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Clashing Beliefs Within the Executive Branch: The Nixon Administration Bureaucracy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Joel D. Aberbach
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
Bert A. Rockman
Affiliation:
The University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1976

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References

1 For a discussion of the turnover rates of politically appointed executives contrasted with career administrators, see McGregor, Eugene B. Jr., “Politics and the Career Mobility of Bureaucrats,” American Political Science Review, 68 (March, 1974), 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the adjustments required by newly appointed executives, see Bernstein, Marver H., The Job of the Federal Executive (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1958), pp. 1037Google Scholar.

2 According to Marver Bernstein (p. 60), the select group of career administrators participating in the Round Table he conducted argued “that a political executive ought to have some freedom in changing career executives.”

3 For a general and insightful analysis of the problem of administrative control, see Long, Norton, “Power and Administration,” Public Administration Review, 9 (Autumn, 1949), 257269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Stanley, David T., Changing Administrations (Washingion, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1965), p. 87Google Scholar.

5 See Somers, Herman Miles, “The Federal Bureaucracy and the Change of Administration,” American Political Science Review, 48 (March, 1954), 131151CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mainzer, Lewis, Political Bureaucracy (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1973), p. 107Google Scholar. In the context of the initial days of the Eisenhower administration, Somers adds (p. 136) that “…when the agency heads first arrived they brought with them a profound distrust of the inherited bureaucracy. A frequent complaint was ‘I don't know whom I can trust.’”

6 Eisenhower Press Conference Transcript, The New York Times, July 23, 1953, as quoted in Somers, p. 142Google Scholar.

7 Witness, for example, the firing of liberal Republican Leon Panetta in early 1970 as Director of the Office of Civil Rights in HEW. It is interesting as well to contrast the administration's firing of Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel and five of his line subordinates with President Eisenhower's genteel handling of his Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, who vociferously opposed the Eisenhower budget in public.

8 Transcript of April 19, 1971 meeting published in The New York Times, July 20, 1974, p. 14Google Scholar.

9 U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Executive Session Hearings, “Watergate and Related Activities—Use of Incumbency-Responsiveness Program,” 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, 1973, Exhibit 35, V. 19, p. 9006Google Scholar. Further, in testimony before the Senate Select Committee, H. R. Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff, argued that the Nixon administration was faced with “…the continuing problem of bureaucracy responsiveness, where decisions are made at the top, and get diverted on a highly political basis at a lower level to a direction other than the policy of the department would have indicated” (v. 18, 8181–8182). For similar views expressed by Harry S. Flemming of the Nixon staff, see “Government Commentary: Nixon vs. the Veteran Bureaucrats,” Business Week, August 1, 1970, p. 31Google Scholar.

10 For evidence of this, see, Beman, Lewis, “President-Less Government in Washington,” Fortune (January 1974), pp. 74–76 and 160162Google Scholar; and Herbers, John, “Nixon's Presidency: Centralized Control,” The New York Times, March 6, 1973, Section I, pp. 1 and 20Google Scholar.

11 The countries involved, in addition to the United States, are Britain, France, Italy, Morocco, The Netherlands, Sweden, West Germany, and Jamaica. Our colleagues on the larger project are Samuel J. Eldersveld, Thomas J. Anton, Ronald F. Inglehart, Robert D. Putnam, Archibald Singham, and John Waterbury.

12 The agencies are: Agriculture, Commerce, HEW, HUD, Interior, Justice, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, GSA, OEO, FCC, FPC, FTC, ICC, SEC, SBA, and the VA.

13 We cannot fully describe the interview instrument and methods used in the study in the limited space available to us here. Details about the interviews and coding procedures can be found in Aberbach, Joel D., Chesney, James D., and Rockman, Bert A., “Exploring Elite Political Attitudes: Some Methodological Lessons,” Political Methodology, 2 (Winter, 1975), 127Google Scholar.

14 Bernard Mennis's study of career foreign service officers notes that only 5 per cent of the FSO's considered themselves to be Republicans. See Mennis, Bernard, American Foreign Policy Officials (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), p. 121Google Scholar.

15 Some of the middle appointee positions do not change hands regardless of the party in the White House because a portion of the jobs within this category stress professional expertise and experience. In other instances, the incumbents often have formidable political links with interest-group or congressional constituencies so that it is politically unprofitable for an administration to replace them. See Stanley, David T., Changing Administrations, pp. 136137Google Scholar. On the other hand, the attempts of the Nixon administration to centralize appointment procedures through the White House even for jobs of this sort probably has decreased the proportion of Democrats remaining in formally appointive positions. See, for instance, Herbers, John, “Nixon's Presidency: Expansion of Power,” The New York Times, March 4, 1973, Section I, pp. 1, 4748Google Scholar.

16 The gamma coefficient between party affiliation and a slightly revised job status code is .65. This revised job status code distinguishes between appointees who are obviously political and those who are apparently nonpolitical.

17 Placement on the left-right continuum was predicated on a respondent's support for, or opposition to, programs that allocate public funds for social services. The term social services was given a broad operational definition in this code. A respondent's views on traditional social welfare programs and more recent extensions of these bore heavily on where he was placed on the continuum. The respondent's discussions of proposals for more public goods and services aimed at improving the lot of the socially and economically disadvantaged were also relevant in determining his or her score on the left-right continuum.

18 The summary coefficient of intercoder reliability for this measure is T b = .41. For procedures used to reconcile coding discrepancies, and for a discussion of T b as a very conservative measure of intercoder reliability see Aberbach et al., pp. 16–19 and 23.

19 Seventy-nine per cent of the Democrats in the social service agencies are career civil servants, compared to 59 per cent in the non–social service agencies. Remember that most of the Democrats in appointed positions are in the NEA and C classifications.

20 The gamma coefficient for Republicans between agency and the left-right social services continuum is .42. It is .95 for Democrats, among whom the overwhelming majority of social services administrators are very liberal.

21 See, for instance, Phillips, Kevin, The Emerging Republican Majority (Garden City: Anchor, 1970)Google Scholar.

22 As quoted in Herbers, John, “Nixon's Presidency: A Nation is Changed,” The New York Times, March 7, 1973, Section I pp. 1, 22Google Scholar.

23 The correlation for the career executives diminishes principally because of the instability in the distribution of cases between the “all considered” and “all considered, but qualifications” categories.

24 As John Herbers has written of the Nixon Administration, “… the White House frequently does not trust the departments which have constituencies of their own.” See, “Nixon's Presidency: Centralized Control,” The New York Times, March 6, 1973, p. 20Google Scholar.

25 Our assumption here, of course, is that the data represent a generational rather than a life cycle phenomenon. While longitudinal data would be necessary to establish definitively the validity of this assumption, the stability among the Republicans regardless of age and the differences between the Democrats lead us to a generational interpretation.

26 As quoted in Beman, , “President-Less Government in Washington,” p. 74Google Scholar.

27 See, for instance, Nathan, Richard P., The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency (New York: John Wiley, 1975)Google Scholar.

28 Long, Norton, The Polity (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962), p. 71Google Scholar.

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