Hiring With a Bias: How Government Ideology Shapes Professional Bureaucratic Composition

An understudied aspect of patronage practices worldwide is how the ideological leaning of governments shapes the professional composition of the bureaucracy. This article explores this question, aiming to determine whether left-wing and right-wing administrations differ in their preferences for hiring from various academic or professional disciplines. Using Chile as a case study, we leverage a rich individual-level dataset of bureaucrats’ careers, covering nearly 15,000 upper- and upper-middle-level bureaucratic hires from 2010 to 2020 across nearly all central government ministries. Utilizing mixed-effects logistic regression models, we find that left-wing governments substantially increase the hiring of social scientists, while right-wing governments favor economists and elite management professionals. These distinct hiring patterns affect top and upper-middle-ranking positions and are not confined to specific agencies or ministries. These results underscore the significant impact of government ideology on the professional composition of bureaucracies, with potentially substantive impacts on policy design and implementation.