Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and Reform the Role of Rent-Seeking

Present scholarship on the adoption of the Pendleton Act of 1883 finds that reform of political patronage becomes incentive-compatible when a sufficient number of legislators can constrain the quantity supplied (Johnson & Libecap 1994), with public pressure an important coordinating force in the activities of individual legislators (Theriault, 2003). These accounts do not sufficiently explain the administrative history of the civil service before and after the actual passage of the Act. I evaluate the Pendleton Act from the perspective of indirect vote-buying, arguing that opportunities to purchase votes outside of patronage networks motivated legislators to support reform. Replicating the statistical procedures of the existing literature, I present evidence that the presence of well-organized, politically-important interest groups drove legislators to vote in favor of the Pendleton Act. These findings highlight the need to explain the Pendleton Act and civil service reform more broadly beyond the scope of civil service per se, and suggest that individual reforms do not necessarily imply net economic benefits.

Author

• Stewart, Alexander B.

• Patronage
• Rent-seeking
• The Pendleton Act
• Vote trading
• Civil Service Reform
• Public Choice

Identifier

hdl:1920/14298

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14298