Influencing Policy at the Top of the Federal Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Career and Political Senior Executives

Abstract

Although we commonly assume that bureaucrats influence the policies which govern public behavior, we know very little about the individuals who occupy executive positions in the federal bureaucracy. Following the creation of the Senior Executive Service (SES) in 1978, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published guidelines detailing the skills and responsibilities required among both career and noncareer members of the SES. Although scholars have focused much attention on relations between these two groups within the federal bureaucracy, their day‐to‐day responsibilities remain understudied. This study reports results of a survey that was administered to 1,000 members of the Senior Executive Service to determine whether career and noncareer members of the SES have significantly different job responsibilities. Although both groups perform a variety of activities which provide them with numerous avenues to affect government policy, the research findings indicate that noncareer executives are more engaged in carrying out political liaison tasks and that career executives have slightly greater personnel responsibilities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.