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

• In Event: Mobilization, Countermobilization, and Backlash in the U.S. Policy State

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 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 the spread of civil service.

In this paper, we examine patterns of municipal civil service adoption with a focus on the role of government employees. 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). 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