Effects on Reelection Rates of the Introduction of Merit Civil Service Appointments in US States

Co-authored with Eugenia Nazrullaeva and Dylan Potts 

Prior scholarship contends that control over patronage appointments confers the incumbent an electoral advantage. We study the introduction of state-level legislation that abolished patronage appointments to the civil services of the 50 US states between 1900 and 2016. Using recently-developed statistical methods appropriate to reform’s staggered introduction, we show that legislators were much less likely to be reelected during the patronage era than after the introduction of civil service reform. Reelection rates for legislators significantly and substantially increase following reform, when political careers also lengthen. We explore both selection and performance explanations for this surprising result.

us_states_reelection241224.pdf

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