000			01530pab a2200157 454500
008			180718b2017 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aSchuster, Christian
245			_aLegal reform need not come first: merit-based civil service management in law and practice
260			_c2017
300			_ap.571-588.
520			_aIntroducing merit recruitment of public servants is a central good governance reform. To move towards merit in practice, legislation which mandates merit recruitment is considered a necessary but insufficient first step by many scholars and practitioners. Merit-based civil service legislation should thus be sought before reform in practice. This article challenges this reasoning. It argues that merit laws are neither sufficient nor necessary: they leave the incumbent's possibility frontier for patronage and meritocracy in practice unaffected. Large- and small-n evidence supports this assertion. Analyses of an original dataset of coded civil service legislation in 117 countries from 1975 to 2015 suggest that countries can attain meritocratic recruitment with and without legal merit requirements. Subsequently, a comparison of Paraguay and the Dominican Republic provides micro-evidence for the underlying mechanism. Conventional wisdom about the sequencing of governance reforms in developing countries may thus be misleading: legal reform need not come first. - Reproduced.
650			_aAdministrative reform
650			_aCivil service
773			_aPublic Administration
909			_a116283
999			_c116277 _d116277