Public Values in Context: A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. Civil Service

Abstract

The focus in this article is on administrative values as articulated by a group of elected officials rather than, as is the case in much of the public values literature, by administrators. An analysis is conducted of the specific values invoked by members of Congress with regard to the federal civil service over the period 1883–2002. The examination of values in this venue allows insights into the extent to which values generally and public values specifically are inherently contextual and why therefore, any definitive definition of the construct will remain elusive. The longitudinal nature of the study further highlights the relevance of historical context to an understanding of “public values.”

Keywords:

• civil service
• public values
• civil service history
• Congress
• U.S. administrative history

Notes

¹ Documents reviewed for this purpose included, for example, excerpts from the congressional debate on the Pendleton Act, the civil service portions of the Brownlow Commission Report and the First and Second Hoover Commission reports, and the “accompanying reports” of the National Performance Review on “Reinventing Human Resources” and “Office of Personnel Management.”

² The determination here was that economy represents the value of efficiency to the extent that it connotes concerns about cost.

³ The measure is of simple “percent agreement” between the coders. This measure has been criticized on the basis that it fails to account for agreement that would occur by chance. However, in light of that consideration, the level that constitutes an acceptable level of reliability is generally set at 90%. For more “conservative” measures of interrater reliability such as Cohen’s kappa or Scott’s pi, what constitutes an “acceptable” level of agreement is generally set at lower levels (Lombard, Snyder-Duch, & Bracken, 2002).

⁴ A false positive is defined as an instance in which the keyword was used in a sense not related to the value to which it was assigned or not related to the civil service.

⁵ Following this process, the initial list of 387 keywords/phrases was reduced to 161 keywords/phrases sorted into 42 separate values.

⁶ For example, one of the keywords listed under the value “expertise” was “knowledge.” Through the keyword retrieval process, it was determined that many of the instances in which the word “knowledge” was invoked were not in reference to the civil service but as part of colloquial expressions such as “to my knowledge,” “it is common knowledge,” and “without their knowledge.” In this instance, the keyword “knowledge” was retained in the dictionary within the value category “expertise” but with the preceding phrases added to the exclusion list.

⁷ Priority in this instance is assigned based on the percentage of total value references.

⁸ One of the keywords assigned to the values of “effectiveness” is “performance,” which has been one of the hallmarks of both the Clinton and Bush II management reform programs.