ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Lotte Bøgh Andersen is Professor at Aarhus University and the Danish Institute for Local and Regional Government Research. Her research interests focus on leadership, administration and management in public organizations, especially motivation and performance of public employees, leadership strategies, professional norms, and economic incentives. Right now, she is leading a field experiment that investigates more than 500 public and private leaders to find out how transformational and transactional leadership affects employee motivation and organizational performance.
R. Paul Battaglio, Jr. is Professor of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include public human resource management, organization theory and behavior, public and nonprofit management, comparative public policy, and research methods. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of Public Administration Review (PAR ), and was also editor-in-chief of the Review of Public Personnel Administration. Battaglio is the author of Public Human Resource Management: Strategies and Practices in the 21st Century (CQ Press, 2014)
Randall S. Davis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Southern Illinois University. He earned his PhD in Public Administration at the University of Kansas. His research explores the environmental and psychological mechanisms that contribute to individual and organizational performance in the public sector. He has conducted research on several topics in public management including organizational goals, role stress, employee motivation, and public employee unions.
Heather Getha-Taylor is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Her research considers the forces transforming public governance and the associated implications for effectively managing human resources. She is a graduate of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
Susan T. Gooden is Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. She served as president of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA ) for 2016–2017 and is a fellow of the congressionally chartered National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA ). Her most recent book is Race and Social Equity: A Nervous Area of Government (Routledge, 2014).
Charles W. Gossett is Professor of Government and of Public Policy & Administration at California State University. He has published articles on public human resource management, gay and lesbian politics, and African politics. In addition to his teaching role, he has held a number of administrative positions, including Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Prior to beginning his academic career, he worked for several years at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and for the city of Washington, DC.
Madinah F. Hamidullah is an Associate Research Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers
University, Newark. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, her BA in Dance and Political Science and MPA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include generational differences in the workforce, public management, issues of gender and diversity, and organizational performance.
Albert C. Hyde is currently an Adjunct Instructor and Lecturer at San Francisco State University’s Public Administration Program and was Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC for the 2015–2016 academic year. He was most recently co-editor of the 8th edition of Classics of Public Administration (Cengage Learning, 2016), and co-author of the ninth edition of Introducing Public Administration (Taylor & Francis, 2017).
Willow S. Jacobson is an Associate Professor of Public Administration and Government and Director of the Local Government Federal Credit Union Fellows Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research looks at ways to better use human capital to achieve organizational success, including Strategic Human Capital Management, workforce planning, and leadership. Jacobson earned a PhD from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
J. Edward Kellough is Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. He specializes in public personnel management, public administration, and program evaluation. Recent books include The New Public Personnel Administration, seventh edition, with Lloyd G. Nigro (Cengage Learning, 2014); Understanding Affirmative Action: Politics, Discrimination, and the Search for Justice (Georgetown University Press, 2006); and Civil Service Reform in the States: Personnel Policy and Politics at the Sub-National Level, edited with Lloyd G. Nigro (State University of New York Press, 2006). His research has also appeared in numerous academic journals.
Peter Leisink has a chair in Public Administration and Organization Science at Utrecht University School of Governance, the Netherlands. His research interests are: the contribution of strategic human resource management to public service performance, leadership and motivation in (public) organizations, age-related personnel policies, and changes in public sector employment relations. Leisink conducted research and advised management in government organizations, police, elderly homes, hospitals, secondary education, and public transport. He is a co-chair (together with Lotte Bøgh Andersen and Wouter Vandenabeele) of the EGPA Study Group on Public Personnel Policies.
Jared J. Llorens is an Associate Professor and Director of the Public Administration Institute in the E. J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University. His scholarly research focuses on public sector human resource management, with particular interests in compensation and recruitment. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Personnel Management. His research has been published in a variety of academic outlets, and he is a co-author of Public Personnel Management: Context and Strategies, 6th edition (Routledge, 2010). Llorens received his B.A. from Loyola University, New Orleans, his M.P.Aff. from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD in Public Administration from the University of Georgia. He is also a former U.S. Presidential Management Intern, having served as a Human Resources Specialist with the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Joan E. Pynes is Professor of Public Administration at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. She is the author or co-author four books including, most recently, of Human Resources Management for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Strategic Approach (Jossey-Bass, 2013), and co-author of Human Resources Management for Health Care Organizations (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and Effective Nonprofit Management: Context and Environments (Routledge, 2011). Her research interests are public and nonprofit management.
Norma M. Riccucci is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor at the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of several books in the areas of public human resource management and public management. She is author of the forthcoming book, Policy Drift: Shared Powers and the Making of U.S. Law and Policy with New York University Press. Riccucci has received a number of national awards including the American Society of Public Administration’s Dwight Waldo Award for a lifelong contribution to public administration. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA ).
Christian Richards graduated with a Master of Public Policy from American University in 2016. Prior to attending American, he was a Legislative Analyst with the American Public Transportation Association and a staff member in the office of U.S. Representative James Langevin (D-RI ).
David H. Rosenbloom is Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at American University (Washington, DC ) and Chinese Thousand Talents Visiting Professor of Public Administration at Renmin University of China. A member of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA ), he is recipient of the Levine, Waldo, Gaus, Brownlow, and Mosher Awards, among others, for his scholarly contributions to the field of public administration. Rosenbloom’s competing perspectives model of public administration as management, politics, and law is widely used internationally.
Shugo Shinohara earned his PhD from and is a lecturer in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, Newark. He has more than eight years of practical experience with the Embassy of Japan in Uganda and the Japanese Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. His research interests include veterans’ affairs, local governance, history of public administration, and social equity and diversity. One of his articles regarding the consciousness of gender inequality among public and private workers has been published in the International Review of Administrative Sciences
Jessica E. Sowa is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. Her current research focuses on public and nonprofit management, including high-performance work systems, strategic human capital management, and the management of volunteer firefighters. Sowa served on a number of journal editorial boards in public and nonprofit management and is currently the co-director of the MS in Nonprofit Management and Social Entrepreneurship program at the University of Baltimore. She recently served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organization and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA ) and currently serves on the board of trustees of the Northeast Conference on Public Administration.
Frank J. Thompson is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University, Newark and an affiliated faculty member with the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy in New Brunswick. He has published extensively on issues of politics and administration, implementation, public management, and health policy. His most recent book is Medicaid Politics: Federalism, Policy Durability, and Health Reform (Georgetown University Press, 2012). Thompson is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA ) and a past President of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. He received several awards including the Dwight Waldo Award for a lifelong contribution to public administration. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2008, he served as Dean of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University of Albany, SUNY.
Wouter Vandenabeele is an Associate Professor of Human Resources Management at Utrecht University School of Governance and a Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute at KU Leuven University. His main research interest is the role of people within organizations and in the motivation of employees in public service delivery. He is most known for his work on public service motivation. Vandenabeele is co-chair (together with Peter Leisink and Lotte Bøgh Andersen) of the Permanent Study Group on Public Personnel Policies of the European Group of Public Administration.
PUBLIC PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT: A CORNERSTONE OF EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT
J. Edward Kellough
Public personnel management, broadly conceived, encompasses all aspects of managing government employees, but it is especially focused on administrative structures and processes associated with employee recruitment, selection, training, development, pay, benefits, performance appraisal, discipline, and union activity. These functions lie at the heart of public administration. The manner in which they are performed will impact the quality of the public workforce and the success with which government agencies pursue their varied and complex missions. Police officers, firefighters, air traffic controllers, airport security screeners, tax auditors, budget analysts, and other works who perform the multiple and diverse functions of government must be carefully selected, well trained, and capable. While organizations with top-flight employees may occasionally fail to achieve all that they set out to do given resource or other constraints, it is inconceivable to think that a public organization staffed with employees with inadequate knowledge, abilities, and skills will ever achieve desired levels of success. Effective performance of core personnel management functions is, therefore, essential for effective government.
THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PUBLIC PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT TASK
The importance of public personnel management is matched by the vast scale on which the tasks are performed. In part, this is a result of the sheer size of government. Recent data, for example, reveal that there are more than 18 million public employees in the United States. Of that number, over 4 million work in our 50 state government agencies and close to 12 million work in various local governments including the 3,000 counties, 19,000 municipalities, and 31,000 special purpose districts, and nearly countless townships and school districts. The federal government accounts for approximately 2 million employees. In addition, the size of the federal workforce has been relatively stable since 1950, while state and local government workforces have grown substantially in size (Nigro and Kellough, 2014).
In addition, public personnel administration is further complicated by the fact that public employees work in a wide range of functional areas. Local jurisdictions, for example, provide police and fire protection, sanitation services, parks and recreation, water and other utilities, street maintenance, and numerous other functions including
primary and secondary education. States are involved in highway construction, corrections systems, welfare programs, business regulation, and higher education, to name only a few activities. The federal government provides for our common defense and security, international relations and trade policy, the maintenance of our currency, the postal service, the social security system, industry-wide regulation, and assistance to states and localities in diverse areas including law enforcement and education. Public employees working in these areas are drawn from countless trades and professions, and it is in that context that effective policies and practices must be put into place to recruit, select, train, develop, pay, and retain high-quality workers.
But other aspects of the context of public personnel management are important as well. For example, the political environment in which the personnel system operates is characterized by multiple stakeholders with often conflicting interests. Chief executives, for instance, typically have significant formal authority over public personnel policy and want to use that authority to control personnel practices in the executive branch to better match preferred policy directions. Members of the legislature also have an interest in personnel policy since they share authority with the executive and are ultimately responsible for the appropriation of funds needed to run the government. Of course, legislators and executives are politicians who respond to public pressure and who also pursue policies for ideological reasons or for their symbolic value. In addition, the work of politicians is necessarily tied to the electoral cycle, so legislators and executives, and in particular, those who face term limits, must operate with short time horizons. They, and the political appointees who work under them, are often driven to act quickly if they wish to alter the shape of the personnel system. Of course, actions they take may subsequently be undone by succeeding executives or by the legislature resulting in the loss of continuity in the operation aspects of personnel systems.
The courts also, as countervailing institutions of government, have an interest in, and responsibility for, public personnel policy. Personnel systems in government rest on a foundation of public law. Statutes establish and specify elements of public personnel systems and laws, with applicability to both the public and private sectors, and regulate matters ranging from fair labor standards to medical leave and nondiscrimination policy. When disputes inevitably arise over the meaning of these statutes, we turn to the courts for resolution. Additionally, the U.S. Constitution, because it limits government authority, also constrains what government can do with respect to key aspects of public management.
The public also has an interest in the operation of public personnel systems, because we are talking about the structure and operation of government. But the public’s expression of interest rarely goes beyond the general expression that we should employ highly skilled, capable, and qualified people in public jobs. To accomplish that objective, most systems today rest on a concept known as the merit principle in which employees are hired and retained on the basis of their abilities. Employee selection rests on the results of open and competitive examinations designed to measure applicant qualifications, employees are shielded from removal without cause directly related to performance, and employees are required to behave in politically neutral ways. Of course these kinds of rules constrain management and build delays and inefficiencies into the system. As a result, organized interests with varying agendas and ideological perspectives push from time to time for reforms to increase efficiency, streamline procedures, or contract (or expand) employee rights.
Finally, we should stress that public employees themselves have an interest in public personnel management. Decisions regarding personnel policy help to define the
rights and responsibilities of employees as well as the conditions of work, including pay, benefits, and opportunities for training and promotion. Usually, employees press their interests most effectively through associations or unions, and the relationship between the government and employee organizations, especially public employee unions, is another important dimension of public personnel management. In the United States, there are a variety of approaches to managing labor relations that range from systems in jurisdictions that engage in collective bargaining with employee unions on central issues including wages and benefits to systems in other jurisdictions where collective bargaining is prohibited and employee unions operate as little more than lobbying groups. Between these two extremes, other jurisdictions (including the U.S. federal government) allow limited collective bargaining on selected issues other than pay and benefits.
In general, then, the importance of establishing and maintaining an effective personnel management system in government cannot be overstressed. It is central to the functioning of government, but the systems established are characterized by numerous rules restricting managerial action and operate within complex environments with multiple stakeholders with competing agendas. It is a complex system. Part of that complexity is rooted in the unique legal environment of public personnel management. We turn now to a fuller consideration of those issues that help to make personnel management in government distinct from its counterpart in the private sector.
The Unique Legal Environment
The U.S. Constitution specifies the powers of government institutions but also places limits on the exercise of those powers (see also Chapter 9). Many of these restrictions on government authority are found in the “Bill of Rights,” the first ten amendments to the Constitution. With respect to public personnel administration, the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments are particularly important. These Amendments not only limit ordinary governmental interactions with persons within the United States, but also restrict the actions that government can take in its role as an employer. Specifically, we are interested in the fact that the First Amendment restrains the government’s ability to limit speech and association, the Fourth Amendment places limits on government’s power to conduct searches and seizures, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments limit government’s authority to deny persons liberty or property without due process and also constrict government’s ability to deny individuals equal protection of the law. Because these issues (i.e., freedom of speech and association, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, rights to due process, and rights to equal protection) can arise in the employment context, the Constitution has the effect of limiting what government can do in relation to its employees. Furthermore, because the Constitution constrains government, but not private sector or nonprofit organizations, these constraints often make personnel management in government more difficult than personnel management in those organizations. Public employees retain important constitutional rights when they enter the civil service, and the authority of personnel managers in the public sector is limited as a result.
First Amendment Protections for Speech and Association
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, and association, but the First Amendment issues most commonly encountered in the context of public personnel administration are those involving speech and association. The U.S. Supreme Court is the final arbitrator of disputes arising over Constitutional rights and important
cases often arise in which the Court must balance public employees’ interests with the interests of the government as an employer.
One case that addresses freedom of expression by public employees, and that set an important precedent, arose in Texas in 1981. In that year, a young worker, Ardith McPherson, in a local office, was overheard immediately following the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan saying to a co-worker, “If they go for him again, I hope they get him” (Rankin v. McPherson, 1987, p. 381). The person overhearing the comment reported it to the constable (Mr. Rankin) who then questioned Ms. McPherson and subsequently terminated her employment. McPherson filed a lawsuit arguing that her Constitutional right to freedom of speech had been denied. The District Court found in favor of Constable Rankin, but the Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and the Supreme Court affirmed the Circuit Court ruling with the majority arguing that when speech by a public employee is on a matter of public concern and is not disruptive to the workplace, it is protected from government restraint.
In addition, the Court has ruled that public employees may not be required to join (or support) particular political parties. In Branti v. Finkel (1980), for example, the Court indicated that dismissal of public employees for failing to support a preferred political party is only permitted if the government can show that political party affiliation is essential to performance of the duties associated with the job. To do otherwise would be a violation of First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and association. In a later case (Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, 1990), the Court applied that same limitation on partisan influence to other government personnel actions including promotions, transfers, layoffs, recall after layoffs, and hiring.
Fourth Amendment Protections Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, in part, that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” In effect, persons in the United States have a right to expect a reasonable measure of privacy. Of course, that right does not extend to the conduct of criminal activities, but government is usually required to obtain a judicial warrant prior to conducting searches and seizures as part of criminal investigations, and evidence of probable cause to suspect illegal activity is necessary for a warrant to be issued. In instances where the time needed to secure a warrant will cause a delay that could threaten public safety, or in other circumstances such as during the process of making an arrest, a warrant is not practical and searches and seizures can be undertaken provided that law enforcement agents have a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity has taken place (Rosenbloom & Bailey, 2003, p. 35).
Importantly, however, government searches and seizures can also occur in the context of public personnel management. For example, a government employer may wish to search an employee or his/her work environment. The U.S. Supreme Court addressed this issue in 1987 in O’Connor v. Ortega. In that case, the Court ruled that public employees retain Fourth Amendment rights when they can reasonably expect a measure of privacy (Rosenbloom & Bailey, 2003, p. 35). For example, the government may not search an employee’s office, desk, cabinets, or lockers without a reasonable suspicion that the employee has violated rules or laws. As a result, routine or unannounced searches of such locations or of an employee’s personal possessions are prohibited absent a reasonable basis for suspicion of improper conduct.
One exception to this policy was established, nevertheless, with regard to compulsory drug testing of public employees. In 1989, in National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab, the Court upheld a drug-screening program that required urinalysis tests of all Customs Service employees who sought transfers or promotions to positions responsible for drug interdiction or that required the use of firearms. From the perspective of the majority, the government has an interest in ensuring that these employees are free from the disabling effects of illegal drugs, and that interest outweighs any associated privacy interest of employees. As a result of this ruling, public employees in jobs related to public safety or security may be subjected to drug tests without individualized suspicion that they have used illegal substances. Employees who are not in public safety-related positions, however, may not be constitutionally subjected to drug testing without reasonable individualized suspicion.
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Protections against the Loss of Liberty or Property
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution prohibit government from depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Fifth Amendment constrains the federal government and the Fourteenth limits powers of the states and local governments. At first glance, it would appear that these limitations on government authority have no bearing on public personnel management. Certainly, in the operation of personnel policy, we do not contemplate depriving people of their lives, but in a series of decisions beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court reasoned that under certain circumstances the dismissal of public employees could amount to a denial of property or liberty.
With regard to employee property rights, the Court has reasoned that civil service rules requiring that dismissal must be for just cause only create for employees a reasonable expectation that they will not be dismissed in the absence of such a cause. In other words, employees can reasonably expect to keep their jobs under these circumstances as long as the work associated with those jobs is needed and the employees do nothing to give the employer just cause for their termination. To that extent, the public employee’s job is similar to his or her property—or in other words, a property interest in employment is created. Once that interest is established, an employee cannot be terminated without procedural due process.
In a sequence of cases including Board of Regents v. Roth (1972), Perry v. Sinderman (1972), Arnett v. Kennedy (1974), and Bishop v. Wood (1976), the Court specified the conditions under which a property interest in employment is established and the requirements to meet due process. In addition, in Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill (1985), the Court mandated that due process in termination proceedings required (1) prior notification of the pending termination and a statement of the reason, and (2) a right of the employee to offer an explanation in a hearing prior to termination and to have legal representation in that hearing. The objective is to prevent unjustified removal of a public employee. But as a result, termination proceedings take time. The discharge of employees who have been told they will be terminated for just cause only cannot be conducted expeditiously, and it is largely for this reason that civil service workers are usually hired initially on a probationary basis for three to six months during which time the promise of termination for just cause only is withheld.
Liberty interests for public employees are activated when, as is often the case, termination damages the employee’s reputation and, as a result, he or she may be unable
to find similar work with another employer. In short, the employee’s liberty to find future work is compromised. This situation can occur whenever government reports negative or unflattering information regarding an employee’s behavior on the job as a reason for dismissal. Because this can be common, termination should always follow due process procedures, even under circumstances where employees have no property interest, such as when an employee is serving during a probationary period.
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Protections Against the Denial of Equal Protection
In addition to providing for due process and other fundamental rights, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment also prohibits the states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws. Furthermore, since 1954 and the Court’s ruling in Bolling v. Sharpe, the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment has been interpreted as prohibiting the federal government from denying persons equal protection. In essence, the guarantee of equal protection of the laws limits government’s ability to draw distinctions between people. Of course, government does this all the time, such as when it licenses some people (but not others) to practice a profession, or teach in the public schools, or even to drive a car. Typically, however, these kinds of distinctions require a person claiming a denial of equal protection (because they are excluded by such certification or licensing requirements) to demonstrate that there is no rational basis for those requirements and the distinctions between people that they create. Such claims are not likely to succeed. This rational-basis standard of equal protection review is applied in the consideration of distinctions such as those associated with business regulation or licensing or other forms of economic or social regulation that do not involve issues of race or the exercise of fundamental liberties such as voting rights (Grossman & Wells, 1988).
When government classifications limit fundamental freedoms or rights or force distinctions based on race or national origin, a second and more rigorous standard of review is triggered. This standard is known as strict scrutiny. It places the burden of proof on the government to defend the validity of distinctions it has drawn by showing that they serve a compelling governmental interest and are narrowly tailored or fashioned to meet that interest, meaning that there are no alternatives for achieving it that are less-restrictive on the rights of parties who affected by the distinctions drawn by government. Clearly, government actions reviewed under strict scrutiny are more vulnerable than are actions subjected to the rational basis standard of review. As an example, when government affirmative action programs involving preferences in employment for minorities are challenged on equal protection grounds by nonminority plaintiffs, strict scrutiny is the standard applied, and it has usually resulted in such programs being invalidated by the courts. An important exception, however, came in the case Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) where the Supreme Court upheld preferential affirmative action at the University of Michigan School of Law.
Interestingly, when the government draws distinctions between men and women, an intermediate level of review is utilized. Under this standard, the burden is still on the government to defend its classifications, but it must show only that those distinctions are substantively related to an important government objective. This reduced burden was justified by a Court that saw sex-based distinctions as only “quasi suspect,” whereas racebased distinctions were considered inherently suspect. Whether this standard of equal protection review will endure, however, is subject to question. To date, the Court has not ruled on an equal protection challenge to the constitutionality of sex-based preferences in affirmative action.
HOW DID WE GET HERE? A BRIEF HISTORY OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION
In the United States, the federal Constitution places the power to appoint officers of the government in the hands of the president. For several of the highest offices, the Senate has the responsibility to approve or reject presidential appointments. In addition, the very first Congress of the United States placed the power of removal in the hands of the president through legislation passed in 1789 (Van Riper, 1958). This basic authority over appointment and removal makes the president the central personnel officer for the federal government, and for nearly a hundred years, from 1789 until the mid–1880s, presidents used that power to shape the federal civil service. This exercise of presidential authority proved to be important for the early development of the government as the new nation struggled to place its institutions and procedures on a stable footing.
The Early Years
George Washington set a standard in the first administration by insisting that appointees exhibit “fitness of character” in terms of moral grounding, support for the Constitution, education, and experience. Of course, the government was small and most of the individuals appointed were drawn from the economic and social elite and from the ranks of military officers. Those presidents who followed Washington in office in the early part of the nineteenth century continued to rely, in part out of necessity, on this segment of the population. Indeed, Frederick Mosher (1968) in his well-known book entitled Democracy and the Public Service, referred to the period of time under the first six presidents (Washington through John Quincy Adams) as a period of “government by gentlemen,” in recognition of the fact that the gentlemen of that era, that is, the social and economic elite, dominated appointments in the civil service. During that time, there was relatively little turnover, individuals held positions for extended periods, and few positions were held by people of modest means. Indeed, the right to vote was also restricted to white men who owned property. It was a system founded upon political authority exercised by the president and members of his administration with assistance from political allies. This system was disrupted only modestly following the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. By that time, the American political system had developed around two primary coalitions or political parties—the Federalists who had been led by Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and who advocated for the centralization of authority at the federal or national level of government, and the Democratic-Republicans (sometimes referred to simply as Republicans) organized and led by Jefferson and James Madison, who advocated for greater authority for the states. As the head of a new party operating in opposition to the Federalists, Jefferson worked to replace many of the Federalists’ appointees in the civil service with supporters of his party. The best estimates suggest that he replaced about 15 percent of the public service on a partisan basis, but in doing so continued to draw on members of the elite much like his predecessors (Van Riper, 1958). Those who followed Jefferson under the Democratic-Republican banner (Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams) made few replacements, but as appointments were made, they continued to prefer members of their party and looked to the upper classes to fill positions. As Paul Van Riper notes, “The government of our early days was a government led by the well-educated, the well-born, the prosperous, and their adherents” (Van Riper, 1958, pp. 17–18). These early presidents sought men for appointment to civil service positions who looked like them, had similar backgrounds,
shared their commitment to the Constitution, and believed that government was the responsibility of the upper class (Nigro and Kellough, 2014). For the most part, the integrity of the government was protected, but partisanship was becoming an increasingly important criterion for civil service appointment in some of the largest states and cities, and by the late 1820s, the elite hold on public offices began to weaken at the federal level as well.
The Era of Spoils Politics
Andrew Jackson came to the presidency in 1829 as the leader of a new political faction, the Democrats, who emerged following a split among Democratic-Republicans over the election of 1824. In that contest, Jackson had won the popular vote, but no candidate emerged with a majority of the Electoral College votes, and the selection of the president fell to the U.S. House of Representatives who picked Jackson’s rival John Quincy Adams. Jackson’s supporters formed the Democratic Party based in part on Jeffersonian ideals of an agrarian and democratic society. By the mid-1820s, most states had removed property ownership as a requirement for voting, and Jackson’s constituents were drawn from the ranks of these newly enfranchised free men of the lower classes and especially from newer states from the south and the west.
When he took office, Jackson articulated a set of new principles for appointment to the federal civil service that favored his party and were based on the claim that government work was simple enough to be completed successfully by men of humble means. This philosophy ushered in the era of “government by the common man” as labeled by Mosher (1968), and Jackson replaced as much as 20 percent of the federal service on the basis of partisanship (Van Riper, 1958). A new period of political patronage emerged.
In the years following Jackson, party control of the presidency alternated between the Democrats and the Whigs, a party formed in opposition to Jackson and that saw Congress as the foremost branch of the federal government. When the Whigs came into office, they tossed out civil servants appointed by the Democrats. When Democratic presidents came back to office, they threw out Whig appointees. Partisanship became a primary qualification for office. Offices of the federal service and similar positions in state and local government were viewed as the “spoils” that belonged to the victor in partisan electoral contests. Positions were handed out as rewards for partisan loyalty, and office holders were not above using the power of their positions for corrupt personal gain (Van Riper, 1958). This system reached its zenith with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Elected as a member of a new Republican Party, Lincoln relied heavily on patronage to fill government positions with union loyalists and fellow Republicans.
The Emergence of the Merit System
Patronage as the basis for appointment to the civil service reigned supreme in the years following the Civil War, until the corruption associated with spoils politics spawned the rise of a reform movement that the majority of Republicans in Congress reluctantly embraced when they feared they would lose control of the presidency in the 1880s. The push for reform was also spurred by the assassination of President Garfield in 1881, who was shot in the back by Charles Guiteau who had lobbied at the White House for a position in the Garfield Administration and had been repeatedly turned down. Guiteau reportedly exclaimed upon shooting Garfield, “I am a stalwart (a supporter of spoils) and Arthur is
President now.” Indeed, Vice President Chester Arthur, one of the most corrupt spoils politicians of the time, became president upon Garfield’s death, but, in an exquisite irony, Arthur signed the Pendleton Act of 1883 that replaced spoils and patronage as a basis for appointment to office with a rudimentary merit system for public employment.
The system set up by the Pendleton Act required employment in the federal civil service be based on merit, meaning that employees (1) had the ability to perform their jobs as demonstrated by passing scores on open and competitive examinations designed to measure qualifications, (2) were obligated to remain neutral politically and would serve with loyalty regardless of which political party was in control of the presidency, and (3) were granted relative security of tenure in that they were protected from removal for political reasons (Van Riper, 1958). These key principles collectively represented the goal of achieving politically neutral competence within the civil service. The law established a central administrative agency, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, to carry out its provisions and issue necessary rules and regulations. The Act initially covered only 10 percent of the federal workforce, but it allowed successive presidents to extend or reduce coverage. As the political parties rotated in and out of control of the presidency, coverage was gradually extended to the point that by the 1930s nearly 90 percent of the federal workforce was covered.
The unambiguous purpose of the Pendleton Act, its subsequent reauthorizations, and similar laws that gradually spread across state and local governments was to limit the discretion of elected executives and managers working under them. This was accomplished in part by restricting the selection or hiring of employees to only those individuals who passed qualifying examinations and limiting the choice to among those persons with the highest three scores on those exams—the so-called “rule of three.” Managerial discretion was also restricted by limiting the conditions under which employees could be terminated. Initially, the focus was on prohibiting terminations undertaken for political reasons, but gradually the law was expanded so that any termination without “just cause” was prohibited, and the burden was placed on the employer to demonstrate just cause. Eventually further restrictions limited managerial flexibility in decisions regarding employee promotions, transfers, assignment, pay, and a host of other personnel actions. The goal was to protect employees from political abuse and to ensure that all personnel decisions were made on the basis of merit. Employees were to get and keep their jobs on the basis of their relative ability and performance. Rules were to be administered in a uniform, neutral, and nonpartisan fashion. Writing in 1962, O. Glenn Stahl argued,
In its broadest sense a merit system in modern government means a personnel system in which comparative merit or achievement governs each individual’s selection and progress in the service and in which the conditions and rewards of performance contribute to competency and continuity of the service. (Stahl, 1962, p. 28)
As a consequence, management’s hands are constrained. Public managers are not able to do whatever they wish to do when carrying out core public personnel management tasks. By the close of the decade of the 1940s, civil service merit systems were universally adopted across the states and in most sizeable local governments. As the merit concept spread, however, the scope of government grew and the magnitude of the personnel management task expanded. Concern about the extent of constraints on public personnel management began to emerge. The perception was that the many rules and procedures associated with personnel management were robbing managers of the flexibility they
needed to guide their organizations effectively. One of the first to raise this concern was Wallace S. Sayre, who in a published review of a new personnel management textbook argued that personnel administration in the public sector represented the “triumph of techniques over purpose” (Sayre, 1948). Sayre argued that merit systems had evolved to serve four main purposes: (1) the elimination of political party patronage form the civil service, (2) the promotion of equal treatment of all job applicants and employees, (3) the advancement of principles of systematized or “scientific management,” and (4) the creation of a career public service. As a consequence, “the basic structure of civil service administration” was characterized by “central personnel control agencies, the ‘rule of three,’ and the whole familiar arsenal of devices to neutralize and divert patronage pressures” (p. 134). Sayre continued, noting that, “Personnel administration, then, has tended to become characterized more by procedure, rule, and technique than by purpose or results” (p. 135).
A similar concern was voiced years later by E. S. Savas and Sigmund G. Ginsburg who published an influential article in 1973 entitled, “The Civil Service: A Meritless System?” in the journal Public Interest. In that piece, Savas and Ginsburg argued that merit systems were characterized by a “web of laws, rules, and regulations” that were “rigid and regressive” and had the effect of preventing managers from doing their jobs effectively. For example, the authors viewed selection procedures as so cumbersome and time consuming that by the time reviews of qualifications of applicants were completed, the best candidates had invariably found jobs elsewhere. Thus government was not able to hire the best people available.
As the 1970s progressed, pressure for Civil Service reform mounted and culminated ultimately in passage of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA ) of 1978 under President Carter. This Act brought about the most significant change in the U.S. civil service since passage of the Pendleton Act nearly 100 years earlier. Among other things, the CSRA abolished the old bi-partisan Civil Service Commission and established in its place the U.S. Office of Personnel Management headed by a director answerable to the president. Civil Service Commission functions that had been associated with promotion of merit principles were placed in a new agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board. The top three pay grades of the white collar classification system (the General Schedule) were combined into a new Senior Executive Service whose members could be more easily reassigned and transferred as needs arose. A pay-for-performance plan was implemented for middle managers (GS Grades 13–15), and the law authorized federal agencies to apply for and receive permission to engage in personnel management experiments involving reductions in regulations and the implementation of greater managerial flexibility.
Years later, in the 1990s, pressure for reform continued, and a reform agenda characterized primarily by efforts to increase managerial flexibility emerged from the National Performance Review conducted by the Clinton Administration. That effort was part of a “reinventing government” plan promoted by Clinton and his allies and closely aligned with a broader “new public management” movement that spread to the states and was prominent internationally. Three central themes associated with this movement were (1) the decentralization of authority for personnel management to line departments and agencies; (2) the promotion and expansion of at-will employment systems in which employees are no longer promised that dismissal will be for just cause only, so that discharge procedures could (in theory) be made easier; and (3) the promotion of pay-forperformance systems in which annual pay increases were based on the results of individual performance appraisals. To varying degrees the states pursued these reforms, with
Georgia, Florida, and Texas at the forefront (Walters, 2002). Similar ideas were pursued by the George W. Bush Administration in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Personnel systems with these characteristics were established by Bush for the newly created Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, but by the end of the Bush years, those reforms were washed away by a combination of political pressure and court rulings.
Today, we are continuing to struggle with how best to structure and manage public personnel systems. Clearly, the tasks associated with public personnel management are of critical importance, but there are competing ideas of how to best operate the civil service. On one hand, we want systems that protect employees from unwarranted political manipulation and abuse. There is obviously a political interest in the management of the civil service, but few would advocate a return to patronage or spoils politics. This view requires, however, that we restrict political and managerial discretion over the civil service. But in doing so, we run the risk of establishing systems that are rule-bound and inflexible, and that rob managers of discretion they see as necessary for running their organizations. As our systems continue to evolve, our central dilemma remains: We must find a way to protect employee interests while simultaneously giving managers and political authorities the flexibility needed to effectively govern.
References
Arnett v. Kennedy (1974). 416 U.S. 134.
Bishop v. Wood (1976). 426 U.S. 341.
Board of Regents v. Roth (1972). 408 U.S. 564.
Bolling v. Sharpe (1954). 347 U.S. 497.
Branti v. Finkel (1980). 445 U.S. 507.
Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill (1985). 470 U.S. 532.
Grossman, J. B. and R. Wells. (1988) Constitutional Law and Judicial Policy Making. New York: Longman.
Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). 539 U.S. 306.
Mosher, F. C. (1968). Democracy and the Public Service. New York: Oxford University Press. National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab (1989). 489 U.S. 656.
Nigro, L. G. and J. E. Kellough, (2014). The New Public Personnel Administration, 7th ed. Boston, MA : Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
O’Connor v. Ortega (1987). 480 U.S. 709.
Perry v. Sinderman (1972). 408 U.S. 593.
Rankin v. McPherson (1987). 483 U.S. 378.
Rosenbloom, D. H. and M. Bailey (2003). “What Every Public Personnel Manager Should Know About the Constitution,” in S. W. Hays and R. C. Kearney (Eds.), Public Personnel Administration: Problems and Prospects, 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall, pp. 29–45.
Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (1990). 497 U.S. 62.
Savas, E. S. and S. G. Ginsburg (1973). “The Civil Service: A Meritless System?” Public Interest, Vol. 32 (Summer), pp. 70–85.
Sayre, W. S. (1948). “The Triumph of Techniques Over Purpose.” Public Administration Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring), pp. 134–137.
Stahl, O. G. (1962). Public Personnel Administration, 5th ed. New York: Harper & Row.
Van Riper, P. P. (1958). History of the United States Civil Service. New York: Harper & Row.
Walters, J. (2002). Life After Civil Service Reform: The Texas, Georgia, and Florida Experiences. White Plains, NY : IBM
