Slackers and Zealots: Civil Service, Policy Discretion, and Bureaucratic Expertise∗

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” systems of public personnel management interact with bureaucratic discretion to create expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and may be either policy-motivated or policy-indifferent. We argue that under specific conditions on the nature of expertise and bureaucratic discretion over policy choices, merit system protections for job tenure encourage the development of expertise and problem solving capacity in the bureaucracy. In addition, we identify conditions under which civil service rules encourage policy-motivated bureaucrats to enter and remain in public service, and policy-indifferent bureaucrats to leave it. ∗The authors thank Marcus Berliant, Bill Keech, Becky Morton, and Craig Volden for very helpful comments and suggestions, as well as those of panel participants at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association in Chicago, IL and the 2005 Annual Meetings of the Southern Political Science Association in new Orleans, LA. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University. Email: [email protected] ‡Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University. Email: [email protected].