The Political Influence of City Employees: Civil Service Adoption in America

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Civil Service Reform

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th century, nearly every city in America featured a patronage-based system of governance. Over the next hundred years, patronage would come to be replaced by civil service, championed by the Progressive Municipal Reform movement. This major transformation of American government fundamentally changed the relationship of elected officials to government employees, effectively inverting the principal-agent relationship by granting bureaucrats new protections from sanctioning. Yet strangely, in studying the causes and consequences of state and local civil service adoption, political scientists have tended to ignore the employees—how civil service affected their organization and political clout, and what role they might have played in civil service adoption. In this paper, we examine patterns of municipal civil service adoption with a focus on the role of government employees. Our argument is simple: Municipal employees wanted the stability and autonomy that came with civil service. In many places, because they were unprotected and subordinate to local elected officials, elected officials had little reason to give employees the security they wanted. But in other places, groups of employees managed to organize, vote together as a bloc in local elections, and push for civil service. In turn, this gave municipal employees electoral clout in future elections that would forever change the calculus of elected officials.

To study the adoption of civil service and trace the role that employees played in securing their own benefits, we collected a new dataset determining whether and when roughly 1,000 municipal governments adopted civil service. We augment these data with new data on the local presence of an important early occupational organization, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF). We focus on firefighters for several reasons: 1) Police officers and firefighters are and were a large share of municipal employees in most cities. These groups have had a large stake in the employment laws governing cities. 2) Police and firefighters began to organize into associations as early as the turn of the century – crucially, before the implementation of civil service in some cities. 3) Qualitative evidence indicates that police and firefighters were organized and active in some cities’ politics in the early 20th century. 4) While police groups were organized through several different national and local organizations, virtually all local firefighter organizations were chapters of the IAFF, offering us consistency in determining the presence and timing of local chapter organization.

Using these data, we assess whether the presence of an early IAFF chapter was associated with the city adopting civil service by 1935. Controlling for state laws and the city demographic characteristics deemed important in the literature, we find that cities that had an early IAFF chapter were significantly more likely to have adopted civil service by 1935. In addition, the presence of an early local IAFF chapter appears to have been most important for smaller to mid-size cities. Our findings therefore highlight an understudied and underappreciated contributor to this fundamental transformation of government: the political influence of city employees.

Authors

• Sarah F. Anzia, University of California-Berkeley

• Jessica Luce Trounstine, University of California, Merced