In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive.

Maranto, Robert

In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive. By Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2000. 230 pp.

This work is the culmination of the authors' three decades of research into the world of political appointees and career executives in the U.S. higher civil service and as such makes important contributions to our knowledge of executive politics. Aberbach and Rockman do a masterful job summarizing previous research and framing the key issues of administrative reform generally and career-noncareer relations in particular. Throughout, the authors present reasoned speculation and are careful not to go further than the data will take them.

Using in-depth interviews of career and noncareer executives serving in first-term Nixon, second-term Reagan, and (the elder) Bush administrations, supplemented with other research, the authors weigh the impacts of three presidential management strategies operating in three different political eras, a wonderful natural experiment.

Using their time-series database, Aberbach and Rockman investigate three themes of recent scholarship. First, they address the "quiet crisis" of the higher civil service alleged by the Volcker Commission and others. Contrary to expectations, the authors find that the credentials of high-level civil servants did not decline during the study period. There is little evidence of a brain drain. Government executives in the Reagan and Bush years apparently did contend with more oversight from Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) than did their Nixon-era predecessors; they also reported slightly lower morale. Still, their job satisfaction remained high, leading the authors to conclude that "evidence on behalf of a `quiet crisis' is itself very quiet" (p. 164).

Second, the authors examine the "noisy crisis" of the higher civil service, the question of bureaucratic responsiveness. Data suggest that career civil servants are influenced by the broader interplay of ideas in the Washington community and by presidential control strategies. While the Nixon-era career government executives were overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, the Reagan and Bush variants actually leaned right, particularly at higher levels. While Nixon attempted to impose conservative policies on a liberal bureaucracy in a liberal political environment, a second-term Reagan administration attempted to impose more conservative policies on a more friendly bureaucracy in a more friendly political environment. Furthermore, career executives seemed to lose policy-making power over time and to report less contact with Congress and interest groups. In short, the data suggest that the bureaucracy is responsive to presidential control, though perhaps not so much as ideologically driven presidential administrations (e.g., Reagan) would like. Interestingly, the authors report that relations between career and noncareer executives seem more positive than is often supposed, although career executives do doubt the management skills of their political appointees.

Finally, Aberbach and Rockman examine the movement to reinvent government. Since the authors' original data set stops at the Bush administration, here they interpret the work of others to present an intelligent and relatively complete, if not always original, critique of reinventing government. The authors correctly point out that the key issues facing government are political rather than managerial. The reinventing government movement will not in fact reinvent government and is not likely to restore public trust in government. Yet this may miss the point. As Vice President Gore, who led the Clinton administration reinvention effort, has acknowledged, reinvention is largely about culture change within the bureaucracy, and on this limited basis, it can claim significant successes.

Similarly, Aberbach and Rockman lament that the reinventing movement has not reduced the numbers of political appointees in government. Yet they fail to acknowledge that the growth of appointees has followed the growth of interest groups, media, and congressional staffs; thus, it might be difficult to limit the numbers of political appointments without downsizing the rest of Washington's political class. Finally, the work would be stronger had the database included Department of Defense organizations, which, after all, make up a significant part of the federal establishment.

Still, these are minor complaints about a work whose strengths should make it a classic in the executive politics and public administration literatures. In the Web of Politics should be required reading for scholars of and practitioners in the higher civil service.

--Robert Maranto Villanova University