🧭 What This Paper Studies
This paper asks how political actors and bureaucratic managers jointly shape biased public-sector hiring. It models hiring as an allocation problem between politicians and managers who have different preferences over types of government positions and different abilities (leverage) to realize those preferences.
📊 How Hiring Patterns Were Tested — Kenyan Payrolls, 2004–2013
- Uses the universe of payroll records from Kenyan local governments, covering every listed employee from 2004 through 2013.
- Matches the theoretical predictions about actor preferences and leverage to observed hiring patterns across distinct job categories.
- Employs comparative tests across job types to identify where politician-driven patronage versus manager-driven favoritism is concentrated.
🔎 Key Findings
- Both political patronage and bureaucratic favoritism are present in public hiring, not just one or the other.
- Different types of bias concentrate in different types of government jobs, consistent with the model’s prediction that politicians and managers prefer and can influence different positions.
- Empirical patterns align with the theoretical claim that relative leverage (ability to place hires) and relative preferences (which jobs are valuable to each actor) determine which actor’s bias dominates in a given job category.
🚨 Why This Matters
- Focusing only on political patronage misses a significant source of biased hiring: bureaucratic managers who advance close contacts into particular positions.
- Understanding the distinct roles of politicians and managers is essential for diagnosing personnel bias and for designing reforms that target the correct locus of influence.
