“Civil Service Adoption in America: The Political Influence of City Employees,” Sarah Anzia, UC Berkeley

AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP

Abstract: At the turn of the 20th century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

Sarah Anzia is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the politics of public policy in the United States with an emphasis on state and local governments and how interest groups, political parties, and political institutions influence policy outcomes. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups influence local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly. Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She has also published research on the political activity and influence of public-sector unions, the politics of public-employee pensions, policy feedback, women in politics, political parties, and the historical development of electoral institutions.

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