These are the career civil servants whose long-term job security does not depend on political beliefs. They are, by default, shielded from dismissal attempts by administrations whose policies they disagree with.
Insulating lower-level bureaucrats from the tendency of incoming administrations to install political loyalists in senior positions has a number of well-established benefits. First, it ensures that the machinery of government does not grind to a halt after every election. It also enables federal departments to hire and promote people based on experience rather than ideology. And eliminating that system would effectively gut whistleblower protections (as anyone from the opposite party to the president would be loathe to talk about wrongdoing for fear of being fired), making government oversight more difficult.
But this practice also ensures that any administration will inevitably employ people who oppose its own goals. What is the cost of this “political deflection”?
That’s the question Kellogg professors are asking Jörg Spenkuch and Edoardo Tesso began to respond—but not because they doubted the wisdom of insulating bureaucrats from political interference. “There are obvious benefits to this system that are well documented,” says Spenkuch. “We just wanted to know if there were any hidden costs.”
To find out, Teso and Spenkuch, along with Guo Xu of the University of California, Berkeley, collected data on the policy preferences of government bureaucrats. They used this information to examine how much and how often political harassment occurs among career civil servants in the US federal bureaucracy. They then measured how procurement officers—the bureaucrats responsible for overseeing government contracts—were affected by this misalignment. Their thinking was that if these procurement officials were unhappy with an administration’s policy, their performance might suffer while that administration was in power.
Indeed, the researchers found that between 2004 and 2019, cost overruns on these contracts were eight percent higher than average when a procurement officer identified with a different political party than the administration.
“In relative terms, you perform worse when you’re not politically aligned with the people at the top,” says Teso, an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision science. And since these misalignments are inevitable in a bureaucratic system that isolates public servants, “this suggests that there is a cost, along with all the benefits.”
Measuring Partisanism
Bureaucracies are peculiar organizations.
“In many ways, they are like corporations, in the sense that there are written rules and a well-defined hierarchy. Orders come from the top, and people lower down the food chain are expected to carry them out,” says Spenkuch, associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences. “In other ways, they’re a lot like corporations, because typically, low-level bureaucrats have much more job protection than low-level workers.” An organization with this particular set of characteristics is called a “Weberian bureaucracy,” after the German sociologist Max Weber, who first described it in the early twentieth century.
Researchers have found the US federal government to be the ideal setting for studying the advantages and disadvantages of a Weberian bureaucracy. In response to media requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the government had already released personnel records for more than a million federal bureaucrats between 1997 and 2019. Researchers matched the names in those records to a national database of registered voters. which was compiled by L2, a nonpartisan company that sells such information to political campaigns, activist organizations, and academics. This database included voters’ self-identification as Democrats or Republicans. for voters in states where correlation is not captured, L2 uses machine learning to guess party affiliation. (The authors assigned the label “independent” to all bureaucrats who were not categorized in the data as Democrats or Republicans.)
By merging the L2 data with government personnel records, Teso and Spenkuch created a first-of-its-kind database of partisanship among modern civil servants.
“These two data sets have been in the public domain for quite some time, but we’re the first to actually combine them,” says Spenkuch. “You have to do that to study the kinds of questions we’re interested in.”
The researchers began by using this data to examine how “Weberian” the federal bureaucracy actually was.
First they found that the bureaucracy exhibited a distinctly un-Weberian characteristic: the new administrations did indeed clean house and distribute high-level government appointments to friendly rebels.
When Democrats took over from Republicans, the average number of Democratic political appointees increased by 152 percent. when Republicans took office, the number of Republican appointees increased by 504 percent. Meanwhile, the researchers also found that civil service employees were remarkably isolated from these partisan circles: Over 22 years, the proportions of federal bureaucrats who identified as Democrats and Republicans remained nearly flat.
In other words, the US government is non-Weberian at the top, but textbook Weberian at the bottom. “I expected a tsunami of change in the political appointees at the top of each government, with little ebbs and flows among the bureaucrats,” says Spenkuch. “We found the tsunami, but there are essentially no ebbs and flows.”
Teso adds that “you could take this as evidence that, for the most part, the system is working as it is supposed to.”
But within that bureaucratic stability, the researchers found that Democrats were overrepresented in nearly every department compared to Republicans — and especially in senior positions. Between 1997 and 2019, Democrats made up about half of federal bureaucrats, while Republicans fluctuated between a third and a quarter. (The rest were independent).
That doesn’t necessarily mean the government bureaucracy has a liberal bias, the researchers say. Instead, at least part of the imbalance between Democrats and Republicans can be explained by differences between Democratic and Republican bureaucrats.
For example, Democratic bureaucrats are 8 percentage points more likely than Republicans to have a master’s degree, which may make them more likely to be hired and promoted in a meritocracy-based system. Democrats are also less likely to quit over time: after ten years, they are 4.5 percent more likely to still be in public service than Republicans or independents.
The cost of political harassment
The researchers’ next step was to investigate whether these political leanings resulted in performance deficits when the opposing party was in power. In other words, if you’re a Republican civil servant in a Democratic administration (or vice versa), do you perform worse at your job?
The researchers chose procurement clerks as a test case because their performance was simpler to measure than that of other bureaucrats. “Procurement managers have a very tangible outcome that they are responsible for,” explains Teso. “For any government contract that’s responsible, if it goes over budget, that’s usually considered a bad outcome.”
In a few years, a procurement officer’s policy would be aligned with that of management. in other years they wouldn’t. By comparing the relative magnitude of cost overruns for the same officers over time, the researchers were able to see how the officer’s job performance changed in relation to these ideological changes.
Indeed, the authors found that procurement managers oversaw more cost overruns when they served an administration with which they disagreed politically. Under these conditions, exceedances were about eight percent higher than usual.
At first glance, this does not appear to be a drastic difference.
“Think of it this way: if the government writes a contract for $100, it usually ends up paying $112. But if the procurement officer is not politically aligned with management, it ends up being $113,” Spenkuch says. “This feels like a push. But government procurement is a huge part of the US economy. If you extend that push across the entire government procurement sector, then we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.” For Teso and Spenkuch, this is proof that Weberian bureaucracies—despite their numerous important advantages—also have a tangible drawback.
The authors examined the data for a possible explanation. Perhaps politically misaligned bureaucrats were put in charge of more complex contracts, which would be harder to keep on budget. Or perhaps bureaucrats felt less motivated to seek promotions and thus did not perform above and beyond what was expected of them during governments with which they politically disagreed. But after analyzing the data, Teso says, “we don’t find that to be the case.”
Instead, the authors believe that a “morale effect” may account for the lower performance of these civil servants. They looked at the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey between 2006 and 2019, which measured how much bureaucrats agreed with statements like “The work I do is important” and “I’m willing to put in extra effort to get a job done.” When bureaucrats aligned themselves with administration policy, their agreement with these statements increased significantly.
“This suggests what might be going on, that these procurement officers are less motivated to perform well when they feel they are not aligned with the mission of the organization,” Teso says.
The authors believe that their work has potential implications for non-governmental organizations as more companies aim to present a coherent political view to the public, rather than simply offering products and services. Spenkuch points to the fact that some major companies have taken a “very strong position” on recent changes to voting laws in Georgia, while other companies have come under fire for not doing so.
“In any company of a certain size, employees will have different political views, and not everyone will align with the company,” he says. “To what extent do these policies affect workplace performance? Nobody knows yet. But our research on the federal bureaucracy suggests that perhaps something similar is happening in the private sector—we certainly need more research along these lines.”
