What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?

Wood, B. Dan; Marchbanks, Miner P.

doi:10.1093/jopart/mum019

Cited by 35 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…One way of securing the implementation of their wishes is to remove the ‘old guard’ of officials who may have become closely associated with the previous regime, and to appoint new senior managers who are untainted by a close relationship with the previous incumbents. The US literature points to control over appointments as one of the ways in which politicians seek to control the bureaucracy, largely at the federal executive level (Wood and Waterman 1994; Wood and Marchbanks 2008), doing this through replacements when a new president enters office and when there is a change of policy. While the principal‐agent literature has focused more on attempts to rectify the information asymmetry between bureaucrats and politicians, studies have also looked at appointments to control the bureaucracy.…”

Section: Theoretical Perspectives On Managerial Turnovermentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Political Change Affect Senior Management Turnover? An Empirical Analysis of Top-Tier Local Authorities in England

Boyne

James

John

et al. 2010

Public Administration

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In many political systems the political neutrality of senior managers’ tenure is often cherished as a key part of the politics‐administration dichotomy and is subject to formal safeguards. We test hypotheses about the impact of political change on senior management turnover drawn from political science, public administration and private sector management theory. Using panel data to control for unobserved heterogeneity between authorities, we find that changes in political party control and low organizational performance have both separate and joint positive effects on the turnover rate of senior managers. By contrast, the most senior manager, the chief executive, is more sheltered: the likelihood of a chief executive succession is higher only when party change and low performance occur together. Thus the arrival of a new ruling party reduces the tenure of senior managers, but chief executives are vulnerable to political change only when performance is perceived as weak.

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Section: Theoretical Perspectives On Managerial Turnovermentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Political Change Affect Senior Management Turnover? An Empirical Analysis of Top-Tier Local Authorities in England

Boyne

James

John

et al. 2010

Public Administration

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“…3 Fewer still have examined how elections influence the career choices of federal employees. While there is widespread acceptance of the role of elections in the careers of political appointees (see, e.g., Dickinson and Tenpas 2003;O'Connell 2009;Wood and Marchbanks 2008) and an important literature examining the relationships between appointees and career civil servants (Aberbach and Rockman 1976;Michaels 1997;Golden 2000;Heclo 1977;Resh 2015), little work examines how these career events shape the choices of civil servants.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper we describe how elections alter public sector policy outputs and reorder patterns of influence within agencies. These disruptions predictably shape the career 2 There is, however, a robust literature on the causes and consequences of political appointee turnover in the public sector (see, e.g., Boyne et al 2010;Dull and Roberts 2009;Dull et al 2012;Hahm et al 2014;O'Connell 2009;Wood and Marchbanks 2008). 3 For works exploring civil service turnover after government changes in other contexts see Akhtari et al n.d.;Boyne et al 2010;Christensen et al 2014, Ennser-Jedenastik 2014a choices of civil servants that care about public policy and agency influence.…”

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confidence: 99%

Elections, Ideology, and Turnover in the U.S. Federal Government

Bolton¹,

Figueiredo²,

Lewis³

2016

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A defining feature of public sector employment is the regular change in elected leadership. Yet, we know little about how elections influence public sector careers. We describe how elections alter policy outputs and disrupt the influence of civil servants over agency decisions. These changes shape the career choices of employees motivated by policy, influence, and wages. Using new Office of Personnel Management data on the careers of millions of federal employees between 1988 and 2011, we evaluate how elections influence employee turnover decisions. We find that presidential elections increase departure rates of career senior employees, particularly in agencies with divergent views relative to the new president and at the start of presidential terms. We also find suggestive evidence that vacancies in high-level positions after elections may induce lower-level executives to stay longer in hopes of advancing. We conclude with implications of our findings for public policy, presidential politics, and public management.

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“…I also include measures of career tenure because career senior executives are typically more likely to have experience in the area of leadership change. As evidenced in previous studies, the average tenure of political appointees tends to be rather short in comparison to the tenure of career executives (Chang, Lewis, and McCarty ; Wood and Marchbanks ). Therefore, members of the SES who have experienced the turnover of previous appointees may be less likely to develop a trusting relationship with new appointees, given the expectation of another impending turnover.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 55%

Appointee–Careerist Relations in the Presidential Transition of 2008‐2009

Resh

2014

Pres Stud Q

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This research takes a different approach from most studies of presidential transitions by examining transition preparations from the unique perspective of the career bureaucrats that provide a critical connection between transitions and governance. I examine how career senior executives perceive management techniques that are commonly prescribed to political appointees, how prominent their application was during the second term of the George W. Bush administration, and what happened at the end of the Bush administration when the White House called for appointees to pursue a transition strategy that required the involvement of career Senior Executive Service members. I find evidence that cooperation between careerists and appointees is conditional, even in a policy area where the president demands it. Career executives' explicit knowledge of transition preparations is more likely in agencies subject to persistent vacancies among Senate‐confirmed appointee positions, and the importance of trust to explicit knowledge exchange is pronounced in agencies with more liberal orientations.

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What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?

Cited by 35 publications

References 25 publications

Does Political Change Affect Senior Management Turnover? An Empirical Analysis of Top-Tier Local Authorities in England

Does Political Change Affect Senior Management Turnover? An Empirical Analysis of Top-Tier Local Authorities in England

Elections, Ideology, and Turnover in the U.S. Federal Government

Appointee–Careerist Relations in the Presidential Transition of 2008‐2009

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