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.”
Forthcoming, American Political Science Review, 2026.
Citation
@article{brierley2026,
author = {Brierley, Sarah and L. Nathan, Noah and K. Ofosu, George and
Zhu, Tingxuan},
title = {The {Seeds} of {State} {Capture:} {Merit} and
{Patrimonialism} in the {Colonial} {Bureaucracy}},
journal = {American Political Science Review},
date = {2026-03-01},
url = {https://georgeofosu.com/publications/articles/2026-seeds-of-state-capture.html},
langid = {en},
abstract = {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.”}
}