Recent changes in state civil services may cause politicians to favor spending more at the state level and less through local governments

In the modern U.S., most state civil service bureaucracies are organized to be professional and independent of political influence. But have these civil service reforms, such as merit based apolitical recruitment, affected the behavior of elected politicians? In a study of states that have adopted these merit systems throughout the 20th century, Gergely Ujhelyi finds that these changes have led to the decentralization of state government spending towards local governments. He argues that as politicians lost their ability to influence policy implementation, they began to redistribute public funding towards friendly local governments. With the current trend towards a less politically insulated and more flexible civil service, state politicians may now have an incentive to centralize spending at the state level once again.