The Abolishment of Patronage: Meritocratic Reforms in 19th Century Britain

• In Event: Appetitive States

Abstract

Meritocratic reforms strive at abolishing patronage by making recruitment of civil servants based on their skills and merits the general norm, rather than appointments based on political or other connections (such as friends or relatives), i.e., patronage positions. The actual realization of these reforms is often presented as puzzling since those actors that introduce them, incumbent politicians, have strong incentives to keep patronage positions. This paper proposes two explanations that combine incumbents’ incentives with those of other powerful actors in the bureaucracy hindering or facilitating meritocracy. The two explanations are tested by examining patterns of reform implementation within the British Civil Service in the 19th Century.

The paper employs a new dataset, The Public Office Data Set, which is based on original data collection of archival material. The dataset covers all entrance examinations that took place in the period 1855–1879, and approximately 117 public offices in the British Civil Service, and therefore allows for a systematic analysis of open and competitive examinations, an important reform to enforce meritocratic principles in the 19th Century.

Open and competitive examinations were made mandatory for most offices in the British Civil Service by an Order in Council issued in 1870. In fact, 1870 is the year often cited as the date of introduction of meritocracy in Britain. However, this paper shows that the implementation varied substantially between different offices, before and after this date. A close inspection of the data reveals an uneven implementation of these practices within the British Civil Service. While a few offices introduced open and competitive examinations already in the 1850s, other offices had not even introduced such examinations by the end of the 1870s.

Previous explanations for meritocratic reform center on changes in political competition or changes in demand for reform from the electorate, as a result of general socio-economic development, education, as well as suffrage extensions, and focus on explaining differences in implementation due to differences between political units or within them over time, at the country level or at the sub-national level (state level in federal countries like the US, see Ting et al. 2013). However, these previous explanations cannot explain why reforms take root in some offices, and not in others, within the same political unit, which was clearly the case in the British Civil Service, when de facto meritocracy was first introduced, with the introduction of open and competitive examinations. Other research shows that there is a substantial variation between agencies within the same political unit, but does not provide explanations for why reforms take root in some offices, and not in others (e.g., Bersch et al. 2017; Gingerich 2013).

This paper thus proposes and sets out to examine two explanations for variation between agencies within the same political unit. First, as suggested by previous research public demand for reform becomes increasingly important for politicians to address in order to win elections as political competition increases and new groups enter the electorate. However, those agencies that are more political salient are more likely to implement meritocratic practices since public demand for reform of those agencies is more likely to be more pronounced and politicians are thus more likely to gain from reforming these agencies. Second, even though the incumbent may have incentives for reform, all agencies are not controlled by the incumbent, some agencies are controlled by backbenchers (in the parliament). Those agencies out of the incumbent’s reach are less likely to introduce reforms since outside pressure for reform is likely to be met with resistance from other powerful actors in these agencies that benefit from upholding patronage.

In sum, this paper contributes to the literature on meritocratic reform by developing theoretical explanations for its variation within the same political unit, and providing an empirical test of the explanations on the paradigmatic British case, with a novel and extensive dataset based on archival material.

Author

• Agnes Cornell, University of Gothenburg