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)

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. This research focuses on understanding collaboration regimes in the Global South, a region where decentralization processes have left a centralist legacy of underfunded local governments with minimal autonomy. We synthesize elements from the Collaborative Governance Regime and Institutional Grammar tool as research lenses to propose a cross-boundary collaboration framework for the Global South to understand how national-level system contexts and decentralization processes shape the institutional arrangements that regulate cross-boundary interactions. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we apply the framework across three Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. This initial application suggests 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“

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 incorporates 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.

“Bureaucratic Politicisation Conditions Decentralisation Effects on Ecosystems and Climate: Evidence from 91 Countries“

Environmental governance worldwide increasingly operates through multi-level, decentralised institutional architectures. Yet the environmental outcomes of these arrangements vary enormously, and we still know relatively little about the macro-institutional conditions under which the coordination mechanisms that polycentric and multi-level systems rely upon can actually flourish. I argue that a foundational but overlooked conditioning factor is the politicisation of bureaucratic appointments—the extent to which politicians control the recruitment of public servants. Using a panel of 91 countries over the period 2005–2022, I examine how the interaction between decentralisation and bureaucratic politicisation shapes four environmental outcomes: overall environmental performance, ecosystem vitality, environmental health, and climate change mitigation. Results from within-between random-effects models, complemented by hierarchical GMM estimators, show that whilst decentralisation is associated with short-run declines in environmental quality, countries with structurally more decentralised systems perform better in the long run. Bureaucratic politicisation amplifies the short-term environmental costs of decentralisation, but its moderating role varies by environmental domain: climate mitigation—where coordination demands are highest and political credit-claiming is most difficult—is the most severely affected, whilst environmental health—comprising locally tangible goods such as drinking water and sanitation—is the least vulnerable.

Work in progress

“The Nonlinear Effects of Polycentric Coordination on Drinking Water Quality“

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

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

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