The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies vary in the extent to which hiring is meritocratic versus patrimonial. Such outcomes are typically seen as the result of politicians’ behavior. However, politicians often delegate hiring to existing bureaucrats. When political leaders are socially distant from communities they seek to govern and these areas are peripheral to politicians’ core interests, bureaucrats’ private preferences can dominate hiring decisions instead. Colonial and other forms of external state-building typify cases where patrimonialism created by bureaucrats, not politicians, can emerge. Digitizing individual-level records across six decades of British rule in Ghana, we find evidence of patrimonialism rather than meritocracy in the hiring of African staff, with large inequities across ethnic groups. Our results demonstrate the underexplored agency of local bureaucrats in state-building and highlight conditions under which bureaucrats’ preferences, rather than only political principals’, shape state institutions. They also challenge conventional wisdom about why, and when, newly-independent African states became “neopatrimonial.”