Transformations in Elite Recruitment Structures of the American Administrative State

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The administrative organizations of the American government are important sites for making and implementing policy. Those at the top of these organizations have major responsibility not only for determining and implementing policy but for guiding the organizational development of government. Recruitment processes determine who occupies these positions and hence their quality and behavior. Thus, how such people are recruited affects the democratic legitimacy and competency of the American government. The purpose of this study is to identify the recruitment structure for elite administrative positions and to describe transformations in those structures over time. The study is motivated by an apparent paradox. Elite research suggests recruitment to these positions is relatively unstructured, politically permeable and tumultuous, producing people with uncertainly relevant skills and little identification with the state. However, research on the development of the organizational capacity of the American state suggests that these structures become coherent, ordered and impermeable, producing people with appropriate skills and identification with the state. To examine this paradox, study does three things. First, it uses theory on the development of the organizational capacity of the state to generate sets of propositions about the kinds of patterns and changes in those patterns that should be expected. Second, it collects unique information on the timing and sequence of diverse aspects of the careers of administrative elites from 1850 to 1998. Third, it uses optimal matching (OM) to analyze the data. This technique allows study to use the timing and sequence of individual careers to discover the recruitment structures hypothesized to generate individual careers. Two contributions are highlighted here. First, the study poses a paradox at the intersection of research fields not usually brought together, and then uses a new analytic technique and unique data to try to resolve the paradox. In so doing, it promotes the development of research in both elite recruitment and state-building. For elite recruitment, the study provides a theoretical frame within which to think about historical changes in recruitment. Further, the research advances concept specification and measurement precision for recruitment research and provides new evidence regarding some of the classic issues in the field. The study contributes to state-building research by examining what has seemed to be an exception to the pattern of growth and transformation in the organizational capacity of the state and, thus, suggests a focus on elite position for research in American state-building. By analyzing such a long time period in organizations across the state, the study greatly expands the time frame and sites of research on American state-building. Concomitantly, optimal matching provides a nuanced picture of recruitment changes. This will help better understand the meaning of transformations for developing the organizational capacity of the state. The study also seeks to add to the field of American Political Development (APD) the combined benefits of historical narrative, quantitative methodologies and individual-level data. Studies in APD commonly use qualitative methods to pursue macro-historical and theoretical questions. This study also seeks to address these questions, but by using quantitative, individual-level behavioral data. It thus builds quantitatively based, historically grounded macro-level arguments out of the micro events of individual lives. This is not common in studies of macro-political change. This project has the potential to contribute to broader societal goals by enhancing understanding of leadership. Th quality and character of leadership in American government are public and academic concerns. These have been explicit issues for the government for at least 70 years, (e.g., the 1930's Brownlow Commission, the post-war Hoover Commissions and the Volker Commission in 1990). This research brings a new perspective to them and could shed light on improving leadership.