Meritocracy in practice: Social equity and senior executive recruitment in Chile

This dissertation examines whether and how a formally merit-based senior executive recruitment system can advance social equity in public-sector leadership. Focusing on Chile’s Senior Executive Service System (SESS), the study addresses a central tension in public administration: the coexistence of procedurally neutral selection mechanisms with persistent gender disparities in executive representation. The research adopts a convergent mixed-methods design integrating documentary analysis, longitudinal quantitative modeling (2004–2024), and qualitative interviews with institutional actors. The documentary analysis reconstructs how merit is legally defined and organizationally institutionalized. The quantitative analysis evaluates gendered advancement across recruitment stages. The qualitative component examines how merit is interpreted and enacted in practice. The findings show that the Chilean SESS operates with a high degree of procedural neutrality in the evaluation of observable qualifications. Stage-specific models do not indicate systematic penalties against women once comparable profiles are considered. However, gender imbalances persist at the overall level, reflecting unequal entry conditions and historically patterned career trajectories that precede formal evaluation. In this sense, equality within the selection process coexists with inequality in the conditions that shape who enters and advances through it. The dissertation contributes to social equity theory by analytically distinguishing procedural neutrality from distributive outcomes and by reconceptualizing merit as a socially mediated construct—legally codified and standardized, yet organizationally interpreted and enacted through discretionary judgment. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of mixed-methods integration for moving from documenting inequality to explaining its institutional mechanisms. Substantively, it clarifies the scope and limits of institutional responsibility in merit-based systems, showing how such systems can be simultaneously robust, legitimate, and structurally constrained in their capacity to transform patterns of representation.