Abstract

Introducing 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.