This project will enhance and test new game theoretic models of a "Competence-Control" dialectic in public administration. Specifically, it will explore how opportunities for promotion affect the propensities of bureaucrats to develop policy and policy-implementation expertise. As part of this project, the research team will develop a new, publicly available database of federal agencies that will allow them to test hypotheses about tradeoffs between promotion criteria and agency competence.
Results from this work will provide insight into how incentives in government agencies affect the expertise, competence, and, ultimately, performance of those agencies. In the public arena, this is a crucial question: agencies must be responsive to the public will, yet a government without expertise lacks the capacity to deliver effective services to its citizens. The insights are also relevant to non-public organizations, as tradeoffs between interventions by principals and implementations by agents are common in many settings.
Collaborative Research: Effectiveness, Control, and Competence in Public Agencies National Science Foundation Grant (SES#1061600) ISSUE: The botched implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the ineffectual regulation of the financial sector prior to 2008, the Gulf oil spill, the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, and intelligence failures prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks have revealed significant weaknesses in government administrative capacity. These failures by government agencies raise the question of whether the public sector has the human capital necessary to perform even the basic functions of government. A key issue for governance in the United States moving forward is how best to recruit, develop, and keep the human capital necessary to perform the functions of government. PROJECT: This project examines government agencies’ ability to recruit high quality individual talent, to develop their employees’ expertise within those agencies, and to retain the best and brightest in government service. This is an important and complicated challenge. Public agencies must cope with episodic turnover of political appointees, limited ability to adjust worker compensation in response to outside market pressures, difficulty in performance measurement due to the nature of governmental tasks, and constraints on frictionless alterations to the government workforce because of employment terms for civil servants. On the theoretical side it explores the relationship between political oversight and the incentives for bureaucrats to become highly skilled implementers and policy experts. The game theoretic models investigate how political intervention influences promotion patterns, accessions and separations to the civil service, choices by civil servants to invest in useful expertise and training. Ultimately, the project seeks to understand how to best design and manage a personnel system where removal is difficult and managerial flexibility in pay is limited. On the empirical side, the project collects the most extensive data yet to explore the empirical predictions of the theoretical models. OUTCOMES: The empirical component of the project was comprised both of gathering existing datasets and collecting new data. We have spent the last several years securing and preparing for analysis an unprecedented new dataset on the backgrounds and careers of every federal employee over almost a quarter century. This data includes the career histories for almost every civilian federal employee over the last 24 years. We have also fielded a survey of 15,000 federal executives to supplement this data. Three manuscripts have been published, two more have been completed or are under review, and a five more are in process. The new data has been acquired, cleaned, validated, and documented. It has also been merged with other relevant datasets. We are pursuing efforts to make this sensitive data available without jeopardizing confidentiality. BROADER IMPACTS: Work on our project has involved a large number of students that have worked alongside us, from graduate students to a high school student. We have coauthored with these students and they have used the data for their own research. Given the policy-relevant nature of the work, data and analysis from our project has had an impact outside of academia. We have had work using our data cited in a recent Supreme Court decision and given presentations to the Government Accountability Office and Office of Personnel Management. We are currently working with the Volcker Alliance, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Office of Personnel Management on projects of joint interest.
