Transformations in Elite Recruitment Structures of the American Administrative State

美国政府的行政机构是制定和执行政策的重要场所。这些组织的最高层不仅负责确定和执行政策，而且还负责指导政府的组织发展。招聘流程决定了谁担任这些职位，从而决定了他们的素质和行为。因此，如何招募这些人会影响美国政府的民主合法性和能力。这项研究的目的是确定精英行政职位的征聘结构，并描述这些结构随时间的变化。这项研究的动机是一个明显的悖论。精英研究表明，这些职位的招聘相对松散、政治渗透性强、动荡不安，培养出的人才具有不确定的相关技能，对政府几乎没有认同感。然而，对美国政府组织能力发展的研究表明，这些结构变得连贯、有序和不可渗透，培养出具有适当技能和对国家的认同感的人。为了检验这一悖论，研究做了三件事。首先，它使用关于国家组织能力发展的理论来生成关于模式的种类和那些模式中应该预期的变化的命题集。其次，它收集了关于1850年至1998年行政精英职业生涯不同方面的时间和顺序的独特信息。第三，使用最优匹配(OM)对数据进行分析。这项技术允许研究使用个人职业的时间和顺序来发现假设产生个人职业的招聘结构。这里强调了两个贡献。首先，这项研究在通常不会聚集在一起的研究领域的交叉点提出了一个悖论，然后使用一种新的分析技术和独特的数据试图解决这个悖论。通过这样做，它促进了精英招募和国家建设方面的研究发展。对于精英招聘，这项研究提供了一个理论框架，在这个框架内思考招聘的历史变化。此外，这项研究为招聘研究提供了概念规范和测量精度，并为该领域的一些经典问题提供了新的证据。这项研究通过考察似乎是国家组织能力增长和转型模式的例外，为国家建设研究做出了贡献，因此建议将重点放在美国国家建设研究的精英地位上。通过分析全州组织中如此长的时间段，这项研究极大地扩展了美国国家建设研究的时间框架和地点。因此，最佳匹配提供了招聘变化的细微差别图景。这将有助于更好地理解转型对发展国家组织能力的意义。这项研究还试图将历史叙事、量化方法和个人层面的数据结合在一起，增加美国政治发展领域的优势。时政研究通常采用定性的方法来追寻宏观的、历史的和理论的问题。这项研究也试图解决这些问题，但使用的是量化的、个人层面的行为数据。因此，它从个人生活的微观事件中建立了基于数量的、基于历史的宏观层面的论点。这在宏观政治变化的研究中并不常见。这个项目有可能通过加强对领导力的理解，为更广泛的社会目标做出贡献。美国政府领导层的素质和特征是公众和学术界关注的问题。至少70年来，这些一直是政府的明确问题(例如，1930年的S·布朗洛委员会、战后的胡佛委员会和1990年的沃尔克委员会)。这项研究为他们带来了一个新的视角，并可能对提高领导力有所启示。

The administrative organizations of the American government are important sites for making and implementing policy. Those at the top of these organizations have major responsibility not only for determining and implementing policy but for guiding the organizational development of government. Recruitment processes determine who occupies these positions and hence their quality and behavior. Thus, how such people are recruited affects the democratic legitimacy and competency of the American government. The purpose of this study is to identify the recruitment structure for elite administrative positions and to describe transformations in those structures over time. The study is motivated by an apparent paradox. Elite research suggests recruitment to these positions is relatively unstructured, politically permeable and tumultuous, producing people with uncertainly relevant skills and little identification with the state. However, research on the development of the organizational capacity of the American state suggests that these structures become coherent, ordered and impermeable, producing people with appropriate skills and identification with the state. To examine this paradox, study does three things. First, it uses theory on the development of the organizational capacity of the state to generate sets of propositions about the kinds of patterns and changes in those patterns that should be expected. Second, it collects unique information on the timing and sequence of diverse aspects of the careers of administrative elites from 1850 to 1998. Third, it uses optimal matching (OM) to analyze the data. This technique allows study to use the timing and sequence of individual careers to discover the recruitment structures hypothesized to generate individual careers. Two contributions are highlighted here. First, the study poses a paradox at the intersection of research fields not usually brought together, and then uses a new analytic technique and unique data to try to resolve the paradox. In so doing, it promotes the development of research in both elite recruitment and state-building. For elite recruitment, the study provides a theoretical frame within which to think about historical changes in recruitment. Further, the research advances concept specification and measurement precision for recruitment research and provides new evidence regarding some of the classic issues in the field. The study contributes to state-building research by examining what has seemed to be an exception to the pattern of growth and transformation in the organizational capacity of the state and, thus, suggests a focus on elite position for research in American state-building. By analyzing such a long time period in organizations across the state, the study greatly expands the time frame and sites of research on American state-building. Concomitantly, optimal matching provides a nuanced picture of recruitment changes. This will help better understand the meaning of transformations for developing the organizational capacity of the state. The study also seeks to add to the field of American Political Development (APD) the combined benefits of historical narrative, quantitative methodologies and individual-level data. Studies in APD commonly use qualitative methods to pursue macro-historical and theoretical questions. This study also seeks to address these questions, but by using quantitative, individual-level behavioral data. It thus builds quantitatively based, historically grounded macro-level arguments out of the micro events of individual lives. This is not common in studies of macro-political change. This project has the potential to contribute to broader societal goals by enhancing understanding of leadership. Th quality and character of leadership in American government are public and academic concerns. These have been explicit issues for the government for at least 70 years, (e.g., the 1930's Brownlow Commission, the post-war Hoover Commissions and the Volker Commission in 1990). This research brings a new perspective to them and could shed light on improving leadership.