Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper aims to identify leaders’ skills that either enhance or hinder government performance. We estimate the causal effect of the career pursued by a chief executive on government performance. We argue that skills accumulated from technocratic experience differ from those accrued from a political career. Once in office, leaders align their differentiated set of skills with implementing certain policies to boost performance. Specifically, we expect that chief executives who pursue mainly technocratic career paths will have higher performances in carrying out policies requiring an administrative implementation process. Chief executives focused on political career paths will have higher performances in carrying out policies requiring a political implementation process. We test our proposition in the Mexican context, using a panel dataset of Mexican governors during the 1995-2014 period, covering four gubernatorial administrations. State performance is operationalized in terms of health outcomes (infant mortality rates) and formal employment. The causal effect of career paths on gubernatorial performance is estimated using an instrumental variable approach. We instrument governors’ political career using exogenous variation in political posts’ availability from a political reform in 1977 that created state deputy seats elected through proportional representation (vs. direct vote/majoritarian rule). Our findings suggest that governors with greater technocratic experiences exhibit higher performance in reducing infant mortality, while governors with greater political career paths exhibit higher performance in terms of formal employment. In specific, a 10% increase of governors’ experience in technocratic posts decreases infant mortality rate in 0.08 percentage points. On the other hand, a 10% increase of governors’ experience in political posts increases formal jobs in 1045.