Merilee 8. Grindle Jobs for the Boys Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2012tame Contents Introduction: Weber’s Ghost 1 1 The Longue Durée AA System for All Seasons 37 Politics in the Constiuction of Reform 72 Apris Reform: Deconstruction and Reconstruction 104 1A Contemporary Record Latin America: Patterns of Patronage and Politics 41 Roots and Branches 156 crafting Relorm: Flite Projects and Political Moments 178 Ambiguous Futures: The Politic of Implementation 203 Conclusion: The Polls of lnsiutional Creation and Re-ereation 241 Notes 265 Bibliography 293 Indes 309cuarrer 4 Latin America Patterns of Patronage and Politics In the nineieenth and twentieth centuries, career civil services were constructed in the now developed countries of the world. Prior to their cteation, public service recruitment systems based on pa- tronage had been of use to kings, party politicians, class elites, revolu- tionarles, reformers, and rascals, and had demonstrated adaptability to 1 wide varlety of purposes. The transition from patronage to a formal ‘career service was generally a Tong process, fraught with conflict be- tween those who sought reform and those who found benefits ina con- timation of the status quo, Moreover, the Introduction of new systems ddd not end contestation about reform; conflict over the existence, con- trol, characteristics, and loyalties of the public service continued for decades after the construction of new systems in most countries. In turn, the new systems generated thelr own pathologies, which then be- came targets for reformers in subsequent perlods. For these countries, then, the transition from one system to another was far from a technical exercise in institutional engineering. It was a profoundly political pro- cess of change. If the cases of public service reform in developed countries suggest patterns and lessons about how institutions are transformed over time land how new rules of the game are introduced, adapted, and accepted, the more recent histories of Latin American countries provide a Jabora- tory for testing these generalizations. At the outset of the twenty-first ‘century, nowhere in the word, except pethaps in mid-nineteenth cen- tury U.S. experience, sas patronage more fully embedded in political reality than in Latin America; nowhere had it proved itself! more durable ‘and flexible; and nowhere had it been more fully decried as a hindrance ma