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Do career bureaucrats outperform political appointees? You betcha
The Monkey Cage —
... Shankar Vedantam, in his Washington Post “Department of Human Behavior” column several days ago (November 24, 2008 — (here), cited several political scientists on the timely topic of the performance of appointed v. career managers of government programs. Featured prominently was research by political scientist David Lewis of Vanderbilt, the author of the recently published The PolItics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton University Press). ...
In Praise of Bureacrats
Matthew Yglesias —
... in most democracies. Political appointees will go three or four levels deep into the org charts of agencies, and the top administrators are also staffed by a lot of political appointees rather than by career professionals. In the State Department, it’s customary to give a lot of the political positions (usually at the Assistant Secretary level) to career foreign service officers, but in some agencies there are politicals everywhere.
And as Shankar Vedantam explains in The Washington Post they do a way worse job than the bureaucrats do: ...
