| Title | Jobs for Votes: Patronage and Performance in Tammany Hall’s NYPD |
| Date | January 16, 2025 (Thursday) 17:00-18:30 |
| Location | Hybrid (Room 3-709) |
| Abstract | Do politicians select public sector employees via patronage to win votes while sacrificing performance? I combine newly digitized personnel records on the selection, careers, and performance of 5,795 New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers with geolocated information on all voters and election results in the city for 1900-1916. The linked data reveals that 21% of the police officers were appointed in a deviation from civil service rules. These patronage employ- ees were more likely to be connected to leaders of Tammany Hall, the city’s incumbent Democratic Party organization. I use a difference-in-differences de- sign to show that patronage appointments increased Democratic registration by 10.3% within the 50-meter radius around the employee’s residential address. This electoral response – and complementary results on promotions tied to elec- toral support – suggest that patronage employees are incentivized to mobilize the votes of their neighbors. The electoral logic of patronage jobs in exchange for votes has important implications for performance: Patronage employees perform considerably worse than their meritocratically selected peers. |
| Paper | Paper File |
| Slide | |
| Note | Link for participation via Zoom: https://list-waseda-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcqf-CtrjosHtKwadpJCOleSvUUrD61UcSb#/registration |