Abstract
Bureaucratic voters are guided both by their preferences over public goods and by their job motivation: they bear costs from policies that downsize the government workforce. Job-motivated voters lead to (i) nonexistence of Condorcet-winning platforms in the short run, and (ii) bureaucratic persistence in the long run: equilibrium outcomes converge to alternations around at most two platforms, in which parties compete over the scale of public investment but keep the size of the bureaucracy fixed. Long-run bureaucracies are never smaller than the ideal bureaucracy of median private sector workers, and parties typically underinvest, so that public goods production is inefficient.