This project will enhance and test new game theoretic models of a "Competence-Control" dialectic in public administration. Specifically, it will explore how 1) supervision and intervention by political appointees; 2) supervision and intervention by elected officials; and 3) opportunities for promotion into policy making positions affect the propensities of bureaucrats to develop certain types of policy and policy-implementation expertise. As part of this project, the research team will develop a new, publicly available database of federal agencies that includes information on political environments, agency structure, expertise investment, and agency performance in order to test hypotheses about tradeoffs between political interventions and agency competence.
Results from this work will provide insight into how political interactions with government agencies affect the expertise, competence, and, ultimately, performance of those agencies. In the public arena, this is a crucial question: democratic government must be responsive to political direction, yet a government without expertise lacks the capacity to deliver effective services to its citizens. The insights will also matter to non-public organizations, as tradeoffs between interventions by principals and implementations by agents are common to many other types of organization.
The project was NSF Grant, "Collaborative Research: Effectiveness, Control, and Competence in Public Agencies" (SES#1061512). 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. Ultimately, the project seeks to determine the best design and management strategy for a human capital system under these conditions. Using our findings, we anticipate identifying the determinants in developing a highly specialized civil service with effective leaders that can achieve high performance while efficiently executing policies. The research has a theory component, trying to explicate the logic of government careers. A paper detailing a theory of "public sector personnel economics" is under review. The research also has an extensive empirical component, including a "big data" component on careers in the federal government. We continue to build the largest data base on careers in organizations ever assembled.
