Santiago Quintero

Peer-reviewed articles

“Short-term Patronage: Job Uncertainty and Temporary Employment in Politicized Bureaucracies“, Public Performance & Management Review

In this paper, I study the effect of the political assignment of temporary public jobs—referred to here as short-term patronage—on the strategic behavior of temporary employees in developing public administrations. I examine the interplay between job uncertainty and political patronage as determinants of temporary employees’ work effort, operationalized as time allocation to a project. The central argument is that temporary employees strategically adjust their time allocation to mitigate future job uncertainty, and patronage can incentivize increased or reduced effort contingent upon such uncertainty. Using a novel vignette experiment with Colombian public employees, I find that lower job uncertainty can lead to an increase in job effort by temporary employees. Furthermore, when future job uncertainty is lower (higher), patronage can increase (decrease) temporary employees’ time dedication to their tasks. These findings underscore the complex and often unintended consequences of the interaction between employment flexibilization reforms and the political dynamics of public administration, particularly in the context of weakly professionalized bureaucracies.

Working papers

“Hidden in Plain Sight: A framework to link Decentralization and Cross-Boundary Collaboration Rulemaking in the Global South” (with José Sánchez and Alejandra Medina), Revise and Resubmit. [Working Paper]

Cross-boundary collaboration to produce public services or govern policy problems can emerge as contingent dynamics initiated by local governments or driven by incentives and mandates from higher-level governments. To understand collaboration regimes, we propose a cross-boundary collaboration framework and a collaboration typology for the Global South, combining elements from the Collaborative Governance Regime and Institutional Grammar frameworks. We conduct a comparative case study to understand how national-level system contexts and decentralization processes have shaped the institutional framework that regulates cross-boundary interactions in three Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Our findings suggest that different paths of decentralization not only set the devolution of capacity and autonomy to local governments, but also determine the level and type of rules under which cross-boundary collaboration emerges.

“The Bureaucratic Politics of Networks: How Patronage Shapes Intergovernmental Collaboration” [Working Paper]

How does patronage—the political appointment of bureaucrats—affect coordination and joint delivery among public organisations? Research has examined patronage’s effects on bureaucratic performance, but mostly within hierarchical, top-down policymaking. Yet growing fragmentation and complexity in domains such as environmental governance make policy dependent on horizontal networks of intergovernmental collaboration. This paper develops a theoretical framework and new evidence linking patronage to the incentives and capacities that shape such collaboration. Patronage can deter coordination by reducing bureaucratic capacity but may also promote it by leveraging appointees’ political capital. To test these claims, I analyse environmental collaboration agreements among the universe of Colombian public agencies using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs). To account for the nested structure of the data, I develop an extension of ERGMs that incorporate regional random effects. Results show that patronage has heterogeneous effects: managerial patronage fosters collaboration, while professional-level patronage inhibits it. I further show that these effects are conditioned by organisations’ specialised knowledge, stability and experience. The findings underscore patronage’s contingent role in governance networks and the importance of bureaucratic politics in collaborative policy delivery.

“Brokers without benefits? Patronage and the performance of intergovernmental collaboration” [Working Paper]

In this paper, I examine whether the effectiveness of intergovernmental collaboration at the local level is conditioned by political patronage. Whilst patronage appointments have been associated with increased corruption, inefficiency, and diminished bureaucratic quality, some studies highlight its potential to facilitate coordination, resource mobilisation, and upward accountability when political and bureaucratic incentives align. To date, research on the effects of patronage has mainly focused on traditional, top-down forms of governance, ignoring its potential effects on horizontal, collaborative forms of governance. Here, building on bureaucratic politics, and collaborative and network governance literatures, I argue that patronage can have both positive and deleterious effects on the performance of intergovernmental collaborations. Empirically, I focus on drinking water governance in Colombia, a decentralised system where municipalities must coordinate with multiple administrative and environmental authorities. I employ a novel instrumental variable approach that isolates exogenous variation in collaboration opportunities and find that, whilst entering collaboration initially reduces water quality, reflecting coordination and entry costs, repeated and increased collaboration investments significantly improve service outcomes. Although patronage influences which municipalities collaborate, its moderating effect on collaborative effectiveness disappears once endogeneity is addressed, suggesting that patronage has no detrimental effect on collaborative outcomes.

Work in progress

“The Bureaucratic Politics of Environmental Decentralisation“

“When AI Talks Politics: Does ChatGPT Influence Voters’ Pro-climate Preferences?” (with Lina Kramer and Laura Montecchio)

“Information Provision and Preferences for Flood Risk Management Policies: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment” (with Francesca Vantaggiato and James Porter)

“Why is collaboration a risky choice? Revising the micro-level sources of collaboration risk in self-organising policy networks“

Book chapters

“Metropolitan Governments: A Historical and Theoretical Approach” (with Santiago Leyva and Laura Gallego). In Citizen Security form a Metropolitan Governance Perspective, Edited by Gallego, L., Leyva, S. & Mesa, J., EAFIT University: Medellin, 2018 – In Spanish

“The Management of Citizen Security Provision in the Valle de Aburrá. Coordination Problems in the Implementation of Government Tools” (with Juan Mesa, Andrea Arango and Luis Arbeláez). In Citizen Security form a Metropolitan Governance Perspective, Edited by Gallego, L., Leyva, S. & Mesa, J., EAFIT University: Medellin, 2018 – In Spanish