Patrón System

A patrón system is used when political officials fill government positions with employees they select personally. When a candidate wins political office, that person often has the right to appoint people to a number of jobs. The patrón system proves problematic when people are appointed to positions solely for their political support or loyalty, rather than for their merit or qualifications to fill a given position. Unique among state governments in the United States, the state government of New Mexico operated under a patrón system of appointments during the state's first 50 years.

At the federal level, a system of checks and balances prevents some negative consequences of the patrón system. For example, requiring Senate approval for many presidential appointments serves as a check on the president's power to appoint unqualified candidates. In most states, government is composed of a mix of elected officials and employees who have risen through a civil merit system. However, under the patrón system in New Mexico, regional political bosses controlled hiring of local and state employees, with no civil merit system in place. This meant significant turnover after each local election, as campaign supporters were rewarded with positions. One legacy of this system is that it kept the qualifications for many government jobs artificially low in New Mexico, so that favored appointees would meet the hiring requirements.

New Mexico's governmental patrón system was rooted in the older landowning patrón system that had dominated Spanish American cultural arrangements for centuries in what would become the American southwest. In that system, the patrón provided employment, community leadership, and financial security to the peons who worked for him. In such cases, the patrónpeon relationship resembled traditional lord-vassal relations. The peons were kept in debt to their patrón, who addressed the community's financial needs from his vast resources in return for loyalty and communal labor.

Some patróns were landowners who employed peons as farm workers or ranchers. Most, however, were village patróns who were social and financial leaders in their small communities. The village patrón's role largely consisted of political leadership, and his power was based primarily on loyalty and respect from local independent farmers who looked to their patróns when village needs arose, from the building of churches and schools to care for the sick and elderly.

After New Mexico gained statehood in 1911 and moved toward political independence, the traces of the older landowning and village patrón systems appeared within the framework chosen for state government. Instead of directly exchanging labor for economic resources, as in the past landowner patrón system, though, a new emphasis arose on exchanging political resources for economic resources, more similar to the village patrón.

Political resources in this context involve community support, loyalty, and respect in ways less tangible than typical in other patrón system relations. Political patróns created societal bonds, which existed because of their clients’ dependence on them for political and economic gain. The dark side of the patronage system was that it was grounded in an imbalance of power, in which the clients had no access to valuable resources, except through the advocacy of a political patrón.

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