Politicians, bureaucrats and targeted redistribution

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public employees is higher for elected chief executives. This difference is stronger in public services with bigger private–public wage differential and it increases during election years. It also finds that the number of public employees increases with the age of bureaucrats while there is no such relationship in the case of politicians, which is consistent with younger bureaucrats having stronger career concerns.