Striped Pants versus Fat Cats: Ambassadorial Performance of Career Diplomats and Political Appointees

On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield as retribution for Garfield's refusal to provide Guiteau with a plum position in the new administration (Peskin 1977). Patronage excesses and scandals after the Civil War had produced calls for reform of the government bureaucracies, and Garfield's assassination by this disgruntled and delusional campaign worker was the tipping point for the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 (Pendleton Act). The Pendleton Act and other civil service reforms that followed were based in part on the concept of a clearly discernible demarcation between politics and administration. As one prominent political scientist (and future president) put it in 1887, "[M]ost important to be observed is the truth already so much and so fortunately insisted upon by our civil-service reformers; namely, that administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices" (Wilson 1887, 210, emphasis in original). This view of administration emphasized improvement in both personnel and organization as the critical elements of better policy implementation. Reformers argued that expert personnel, protected from the political whims of any given administration, could attain a higher objective standard of performance than appointees who were given jobs, not because of their qualifications or expertise, but as "a recognition of past services or perhaps a credit toward future considerations" for a candidate or party (Mackenzie 1981, xix). Abundant anecdotal evidence--both then and now--suggests that such patronage appointments distributed among campaign workers and donors results in poor agency performance, corruption, and low morale among more public-spirited government workers (e.g., Heclo 1977; Lewis 2008); and all modern candidates and presidents of both parties promise to adopt good governance best practices and pledge not to appoint special interest lobbyists or unqualified hacks to important positions. Demonstrating the performance advantages of career civil servants, a slew of internal federal government and external organization awards for achievement and innovation highlight outstanding performance by careerists across all federal agencies. (1) One frequently cited example of this contrast between politically connected but incompetent appointees and dutiful, expert careerists is presidential appointment of ambassadors at U.S. embassies abroad (see, e.g., Smith 2014). Yet recent scandals, such as lavish spending on conferences by the General Services Administration (Rein and Smith 2012) and a top Environmental Protection Agency policy maker defrauding the agency of almost $1 million (Simpson 2013), seem to contradict the conventional wisdom that careerists are (less) immune from corruption. Conversely, there are political appointees with exceptional abilities who reenergize agencies and lead innovative programs such as James Lee Witt at the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the 1990s (Lewis 2008). These examples of corrupt careerists and outstanding appointees raise the questions of whether careerists systematically perform better than political appointees and what factors, either in leaders' personal backgrounds or in institutional features, might contribute to variation in performance. Understanding appointee performance matters for presidents and the public: presidents want to know if their appointment strategies and appointees are contributing to achieving their policy and electoral goals, while the public needs information on performance to hold elected leaders accountable. This article examines ambassadorships, a category of appointed positions normally ignored in the bureaucratic politics and performance literatures, to explain how presidential personnel choices and the specific characteristics of agency leaders influence performance at the individual and agency levels. …