Geoffrey Chaucer held office as comptroller of customs in the Port of London, clerk of works in the royal palace, and commissioner responsible for maintenance of the Thames, each position allocated to him through the “grace and favor” of John of Gaunt, his patron. John Milton was appointed “secretary for foreign tongues,” a reward for loyalty and a position he used to defend the resurgence of Parliament in the seventeenth century. Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and John Locke all held public office through the intervention of powerful patrons; Matthew Arnold and Anthony Trollope were also among...

Patronage systems flourished in distinct patterns across history, across countries, and within countries. So, too, did reform initiatives. The countries considered as historical cases in Chapter 1 all established career civil services in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the embedded nature of the institution of personal and political appointment to staff the public sector, reforms did not “just happen.” They were the result of deliberate initiatives that created conflict among potential winners and losers, played out within constraints and opportunities set by the past. Often, reforms that put new rules of the game into practice were preceded by...

Career civil service systems were constructed in the United States, Europe, and Japan in the nineteenth century. In some cases, their introduction was established through laws or regulations that set up commissions to oversee the recruitment, promotion, monitoring, and pensioning of public servants; in other cases, the systems evolved without a single legitimizing moment, but became accepted fact through gradual accretion of practice and regulations. However they emerged, reform initiatives were everywhere subject to questioning and contestation, and they took shape in ways that reflected these conflicts.

In addition to the difficulties of their birth, new systems faced further challenges,...

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, career civil services were constructed in the now developed countries of the world. Prior to their creation, public service recruitment systems based on patronage had been of use to kings, party politicians, class elites, revolutionaries, reformers, and rascals, and had demonstrated adaptability to a wide variety of purposes. The transition from patronage to a formal career service was generally a long process, fraught with conflict between those who sought reform and those who found benefits in a continuation of the status quo. Moreover, the introduction of new systems did not end contestation about reform;...

Traditions of public service in Latin America owe much to the patronage system inherited from colonial empires. Kings and viceroys, nineteenth- and twentieth-century presidents, cabinet ministers, party leaders, agency and department heads, among many others, personally appointed the officials who carried out the work of government. As elsewhere, positions in government were awarded for a variety of purposes, and appointments were often the result of pulling strings and pleading for the attention of potential patrons.¹ Across broad expanses of time, this system of personal appointments remained a fundamental aspect of politics and administration. Yet its use had distinct consequences for...

Brazil is a useful starting point for a closer assessment of the politics of civil service reform in Latin America because it has the oldest system in the region and thus provides a longer lens of history for exploration. Established by President Getúlio Vargas, the country’s career civil service was entrusted to a newly formed and powerful Administrative Department of the Public Service (DASP) in 1938. At the time of its creation, the DASP was given responsibility for the public service, along with extensive authority over government functions, legislation, and budgets. It was designed to be a superministry responding directly...

Introducing career civil services in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile was surprisingly easy. Small groups of reformers generated ideas, little public and intra-governmental discussion accompanied the planning process, and negotiations and approval processes took place under conditions that eased acceptance of the new systems. A new and centralizing regime in Brazil, an economic crisis in Argentina, an electoral standoff among parties in Mexico, a corruption scandal in Chile—the story for each is distinct, but in all, unusual circumstances surrounded how the well-institutionalized patronage process was challenged and replaced in law.

These unusual circumstances limited the extent to which opposition...