LAUSR

This paper is a study of civil service reform in Paraguay during the tumultuous government of Fernando Lugo (2008–2012). On its own merits, the reform was one of the government’s greatest successes. But in this paper, I show that it also had inadvertent effects that were detrimental to the rural poor, or campesinos, who made up a major portion of Lugo’s political coalition. I argue that Lugo’s campesino allies, in fact, lost twice as a result of this reform. The first loss was perhaps predictable. By insisting on merit-based civil service appointments over patronage appointments, Lugo’s government made it harder for those with lower levels of education to accede to the traditional short-term benefits of electoral victory: government jobs. The second loss was more subtle. By creating an implicit division between experts and clients in the civil service, and by putting a premium on the former, Lugo’s government participated in increasing the influence of campesinos’ primary enemies, the massive soy farms that were overtaking the agrarian frontier.