April 7, 2021 | Noon to 1:00 PM EDT
Jon Rogowski (Harvard University)
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Presidential patronage occupies a central role in accounts of administrative capacity, state development, and party politics. Yet existing scholarship lacks systematic evidence about how patronage considerations affected the composition of the federal workforce in the United States. We address this omission with new individual-level data on the personnel who occupied more than 145,000 positions in the Department of Interior between 1849 and 1905. Using panel data on the allocation of bureaucratic personnel, we find that a state’s electoral support for the presidential administration significantly increased the hiring rates of state residents. This finding is robust across a range of model specifications and measurement strategies and when accounting for a variety of congressional characteristics. In additional analyses, we show that the connection between electoral politics and allocation of patronage was significantly attenuated following the adoption of federal civil service reforms. Our findings document the role of presidential parties in staffing the federal bureaucracy in the nineteenth century, provide evidence of potential mechanisms through which patronage operated, and suggest how agency characteristics and institutional reforms contributed to the weakening of presidential patronage.