What is the Best Way to Recruit Public Servants?

Abstract

What is the best way to recruit public servants? Governments all over the world have the last decades pondered that question, as parts of increasing attempts to reform civil services and public administrations. Two opposing alternatives can be distinguished: on one hand, traditional civil service recruitment, centralized, through formal examinations, with low discretion and flexibility for managers. On the other hand, private sector-style recruitment that is faster and more flexible, allowing managers to pick the candidates most suitable for each position. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that the context determines which institution that will deliver the highest level of meritocracy (in the sense that skills and ability actually are the decisive factors). More specifically, when the risk for patronage is low, private sector style-recruitment can be at-tempted to find the best candidates, but when the risk instead is high, formal public sector style-recruitment is preferable to prevent patronage and nepotism. Analysis of a dataset containing in-formation about the structures and characteristics of bureaucracies in over 100 countries lends support to the hypothesis.