Drawing on four historical case studies, this chapter develops a picture of the paths toward civil service reform by interrogating the motivations of reformers, searching for clues as to whether they believed the merit system to be a democratizing reform or not. The first part of the chapter thus trains its sights on the period prior to reform in the United States and the United Kingdom. Whether reformers achieved their goals is a separate question. The second part of this chapter thus focuses on the distributional and representational consequences of civil service reform, looking at two different cases: China and India. In China, the merit system introduced during the seventh century was, in comparison to what preceded it, a democratizing reform, enabling ambitious office-seekers from regional hinterlands to share in power. India's brief interlude with unmediated meritocratic recruitment while under British colonial rule, meanwhile, was not democratizing and was ultimately criticized for effectively shutting the door to government representation among the less well-to-do.