BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE ON MUNICIPAL CIVIL SERVICE

Prior to civil service reform, American politics was largely a patronage system in which incumbent politicians could hire and fire employees on the basis of political calculations. Victorious political party organizations filled government positions with their supporters, who then helped the party win future elections. From the perspective of government employees, the way to get a government job was to be in service to a political party or set of candidates that would win elections, and the path to job security was to work to keep those officials in office. This distorted democratic representation and accountability (Bryce Reference Bryce1888; Royko Reference Royko1971; Steffens Reference Steffens1902; Trounstine Reference Trounstine2008).

The Pendleton Act of 1883 introduced civil service to parts of the federal bureaucracy, and two key pillars of that reform were the recruitment of employees based on merit, through competitive examinations, and the prohibition of firing or demoting employees on the basis of politics. While bureaucracy scholars have probed how this change shaped the federal bureaucracy (e.g., Carpenter Reference Carpenter2001; Gailmard and Patty Reference Gailmard and Patty2007; Shefter Reference Shefter1983; Skowronek Reference Skowronek1982) and the events that led up to it (e.g., Hoogenboom Reference Hoogenboom1961; Van Riper Reference Van Riper1958), others have puzzled over why the shift to civil service in state and local governments was slow, gradual, and piecemeal. Half a century after the Pendleton Act, only nine states had adopted state civil service, and there were no bursts of reform in cities until the 1910s and 1930s (Ruhil Reference Ruhil2003; Ting et al. Reference Ting, Snyder, Hirano and Folke2012; Ujhelyi Reference Ujhelyi2014). Moreover, many early municipal civil service systems were not comprehensive but rather applied only to certain city departments, most commonly police and fire—which were often the largest departments in the city (as they are today).

In 1939–1940, changes in federal policy altered the environment for state and local governments. In 1939, an amendment to the Social Security Act required state and local governments to enact merit-based personnel systems for any employees administering funds related to social security, health, or unemployment compensation (Ruhil Reference Ruhil2003; Ting et al. Reference Ting, Snyder, Hirano and Folke2012; Ujhelyi Reference Ujhelyi2014). Starting in 1940, then, many subnational governments likely adopted civil service to comply with this requirement. Notably, cities rarely eliminated civil service after adopting it (Ting et al. Reference Ting, Snyder, Hirano and Folke2012; Tolbert and Zucker Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983).

Most research on state and local civil service has focused on its effects (e.g., Folke, Hirano, and Snyder Reference Folke, Hirano and Snyder2011; Kuipers and Sahn Reference Kuipers and Sahn2023; Rauch Reference Rauch1995; Ujhelyi Reference Ujhelyi2014). Research examining the contributors to civil service adoption has been more limited—more focused on state governments than local governments and focused on a small set of possible factors. Scholars have shown that the Pendleton Act spurred reforms in some places (Miller Reference Miller2009; Schiesl Reference Schiesl1977; Thelen Reference Thelen1972). More importantly, historians have described how civil service was a component of the agenda pushed by Progressive Era reformers who emphasized the importance of technocratic administration of government as a way to solve problems of municipal governance and bring down political machines (Frant Reference Frant1993; Hoogenboom Reference Hoogenboom1961; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1937; Stewart Reference Stewart1929; Tolbert and Zucker Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983). But while the National Municipal League advocated for civil service in its model Municipal Program (Liazos Reference Liazos2020), Progressives regularly failed to achieve civil service enactment at the state and local levels (Berry Reference Berry2009). To date, there has been no research that quantitatively measures the presence of reform organizations or their influence on civil service adoption.

Other theoretical accounts emphasize incumbent politicians’ electoral incentives to adopt civil service. Focusing mainly on state governments, a model by Ting et al. (Reference Ting, Snyder, Hirano and Folke2012) highlights the importance of the competitiveness of elections for spurring politicians to adopt civil service. Ruhil (Reference Ruhil2003) emphasizes the costs and benefits of civil service versus patronage, arguing that the many changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (immigration, shrinking opportunities for patronage at the federal level, changes to political institutions) altered city incumbent politicians’ electoral calculus, making civil service more in their interest than it had been in the past.

Quantitative empirical studies have also identified some city-level correlates of adoption. Ruhil (Reference Ruhil2003) and Tolbert and Zucker (Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983) analyze civil service adoption in the early decades of the twentieth century (in 167 cities of more than 50,000 residents and 252 cities of more than 30,000 residents, respectively) and find that larger cities were more likely to be early adopters. This is to be expected, scholars argue, because between 1900 and 1940 city populations grew rapidly. These larger populations generated more demands on government, and civil service was thought to be important for higher quality governance and building state capacity (Finegold Reference Finegold1995; Lowi Reference Lowi1964). Tolbert and Zucker (Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983) also find that early adopters tended to have a larger middle class (measured as smaller proportions of manufacturing workers and “illiterates”), and Ruhil (Reference Ruhil2003) puts emphasis on city political institutions.

Finally, these studies find state and regional patterns. Ruhil (Reference Ruhil2003) shows cities in the South were less likely to adopt civil service, although the reason remains unclear. State policies on civil service also matter. Cities in states where statutes or constitutions required it were more likely to have civil service, which, in the early years of the twentieth century, was only the case in New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio (Tolbert and Zucker Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983).Footnote ² Also, in states that had civil service requirements for state agencies, cities were more likely to have civil service (Ruhil Reference Ruhil2003).

GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES

Strikingly absent from most of the literature on both the effects of and contributors to civil service adoption are the government employees themselves: the individuals who were directly impacted by the reforms. There is some political science literature on government employees and their organizations, but it almost exclusively examines patterns of their activity and influence since the late twentieth century and with an emphasis on collective bargaining and unionization (Anzia Reference Anzia2022; Anzia and Moe Reference Anzia and Moe2015; Moe Reference Moe2011; Reference Moe2019; Hartney Reference Hartney2022; Saltzman Reference Saltzman1985). Long before the shift to collective bargaining in the public sector in the late 1950s, however, there was a shift to civil service. DiSalvo (Reference DiSalvo2015) and West (Reference West2009) argue that the ability of government employees to organize in the mid-twentieth century was aided by the earlier adoption of civil service and the erosion of patronage politics, which gave rise to greater opportunity for employees to advocate for their interests independent of public employers. Political scientists have yet to analyze how government employees might have helped to shape these institutional developments in American local government in the first place.

We argue that as of the early twentieth century, city employees had a strong interest in civil service and that when they had agency, they helped influence its adoption. Compared to patronage, civil service had clear, immediate benefits for government employees. Positions covered by civil service were regularized with job qualifications, open advertisements, and, frequently, examinations. Perhaps most importantly, civil service employees could not be removed from their positions for political reasons. While civil service examinations and hiring could be manipulated by enterprising politicians to ensure the hiring of their supporters, it was harder to manipulate dismissal without cause (e.g., Erie Reference Erie1988). Civil service systems were widely viewed as removing the political yoke around public employees, offering them predictability and stability in employment. Thus, as a general matter, employees had a strong stake in civil service and stood to benefit from its adoption.

With patronage widespread (Erie Reference Erie1988; Mayhew Reference Mayhew1986; Sorauf Reference Sorauf1960), however, city employees and others interested in civil service likely encountered powerful resistance, because these changes reduced elected officials’ control over city bureaucracy and outlawed a primary means by which they built electoral support. Moreover, city employees across the country varied in whether they had agency—political capacity and coordination to advocate for institutional change. We propose this variation in local government employee agency affected the extent of bottom-up pressure politicians faced. We expect cities where the employees managed to coordinate and act collectively in politics were more likely to see civil service enacted.

While early local government employee agency could take a number of forms, including the formation of mutual benefit societies, active participation in elections, and informal lobbying (see Slater Reference Slater2004), one of the most common and effective vehicles for exercising political voice—and one of the most visible and measurable—was the formation of employee unions and professional associations (see Banfield and Wilson Reference Banfield and Wilson1965, 210–6). Early occupational organizations of government employees in the United States date back to the late nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century, there were several local government employee organizations, mostly organized along craft lines. The National Education Association (NEA) was formed in 1870, and the American Federation of Teachers started in 1916 (Spero Reference Spero1948, 314, 319). Police officers also formed local organizations—the first chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) organized in 1915 in Pittsburgh (Walsh Reference Walsh1977)—but their organization was more controversial, especially the question of whether local police organizations should be allowed to join the labor movement. Shortly after the American Federation of Labor (AFL) agreed to issue charters to police unions in 1919, the Boston police strike set back the organization of police officers for many years (Slater Reference Slater2004), and as a result, police unionization proceeded in a relatively fragmented and delayed manner.

In cities, firefighters were some of the earliest organized public employees. During the nineteenth century, the threat of conflagration loomed in America’s cities: By the late 1800s, fire had decimated dozens of the nation’s largest cities, and the problems grew worse as cities densified and buildings increased in height. Yet prior to the Civil War, firefighting was an all-volunteer operation, albeit with some contributions from city coffers (Tebeau Reference Tebeau2003). By mid-century, property owners and fire insurance companies began to push for municipal fire departments staffed by paid firefighters. By 1900, nearly all large cities (those with populations over 25,000) had established fire departments with paid firefighters (Bureau of the Census 1905). However, Tebeau (Reference Tebeau2003, 239) explains that at this time, “politics tied firemen to ward leaders and structured their relationships to their local communities. In return for their assistance during elections, ward officials rewarded firemen and other municipal workers with employment.”

As early as the 1880s, firefighters organized mutual benefit societies and social clubs. In addition to providing death and illness benefits, they advocated for changes to local firefighting practices and personnel matters, like regular days off, higher wages, and rotation in shifts (New York Sun 1918; Department of Commerce 1918; Spero Reference Spero1948, 228–44). In 1873, the National Association of Fire Chiefs was established (later becoming the International Association of Fire Engineers), and the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) was formed in 1918, organizing rank and file firefighters to promote better working conditions.Footnote ³ The IAFF considered itself part of the labor movement and identified as a union (and was chartered by the AFL), although as of 1930 it prohibited members from striking (Slater Reference Slater2004, 35).

The historical record illustrates that the IAFF played a role in civil service adoption, revisions to civil service laws, and protection of the laws once they were in place. In its documentation of its organizational history, the IAFF website features a cartoon from the organization’s magazine, dated 1934, showing an IAFF firefighter exterminating “politics” under a tree bearing the “fruits of civil service” (see Figure 1). The caption argues, “if used freely, satisfactory results guaranteed.”Footnote ⁴ In 1932, in Salem, Oregon, firefighters dropped leaflets across the entire city promoting the adoption of a civil service ordinance (Statesman Journal 1932). The IAFF also worked to amend civil service laws and decisions that they felt undermined their members (e.g., Brooklyn Standard Union 1921).

Figure 1. 1934 Political Cartoon Featured in the International Fire Fighter Magazine

We propose civil service was especially desirable to these nascent local employee groups because of the political and legal environment of the early twentieth century. At the time, formal collective bargaining was illegal in government. When the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) sanctioned collective bargaining for private-sector workers in 1935, public-sector employees were excluded (Walker Reference Walker2020). Many local governments sought to bar their employees from joining unions, including firefighters (Cincinnati Enquirer 1919; Sacramento Bee 1919; Louisville Courier-Journal 1933; Richmond Times Dispatch 1934; Slater Reference Slater2004, ch. 3). During this era of hostility toward government employee organizing, employee groups struggled to maintain their organizations. In the face of these collective action problems, civil service promised greater continuity and predictability in employment and longer career horizons, thereby creating more stability in the groups’ potential membership and enhancing the incentives for employees to invest in the organizations’ efforts.

In addition, these early employee organizations advocated for policies that benefited their members, such as higher compensation, more regular and limited work hours, paid vacation, better working conditions, and regularized processes for handling grievances (e.g., Slater Reference Slater2004), and they often worked within civil service systems to push for those policies. In 1943, for example, the St. Louis IAFF took out a quarter-page advertisement in the Globe Democrat advocating for higher wages, and the ad implored voters to speak out against the Civil Service Commission’s Compensation Plan (St. Louis Globe Democrat 1943). In 1926, when Scranton’s mayor threatened to dismiss firefighters to “make room” for his new hires, the Scranton IAFF asserted that it was “fully prepared to protect the firemen and the policemen and [would] also likely take some legal steps to prevent the mayor from venting political spleen under the guise of bringing the entire department up to civil service standards” (Scranton Times-Tribune 1926, 3). Thus, during this period when collective bargaining was a far-off goal, civil service offered government employee organizations an institutional foothold from which to advance policies they favored.

In sum, long before the 1960s and the push for state labor–management relations laws in the second half of the twentieth century, local public employees in many places had political agency. They were active in local and state politics and coordinated to advocate for policies that would benefit them as a group. A primary way they did this—and advanced their interests—was forming and maintaining employee organizations and unions. In municipal governments, firefighters’ organizations and unions were especially prevalent and important.

We propose employee political agency was important to the adoption of civil service. As a general matter, elected officials had strong reasons to resist civil service, because it reduced their control over the bureaucracy and upended their ability to build electoral support through the provision of government jobs. The extent of bottom-up pressure from government employees and their organizations thus stands to be an important factor shaping when and whether cities transitioned to civil service. The central hypothesis of our article is that cities where the employees had agency—as shown by their organization—should have been more likely to adopt civil service in the years prior to the 1939–40 change in the federal policy landscape.

DATA

To better understand the relationship between early municipal employee agency and civil service adoption, we assembled an original dataset from tables in the Municipal Yearbooks, which are annual volumes of city statistics and activities compiled by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA, formerly the International City Managers’ Association, see Ridley, Nolting, and Arnold [Reference Clarence, Nolting and Arnold1934]).Footnote ⁵ In select years, these Yearbooks contain statistical tables with information on the status of cities’ civil service provisions as well as the existence of municipal employee organizations—our primary measure of the employees’ political agency. While the information provided and number of cities vary from year to year, this is a rich source of data on personnel matters in American municipal governments in the early and mid-twentieth century.

We started by using tables from the 1940 to 1944 Municipal Yearbooks that identify when cities adopted civil service, back to the late 1800s. Starting in 1945, the relevant tables in the Yearbooks contain information on whether the city had civil service but not the year of adoption. We digitized a select set of tables to generate an indicator of whether a city had civil service each year. Our description of civil service adoption below presents data up through 1962 (the last year for which the Yearbooks contain civil service information for the full set of cities with a population greater than 10,000), but because of changes in federal law, our analysis focuses on years up to 1940.

The resulting dataset has 1,674 cities for which we have some information on the status of civil service in the city during this time period. For 583, we identified the date of civil service adoption directly from the 1940–1944 Yearbooks. Another 456 cities had not adopted civil service by the last year they appear in the Yearbooks’ civil service tracking (usually 1962). 304 cities are shown as having civil service for all years in which data are available but for which the Yearbooks do not contain a date of adoption; these cities are excluded from our analysis because we do not know their civil service status for years before 1940. Finally, 331 cities changed to civil service between 1945 and 1963. For these, we drew on all available information in the Yearbooks and coded them as having civil service for every year following the first indication of civil service in the Yearbooks. We also test the robustness of our results to excluding cities for which we approximated the date of adoption (Supplementary Table A2). Using all this information, we created a panel dataset of the cities from 1883 to 1962 with the binary indicator Civil Service. As others note, cities rarely eliminate civil service once it is adopted, so we code cities as having civil service for every year following initial adoption.

We also use information from the Yearbooks on early municipal employee organizations. It is important to note that comprehensive data on employee organizations in US cities do not exist even today; there are no datasets on whether US municipal governments have unions, let alone detailed data on the specific organizations (Freeman and Ichniowski Reference Freeman and Ichniowski1988). Thus, while the information on early employee organizations in the Yearbooks is not perfect, it is a valuable and underutilized resource and one that sheds light on early city employee organizing.

Specifically, the 1938–1940 Yearbooks include lists of municipal employee organizations and, for each organization, the year it was established. The ICMA assembled these lists by acquiring directories of a few prominent national-level employee organizations, including the IAFF and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and then listing their local chapters in each state. It is not a comprehensive list of all local employee organizations at the time, because if the ICMA did not obtain a directory from a particular national organization, or if there were local organizations unaffiliated with a national organization, they were not included. Notably, police organizations are absent from the list.Footnote ⁶

For our analysis, then, we focus on the IAFF, which is a good proxy for employee agency for several reasons. First, it was the organization with the broadest reach into American municipal governments in the early twentieth century. As of 1940, it had been around for decades and counted the largest number of locals—in over 400 cities (Ridley, Nolting, and Arnold 1940, 141–3). AFSCME, by comparison, started later, in 1935. Second, firefighters were a large share of city employees. Third, unlike police or teachers, virtually every local firefighters’ union is affiliated with the IAFF, which means the ICMA data are most likely a comprehensive list of local firefighters’ unions at the time.

Finally, while we have data going up to the 1960s, we focus on years up to 1940 because we are interested in the relationship between local employees’ organizations and local civil service—and national circumstances changed in 1940 when new federal legislation encouraged the adoption of local civil service (Folke, Hirano, and Snyder Reference Folke, Hirano and Snyder2011; West Reference West2009). The impact of federal legislation makes it more difficult to disentangle local motives for civil service adoption from changing incentives created by national legislation.

ANALYSIS

We begin by displaying the number of municipal civil service adoptions by year in Figure 2. Our dataset includes more cities and spans a longer time period than the data analyzed by Ruhil (Reference Ruhil2003), but we see patterns similar to what he shows: (1) an initial phase of municipal civil service adoption immediately following the Pendleton Act of 1883, most of which were in New York and Massachusetts, (2) a second surge of adoptions between 1910 and 1919, after which they slowed; (3) a third surge of adoptions between the late 1920s and 1935; and then (4) a massive increase between 1935 and 1940. In addition, many municipalities did not adopt civil service until after 1945: there was a large increase in adoptions after World War II and a continued trend of new adoptions during the 1950s. Moreover, hundreds of cities had not adopted civil service by 1962.

Figure 2. Year of Municipal Civil Service Adoption

In Figure 3, we show the years in which cities first established local IAFF chapters by 1940 (for those that had). It shows that a number of cities established an IAFF local just before 1920. As with civil service adoption, there was a slowdown in IAFF local creation in the early 1920s, followed by a second surge of new local IAFF organizations starting in the late 1920s, with adoptions per year continuing to mount through 1940. That our dataset records more than 400 IAFF chapters by 1940 is notable, because it was more than double the number of chapters in the next largest local employee organization: AFSCME.

Figure 3. Year of Municipal IAFF Establishment

Two points about Figures 2 and 3 are worth underscoring. First, patterns evident in Figure 3 align with how others have described the advances of the early labor movement. As Slater (Reference Slater2004) documents, 1916 to 1919 were especially active for employee organizations in both the public and private sectors. There were many strikes in these years, with 3,600 strikes including 4 million workers throughout the United States in 1919 alone (30). Moreover, between 1915 and 1921, the share of public-sector employees in unions increased from 4.8% to 7.2%, even as total government employment rose from nearly 1.9 million to nearly 2.4 million (18). Then, after the 1919 Boston police strike, the 1920s saw a weakened labor movement, with many cities and states prohibiting public-sector workers from joining unions. Both of these patterns are reflected in our data in Figure 3 on IAFF local chapter establishments. The second pattern of note is that municipal civil service adoption slowed during the 1920s just as labor organization and activity slowed as well. This is suggestive that employee organizations were a contributor to civil service.

To examine the relationship between employee organizations and civil service, we begin by analyzing whether cities that had early IAFF locals were more likely to have adopted civil service by 1940. For that analysis, we need to account for city-level correlates of municipal civil service adoption that have been identified in the literature, such as city size, population diversity, and state-level civil service requirements. To do this, we encoded data from the decennial Census of Population and Housing for 1930.

We have data on the civil service status of 1,371 cities as of 1940, and at that time, 38% had civil service. When we combine these cities with four city-level Census variables—population and the shares of the population that were illiterate, foreign-born, and Black—our dataset is reduced to 1,211 cities. In Table 1, we present the averages of these variables, separately for those with and without civil service by 1940. As others have found, cities that adopted civil service during this early period were typically larger and had higher shares of foreign-born residents than those that had not yet adopted it. In addition, on average, the early civil service adopters had smaller shares of Black residents.

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics, by Civil Service Status

We also examine the share of cities that had civil service by 1940 in each of the four major regions of the United States and find variation across regions. It was most prevalent in the Northeast, where 54% of the cities had civil service by 1940. In that same year, 47% of cities in the Midwest had civil service and 42% in the West. The South stands out for its low rate: Only 21% of its municipalities had civil service by 1940.

Moreover, of the cities that had adopted civil service by 1940, 51% had an IAFF. That number is only 19% for the cities that did not have civil service. When we consider whether a city had any known municipal employee organization by 1940 (as documented in the Yearbooks)—whether it was an IAFF chapter or otherwise—the numbers change little: 21% of the cities without civil service had a documented employee organization by 1940, compared to 55% of the cities with civil service.

We next use OLS to regress the civil service indicator (for each city as of 1940) on the indicator for IAFF locals, controlling for the city demographic variables shown in Table 1 and clustering standard errors by state.Footnote ⁷ Column 1 of Table 2 presents those estimates. We include indicators for three of the four Census regions to account for regional patterns in civil service adoption, and we also include an indicator for whether the city’s state had a civil service law that covered state workers by 1940 (coded according to Ting et al. [Reference Ting, Snyder, Hirano and Folke2012]). The estimates show that cities that had IAFF locals by 1940 were more likely to have civil service by that time as well, even accounting for these other city characteristics. On average, cities with IAFF locals were about 25 percentage points more likely to have adopted civil service during this early period. In column 2, we replace the IAFF indicator with an indicator for whether there was any municipal employee organization in the city by 1940, and our estimates are substantively the same.

Table 2. Municipal Civil Service by 1940

Notes: OLS estimates with standard errors clustered by state in parentheses. Models 1–3 include regional fixed effects; model 4 includes state fixed effects. *p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 (two-tailed).

In column 3, we combine the indicator of IAFF locals with another measure of local firefighters’ agency: whether the city had a firefighters’ benevolent association as of 1917, which we created using a list of such associations provided in a 1918 Department of Commerce report called “Statistics of Fire Departments of Cities” (Department of Commerce 1918, 22). The main independent variable in column 3 equals 1 if a city either had an IAFF local by 1940 or is listed as having had a firefighters’ benevolent association in 1917; it equals 0 otherwise. Again, the estimated coefficient is positive: on average, cities with firefighters’ organizations were about 25 percentage points more likely to have civil service by 1940.

In column 4, we return to the model from column 1 and include state fixed effects instead of region fixed effects. This accounts for state-level characteristics associated with municipal civil service and local IAFF organizations, such as state personnel laws. In addition, while many cities adopted civil service locally, state legislatures played an especially large role in governing municipalities during this period, and some cities acquired civil service as a result of state legislation. While the Yearbooks do not include information about how civil service was adopted for each of these cities, with the inclusion of state fixed effects, we can evaluate whether within states, cities with IAFF locals were more likely to get civil service. We find that they were indeed more likely to get it. The coefficient estimate on IAFF is reduced—to about 14 percentage points—but still reveals a meaningful positive relationship. Thus, there is an association between early organization of employees and civil service adoption, as we expect. Moreover, we find that larger cities were more likely to adopt civil service early, as were cities in states that had civil service provisions for state government. Cities with larger Black populations were less likely to adopt civil service, which fits with reports that in some cities, white individuals opposed civil service adoption because Black individuals would be able to apply for jobs (Liazos Reference Liazos2020, 105).

We next take advantage of the time-series nature of the data on civil service adoption and IAFF presence, regressing the civil service indicator for each city-year on the presence or absence of an IAFF local in that city-year. We limit the analysis to years from 1900 to 1940 because IAFF organization did not begin until the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸ Although Census data are available for many of our cities, there is a great deal of missingness in these Census variables over time. So, here we exclude the demographic controls and add fixed effects for cities and years, which account for characteristics of cities that were constant over time as well as national yearly trends likely to affect all cities, such as the Great Depression. As is typically the case with observational data, and as we discuss below, there remain threats to causal inference,Footnote ⁹ but these models allow for additional assessment of whether employee organizations were involved in the push for civil service.

The results in column 1 of Table 3 again suggest that employee organizations were associated with civil service adoption. Partialing out the effects of secular time trends and time-constant city characteristics associated with both IAFF organization and civil service, we find that on average, cities with organized firefighters were 21 percentage points more likely to adopt civil service.

Table 3. Employee Organization and Municipal Civil Service, 1900–1940

Notes: Standard errors clustered by city in parentheses. Models 1–2 and 4–5 include city and year fixed effects. Model 3 includes only city fixed effects. *p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 (two-tailed).

In column 2, we add an indicator for whether the cities had an AFSCME local in a given year. AFSCME began to organize close to two decades later than IAFF, so we do not necessarily expect the presence of an AFSCME local to be as strongly related to the adoption of civil service during this period, but this model serves as a test of whether it was really government employee agency that made a difference—as opposed to something else about cities where firefighters organized. The results show both types of local employee organizations are significantly associated with a greater likelihood of civil service adoption: a 21-point increase for IAFF and a 7-point increase for AFSCME.

Next, we add total population (logged) to our model, which we assembled from decennial records from 1890 to 1940 using Census of Population state reports and interpolated within cities for the between-census years.Footnote ¹⁰ Cities were generally increasing in population during this period, and one possibility is that the estimated coefficients on employee organization in columns 1 and 2 could reflect a pattern of faster-growing cities being more likely to adopt civil service and establish employee organizations. In column 3, we add logged city population to the model from column 1 but exclude year fixed effects. We find greater population was indeed associated with greater likelihood of civil service adoption, and also, the coefficient estimate on IAFF remains positive and statistically significant. In column 4, we add year fixed effects and find cities were about 20 percentage points more likely to adopt civil service when they had IAFF locals. Finally, in column 5, we add the indicator for an AFSCME local, and we find both IAFF and AFSCME locals are associated with a significantly greater likelihood of civil service adoption. Thus, even accounting for secular time trends, time-constant features of cities, and city-specific population over time, cities with early organizations of government employees were more likely to adopt civil service.

CAUSAL PATHWAY: ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF CITY EMPLOYEE AGENCY

Our analysis so far demonstrates a powerful link between employee agency and civil service adoption. There remains some question, however, about whether employee organizations led to civil service or civil service in some cases could have made it easier for government employees to organize. As the policy feedback literature emphasizes, the political activity of interest groups can lead to policies favorable to those groups, but policies can also create incentives for interest groups to form, grow, and engage in politics (Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2014; Pierson Reference Pierson1993). With our quantitative data, the sequence is somewhat difficult to parse out, and the reality is that both processes were probably in play. To offer additional evidence in support of our proposed time ordering (i.e., IAFF chapters were commonly established in advance of the adoption of civil service), we replicate the model in column 1 of Table 3 with one-, two-, and five-year lags of the IAFF variable. The results, shown in Supplementary Table A6, show a strong association between IAFF establishment and civil service adoption in subsequent years. This further suggests that municipal employees were actively recreating the terms of their employment during this period in a way that scholars have not previously recognized.

Another potential concern with the results above is that perhaps there may have been other time-varying characteristics of cities associated with local firefighters formally organizing an IAFF chapter and cities adopting civil service. We do not assert that employee agency was the only contributor to civil service adoption, or that it was the main reason for civil service reform in every state and city. We also cannot feasibly account for all the potentially relevant characteristics of over a thousand cities a century ago. To move closer to an understanding of the role employees played, however, in this section, we carry out additional analyses that consider other factors that may have also contributed to the spread of civil service.

City Size

We first evaluate the contributions of two alternative pathways to civil service emphasized in the literature: city size and Progressive Era municipal reform efforts. Beginning with city size, the existing literature suggests that civil service was adopted to fulfill a functional need (e.g., Tolbert and Zucker Reference Tolbert and Zucker1983).Footnote ¹¹ In large, urban communities where the demands of service provision grew exponentially in the early twentieth century, it could be that elected politicians had incentives to build state capacity and professionalized their municipal workforces to handle these new demands, regardless of any pressure from employees, and irrespective of what the employees wanted (Finegold Reference Finegold1995; Lowi Reference Lowi1964). In our earlier analysis, we accounted for logged city population in our models, and in the additional analysis shown in the Supplementary Material, we estimate the model from column 1 of Table 2 semiparametrically, allowing logged population to enter nonlinearly, and we still estimate a large, positive coefficient on IAFF. Even so, these aggregate results could mask a relationship that varies by city size. If the existing scholarship is correct, employee agency could have mattered more for smaller to mid-sized cities than for the largest cities.

Figure 4 shows the proportion of cities in each of four population bins with civil service as of 1940 (medium-gray bars). We also show this proportion separately for cities with and without IAFF locals in each population category. The light-gray bars in the middle show the proportion of cities without IAFF locals that had civil service, and the black bars show the proportion of cities with IAFF locals that had civil service. The black bar is higher than the light-gray bar in all cases, showing that for all population categories, a larger share of cities with IAFF locals had civil service than cities without IAFF. However, there is also some indication that employee organization mattered less for the largest set of cities than for small and mid-size cities: The gap between the light-gray and black bars is larger for the first three size categories than for the largest cities. Moreover, in the Supplementary Material, we re-estimate the model from column 1 of Table 2, except that we interact the IAFF indicator with logged city population (centered around its mean). We still find that larger cities and cities with an IAFF local were more likely to adopt civil service, but the coefficient on the interaction term is negative. This suggests the IAFF was less important to the adoption of civil service in large cities like Seattle and more important to smaller and mid-sized cities, such as Aberdeen and Bellingham, Washington. Understanding institutional development in these smaller to mid-sized cities is important, moreover, because while city population growth was rapid proportionally speaking, many turn-of-the-century cities remained quite small. In 1940, the Census counted 3,646 urban places (cities with populations greater than 2,500 people), which were home to approximately 57% of the US population, but nearly 70% of those places had fewer than 10,000 residents (Bureau of the Census 1941).Footnote ¹²

Figure 4. Proportion of Cities with Civil Service by 1940, by Population Size and IAFF

Private-Sector Labor Organizing

Another approach to evaluating the possibility of omitted variable bias (and reverse causality) involves explaining variation in city employee agency. Our measurement and description of the presence of these early employee organizations is itself a significant contribution and opens up a host of new research questions, including why city employees had agency in some places and not others; what forms their political activity took, and thus, how they had influence; and what other policies and institutions they may have helped to shape. We cannot provide comprehensive answers to all such questions in this article, but here we provide an exploratory analysis of the early years of firefighters’ unions in a preliminary effort to understand the variation in our main independent variable.

First, we evaluate whether the presence of early IAFF locals varies with city size, demographic characteristics, or region—the independent variables included in our earlier models. The results in Supplementary Material (A11) show that larger cities were more likely to have an IAFF local by 1940 than smaller cities and that the likelihood of a municipality having an IAFF local was relatively higher in the Midwest and lower in the Northeast.

We also propose and consider a second possibility: that other labor unions, especially those of workers in the private sector, helped to spur the formation of these early firefighters’ unions in US cities. Most accounts of the labor movement in the United States focus on private-sector labor (see McCartin Reference McCartin2006), and the studies that do discuss the history of public-sector unions emphasize their rise in the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., Saltzman Reference Saltzman1985). Our data, however, show that union locals formed in many cities early in the twentieth century. Moreover, even though they were government employees, early firefighters’ locals were chartered and supported by the AFL. In addition, as we show in the Supplementary Material, the surges and slowdowns in IAFF establishments shown in Figure 3 coincided with surges and declines in work stoppages in the United States, and the latter were almost all strikes by private-sector unions. Thus, even though the passage of the NLRA in 1935 gave private- and public-sector unions different legal statuses and rights, there are signs that the early development and organization of labor unions in the two sectors may have been interconnected.

As a preliminary exploration of this, we draw on the work of Holmes (Reference Holmes2006), who presents evidence that unionism in large mining and steel establishments in the mid-twentieth century spilled over to other industries in the same geographic area, such as healthcare and grocery stores. We extend this logic and consider whether unions in mines and steel mills also helped to inspire the agency and organization of city employees such as firefighters. It is reasonable to think that firefighters, miners, and steelworkers had overlapping social networks in some of these cities and faced similarly dangerous occupational conditions that might be ameliorated with organization. One possibility, then, is that some firefighters organized unions thanks to their proximity to and solidarity with unionized mining and steelworkers.

We begin by considering the nine cities that had firefighters’ locals by 1916 (all of which were affiliated with the IAFF when it was formed in 1918). Every one of those cities was close to significant mining or steel production at the time, including not only large cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago but also Pueblo, Colorado; Great Falls, Montana; and Wheeling, West Virginia. In Figure 5, we explore this visually by mapping county-level data on mining employment from the 1940 Census. We shade counties according to the log of one plus the number of mining workers in 1940, with darker shades indicating counties with more mining workers. Cities that had established an IAFF local by 1920 are denoted with points on the map. The map makes clear that many of the earliest IAFF locals were in or close to areas with greater mining employment.

Figure 5. IAFF Establishment by 1920 and County-Level Mining Employment

Next, in Table 4, we regress the indicator for whether a city had an IAFF local by 1920 on logged mining employment (using the 1940 county-level data) and logged city population in 1920. In column 1, the estimated coefficient on logged mining presence is positive and statistically significant. In column 2, we add regional fixed effects, and in column 3, we add state fixed effects. Across these three models, we find a positive relationship between mining in the county and IAFF formation by 1920. However, after the 1920s, the spread of the IAFF appears to have had less to do with mining employment. In column 4, we replace the dependent variable denoting IAFF formation by 1920 with one denoting formation by 1940 (and include logged population from 1940), and the coefficient is substantially smaller.

Table 4. Mining Employment and Early IAFF Organization

Notes: Standard errors clustered by state in parentheses. *p < 0.1, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01 (two-tailed).

There is much more research to be done on this question, and our analysis here is preliminary. Still, the results suggest that firefighters may have been influenced by private-sector unions in mining and steel establishments and that this may partially explain the geographic pattern of early firefighter unionization. To the extent private-sector union strength helps explain variation in our main independent variable—the presence of IAFF locals in cities—it is an explanatory factor that would almost certainly have a weak correlation with civil service adoption otherwise. One would not expect miners’ and steelworkers’ unions to have much (or any) stake in municipal civil service, suggesting that IAFF organizations developed first and then pushed for the adoption of civil service in some set of cities.