Peters and Bianchi, 2023).…”

“…In some cases, politicization includes the allocation of different forms of rewards, public contracts, or projects (Kopecký et al, 2016) or the creation of coordination institutions at the governmental level (Rouban, 2012). Voters adhere to a political party to have access to jobs in public institutions (Peters and Bianchi, 2023), and this is a form of vote buying when voters are promised public jobs (Volintiru, 2015). Peters et al (2022) argue that the goal of politicization in developing countries is to provide jobs for party members and loyal people, while in developed countries, politicization is used to control the policy-making process.…”

“…The extent of politicization of the civil service varies across countries. There are countries with mass politicization that is spread throughout the administrative system, and countries that professionalized their civil service and eliminated mass politicization but continue to have elite politicization (Peters and Bianchi, 2023). In this case, elite politicization refers to the appointment of highly qualified advisers to assist political leaders in governing better.…”

“…Studies showed that even though former communist countries adopted reforms for civil service professionalization during the pre-accession to the European Union, politicization increased afterward and politicians found informal practices to appoint loyal subordinates, reward party clientele or extract public resources (Gajduschek and Staroňová, 2023;Tomiċ and Pavloviċ, 2023;Čehovin and Haček, 2015). These practices generated a movement back toward patronage (Peters and Bianchi, 2023;Staroňová and Rybár, 2020). However, the study conducted by Duong (2021) on the Vietnamese authoritarian regime showed that the politicization of public institutions does not exclude meritocratic recruitment and promotion in the civil service.…”