Casas, Julieta. ''American Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective." Conditionally accepted at Studies in Comparative International Development.
American Political Development (APD) scholars have long sought to escape notions of American exceptionalism—the view that the United States is qualitatively distinct in ways that limit the usefulness of comparative analysis. This article presents a comparative framework that reframes the issue of exceptionalism by distinguishing between two analytic logics: divergence and lack of convergence. The exercise consists of examining the U.S. divergence from cases with shared starting points in Latin America and assessing convergence—or its absence—with European cases that began from markedly different initial conditions. Viewed from these two lenses, the U.S. fits neither pattern of development neatly. It followed a different trajectory shaped by contingent historical choices and specific structural characteristics. However, treating the U.S. as a comparative case study proves analytically productive: it sharpens counterfactual reasoning, permits the transfer of comparative lessons, and revises interpretations of core theories of political development, including debates over institutional sequencing.
Paths out of Patronage: The Political Origins of Civil Service Reform. Book workshop held at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute on May 2025.
Casas, Julieta. "Parties, Patronage, and the State: New Paths to Bureaucratic Reform." Revise and Resubmit at World Politics.
Awarded the McCoy Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper, Johns Hopkins University, 2023.
Patronage—the selection of government officials at the discretion of a political actor—is ubiquitous among democracies. Yet, some countries managed to curb it over time while others failed. Under what circumstances do democratic governments reduce patronage and establish professional bureaucracies? The paper argues that the success of bureaucratic reform is rooted in the type of patronage regime. Although all countries had some form of patronage, substantial differences in their firing practices can significantly impact the reform’s outcome by creating opportunities for the emergence of political entrepreneurs interested in bureaucratic reform or precluding such opportunities. Drawing on state-building scholarship in comparative politics and political development in American politics, I introduce a theoretical framework that accounts for successful and failed bureaucratic reform attempts. I apply the theory to the U.S. and Argentina, providing original archival evidence. The article elucidates the longstanding puzzle of bureaucracy professionalization in democratic contexts, generating new insights for contemporary debates on state-building.
Casas, J., Coyoli, J., Driscoll, B. "The Merit Project: Civil Servant Examinations across time and space (1789-2020)."
Critical outcomes like economic development (Besley et al., 2022; Dincecco & Katz, 2016), human rights protection (Englehart, 2009), and public service provision (Aneja and Xu, 2024; Oliveira et al., 2024) are largely determined by a government’s administrative capabilities. A key method for governments to enhance their administration is to implement civil service examinations for the recruitment of public officials (Dahlström 2012; Egerberg et al. 2017; Evans and Rauch, 2000). Exams guarantee that hires are based on talent instead of other non-meritocratic criteria, such as loyalty to individuals or a political party. However, most countries in the Global South struggle to introduce exams for civil servants. Why do some countries successfully implement civil servant exams while others fail? This project presents a collaborative initiative— a time-series cross-sectional dataset of 164 countries on exams for civil servants (DECS)—to collect and harmonize large-scale comparable data on civil service reform. Existing measures of civil servant exams are limited to expert surveys. Two distinct features of our dataset—the objective nature of our measure of meritocratic recruitment and the coverage between 1789 and 2020 make it particularly useful for quantitative research on civil service reform. The project also involves publishing an online archive of historical civil service reform laws.
Casas J., Francis Fukuyama. "When Participation Undermines Representation: The Paradox of Democratic Bureaucracy."
Efforts to democratize bureaucratic decision-making in the United States through participatory mechanisms—such as notice-and-comment procedures and public hearings—were institutionalized with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946. Yet these innovations have not made policymaking more representative, as their architects intended. Instead, the design of the APA’s participatory mechanisms has amplified the voices of well-organized and well-funded actors at the expense of ordinary citizens. We argue that this outcome stems from the use of unstructured participation mechanisms in a highly organized society, where interest groups can easily dominate deliberative spaces. Under these conditions, participation becomes a veto point that obstructs policy implementation rather than expanding democratic input. The paper asks how public participation in governance can be re-structured to make decision-making more genuinely representative and deliberative.
Casas, Julieta, S. Mazzuca. State-building and State Formation in Argentina. For the Oxford Handbook of Latin American States.
Casas, Julieta. Rotation vs the Spoils: Patronage and the American Civil Service Reform Process in Comparative Perspective.
Casas, J. Who works for the government? Reconstructing the Human Resources of the Early American Bureaucracy.
Casas, Julieta 2025. "How Milei Made Austerity Popular." Engelsberg Ideas.
Casas, Julieta. 2021. “Democracy’s Horizons: Talking with Michael Hanchard.” Public Books.