Public agency executive jobs are temporary matches of individual bureaucrats with government employers. Together, the buyers and sellers of executive labour form jobs in ways that define critical links in the policy process: the relationships between agency administrators and their elected officials. This article argues that when the executive is hired from outside, the job typically carries a mandate for significantly greater engagement with elected officials than when the executive is promoted from within an agency. Analysis of three very different types of agencies demonstrates that individuals who were hired from outside interact with their elected officials more frequently than do those who were promoted from within. These results shed new light on bureaucratic executives’ roles in the policy process, their relationships with the governments that they serve, and the theoretical significance of bureaucratic jobs as units of analysis in public policy studies.
