At-Will Employment in Bureaucracies: Evidence from Mississippi

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Political Control of the Bureaucracy

Abstract

Amid accusations from former President Trump of a "Deep State" curtailing conservative policy goals, public personnel management has become a partisan lightning rod. Candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination vow to weaken many federal civil servants’ job protections, while President Biden and other prominent Democrats are determined to protect bureaucrats from what they perceive as political interference. Despite the contemporary attention, scholars know very little about the effects of removing civil servants’ merit protections on patterns of hiring, firing, or compensation. In this paper, I turn to the U.S. state of Mississippi—where five agencies were temporarily exempted from the state’s merit system between 2014 and 2020—to test whether reclassifying bureaucrats as at-will leads to increased turnover among outpartisan civil servants. Using a new dataset of personnel and voter records of U.S. state bureaucrats, I find no evidence that Democratic civil servants who lost their job protections were more likely to depart than their Republican peers. However, employees in exempted agencies, most of which disproportionately employ Democrats, were considerably more likely to depart regardless of their registered partisanship. Consequently, the Mississippi case suggests that even if outpartisan civil servants are not individually targeted for dismissal, partisanship still influences which groups of employees are targeted for reclassification.

Author

• Benjamin Goehring, University of Michigan