Giving up Weber's Ghost?

"In a nutshell," Merilee Grindle writes, "this is a book about why patronage systems have been so ubiquitous in history, how and when moments for reform have emerged, and why an understanding of that moment only tells half the story."¹ She explains how reformers latch on to moments that include political-economic crises, regime change, scandal, and electoral turmoil to replace patronage systems with professional civil services. The institutionalization of such reforms, however, often remains tenuous for long periods. Thus, a holistic view requires an understanding both of the historical processes by which patronage systems become entrenched, and the post-reform 'endgame' of contestation and negotiation between actors competing over the allocation of public sector jobs.

Grindle uses ten country case studies to advance compelling arguments—six developed countries (the United States, Germany, Great Britain, France, Japan, and Spain) and four Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina). She argues that despite a vigorous scholarly effort to understand the historical dynamics that led to reforms in developed countries, efforts to situate reforms in their local contexts are comparatively lacking in the four Latin American cases. This makes their governments more susceptible to demands that they implement technocratic best-practice recommendations, regardless of historical context.

Her examples illustrate the diversity of political structures to which patronage systems can be adapted. During the age of industrialization, such systems were used as means toward a variety of ends in now-developed countries: In Prussia and Japan to solidify modern autocratic states, in France to found a competent public service, in Spain to forge an empire, in the United States to build mass political parties, and in Britain as ammunition in the political power struggle between crown and parliament. "The nature of patronage itself is that it serves the extremely useful purpose of allowing those who control it to mold its impact to their own purposes, whether these be noble and exalted or sinful and perverse."²

Grindle takes great care to explain how and why deeply entrenched patronage systems changed. In autocratic countries such as Japan and Germany, a select group of influential reformers were eager to modernize their civil services in line with Max Weber's ideal of a professional merit-based bureaucracy. They acted decisively during pivotal moments in history to extirpate patronage systems through a top-down process, co-opting elites by creating channels through which landed aristocrats could continue to exercise influence in the new system. In contrast to these processes, which unfolded without encountering any major obstacles, movements to overhaul the civil service in the United States and Britain were gradual and intensely contested.

Part of Grindle's mission in this book is to question the widely-accepted notion that patronage systems are inherently corrupt and incompetent while Weberian bureaucracies are transparent and high-performing—indeed, "a catalogue of its practice indicates that patronage has proved useful in achieving some of the ends of modern government, even while it is widely held responsible for extensive corruption and inefficiency and damned as a throwback to pre-modern and patrimonial governments."³ She argues that the primary drawback of patronage systems is not that they always result in the hiring of incompetent personnel, but that they are fragile and capricious. Thus the process of civil service reform should not be framed as a battle between good and evil, but as a highly-contested process of tradeoffs between the flexibility of patronage systems and the stability of Weberian bureaucracies.

Some issues which formed the basis for historical contention about the civil service were "its continued existence, the power to control it, the criteria that would define its composition, and the focus of its loyalty."⁴ Despite the battles waged over these attributes in the six developed country cases, "the overall trajectory favored the consolidation of career civil services that were professional, neutral and well trained."⁵ As civil services were consolidated they also became more autonomous, organizing to represent their collective interests and insulating themselves from external influence...