Typologies Of Political Patronage: Expert Evidence From Mongolia's Civil Service

Abstract

Political patronage remains a persistent feature of civil service systems worldwide, even where formal recruitment rules are nominally meritocratic. This article examines the typological forms political patronage takes within Mongolia's civil service, addressing a gap in the comparative literature between highly institutionalized European party-government systems, where influential typologies of patronage were originally developed, and post-socialist, semi-presidential contexts, where such typologies remain largely untested. Despite two decades of civil service reform explicitly modeled on career-based meritocratic systems, official Civil Service Council statistics document a rise in unlawful personnel rotation from 5.2 percent of civil servants in 2007 to over 22 percent in 2019, indicating a persistent divergence between formal rule and administrative practice. Drawing on a two-stage expert survey and interview design involving 55 experts from academia, the civil service, and political practice, this study tests the applicability of the influential typology developed by Kopecký, Mair, and Spirova (2012)—distinguishing party-apparatus-based, technocratic, agency-based, and party-membership-based patronage—to the Mongolian case. Findings indicate that all four typological categories are unanimously or near-unanimously recognized by experts as operative, evidencing pronounced typological pluralism rather than a single dominant patronage logic. Further analysis reveals that these forms are systematically stratified by administrative tier and organizational domain, and that their relative prominence has shifted across three historical periods of legal reform, giving rise to an additional, previously untheorized mechanism: legislative-amendment-based patronage. The study offers the first systematic empirical mapping of patronage typologies in a Mongolian context, extends an established Western typology to a post-socialist hybrid regime, and demonstrates a methodological approach for measuring patronage in data-scarce administrative environments.