Presidential Patronage and Bureaucratic Development∗

Presidential patronage occupies a central role in accounts of administrative capacity, state development, and party politics. Yet existing scholarship lacks systematic evidence about presidential administrations and bureaucratic composition in the United States. We address this omission using new individual-level data on the personnel who occupied more than 145,000 positions in the Department of Interior between 1849 and 1905. We document changes in turnover rates across time, presidential administrations, and agencies. Using panel data on the allocation of bureaucratic personnel, we also establish a link between electoral politics and the disbursement of bureaucratic appointments. Finally, we show that civil service reform signi cantly attenuated the connection between electoral politics and allocation of patronage. Our ndings document the role of presidential parties in sta ng the federal bureaucracy in the nineteenth century, provide evidence of potential mechanisms through which patronage operated, and suggest how agency characteristics and institutional reforms contributed to the weakening of presidential patronage. Note to readers: This is an extremely rough draft of our ideas and empirics. We are grateful for suggestions! ∗We thank Benjamin Manning for excellent research assistance and Tyler Simko for his help with the data. Brandice Canes-Wrone, John Dearborn, George Krause, Dave Lewis, John Patty, Sharece Thrower, and Ian Turner provided helpful comments. Research support was provided by the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship at Harvard University. †Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government; gcalaishaase@g.harvard. edu. ‡Associate Professor, Department of Government; rogowski@fas.harvard. edu. The spoils system was a—perhaps the—distinctive characteristic of nineteenth-century American politics. The system linked presidents to their parties, connected national parties to state and local party organizations, and provided Congress with informal means of in uence over the executive branch (James 2000; Johnson and Libecap 1994; Skowronek 1982). The president stood at the center of this system. Wielding the appointment power, presidents selected copartisan supporters to serve in executive branch positions (James 2000; Johnson and Libecap 1994; Skocpol 1992; Skowronek 1982; White 1954). Through this process, as Carpenter (2001, 40) has argued, “agencies were partisan re ections of the presidential administration in power. ” Controversy over patronage was associated with the rst impeachment of an American president, the assassination of another president, and persistent calls for reform. The replacement of the spoils system with the merit system was among the most “wrenching and controversial changes” (Carpenter 2001, 5) that had “transformed” the civil service by the turn of the twentieth century (Hoogenboom 1959, 313). In this paper, we study how presidential politics a ected the composition of the federal workforce during the patronage era. Previous research characterizes the patronage system based on snapshots of personnel turnover (e.g., Carpenter 2001; Hoogenboom 1959) and the removal of individuals from Senate-con rmed positions (e.g., James 2006). Yet it is not clear from existing scholarship how turnover rates varied across time or to whom executive branch positions were awarded. Because nineteenth-century patronage was “a quintessentially distributive phenomenon” (Skocpol 1992, 83), understanding the allocation of executive branch positions provides insight into the mechanisms through which the patronage system operated. We contribute new evidence about the politics of patronage and its decline in the United States. We draw from original data we compiled on employment patterns in the Department of the Interior from its inception in 1849 to 1905, comprising approximately 145,000 positionyears. We present three primary ndings. First, we document changes across time in personnel size and stability: as overall employment increased across the nineteenth century, turnover rates