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来源类型 | Working Paper |
规范类型 | 报告 |
DOI | 10.3386/w28673 |
来源ID | Working Paper 28673 |
Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations | |
Jorg L. Spenkuch; Edoardo Teso; Guo Xu | |
发表日期 | 2021-04-12 |
出版年 | 2021 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997-2019 with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between politicians and bureaucrats affects the personnel policies and performance of public organizations. We present four results. (i) Consistent with the use of the spoils system to align ideology at the highest levels of government, we document significant partisan cycles and substantial turnover among political appointees. (ii) By contrast, we find virtually no political cycles in the civil service. The lower levels of the federal government resemble a "Weberian" bureaucracy that appears to be largely protected from political interference. (iii) Democrats make up the plurality of civil servants. Overrepresentation of Democrats increases with seniority, with the difference in career progression being largely explained by positive selection on observables. (iv) Political misalignment carries a sizeable performance penalty. Exploiting presidential transitions as a source of "within-bureaucrat" variation in the political alignment of procurement officers over time, we find that contracts overseen by a misaligned officer exhibit cost overruns that are, on average, 8% higher than the mean overrun. We provide evidence that is consistent with a general "morale effect," whereby misaligned bureaucrats are less motivated. |
主题 | Microeconomics ; Welfare and Collective Choice ; Public Economics ; National Fiscal Issues ; Other ; Accounting, Marketing, and Personnel |
URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w28673 |
来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
引用统计 | |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/586346 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Jorg L. Spenkuch,Edoardo Teso,Guo Xu. Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations. 2021. |
条目包含的文件 | ||||||
文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
w28673.pdf(896KB) | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 |
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