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Presidential Control of the Senior Civil Service: Assessing the Strategies of the Nixon Years*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard L. Cole  and
David A. Caputo
Richard L. Cole
Affiliation:
The George Washington University
David A. Caputo
Affiliation:
Purdue University
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Abstract

Modern presidents must be attentive to influences of the federal bureaucracy on their policy initiatives and all attempt some measure of bureaucratic control. This article assesses the extent of President Nixon's success in gaining some degree of management control over the bureaucracy through the manipulation of the civil service personnel system. We find that Republicans were, in fact, more likely to be selected to top career positions during the Nixon years. We find also that career executives calling themselves Independents were more likely during the Nixon years than before to resemble Republican executives in their support of Nixon's policies and goals. This is significant to presidential control because of the large number of bureaucrats calling themselves Independents. We conclude that Independent career executives may provide a president with a considerable reservoir of bureaucratic support.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 399 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

We have benefited in the preparation of this article from the thoughtful suggestions of Hugh Heclo and Richard Nathan of the Brookings Institution, Carl Stenbeig of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Hugh LeBlanc of the George Washington University, and Myron Q. Hale of Purdue University, all generous with their time and talents. We are grateful, also, to several anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions, to Ms. Deborah Sines for assistance with data collecting and coding, and to George Washington University and Purdue University for research support. A special note of appreciation is due to the men and women of the federal bureaucracy who assisted by responding to our survey.

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