The Tory elite: President Bush's executive branch appointments

The purposes of the study are: (1) to provide a complete, detailed description of the preappointment financial, occupational, age, residential, and educational characteristics of President Bush's Senate-confirmed executive branch appointees, (2) to accomplish an empirical test of some relationships, suggested by earlier studies, between preappointment characteristics and appointments received, and (3) to assess the practical public management implications of the empirical findings. The constitutional and historical development of presidential nomination with Senate confirmation also are examined to provide needed background and context.;The study is based on a sample of 278 Bush appointees confirmed in 1989 and 1990 and makes use of a new data source, the Financial Disclosure Report submitted by each nominee to the Office of Government Ethics. The main findings are: (1) Bush's executive branch appointees are best characterized as middle class and professional rather than as wealthy property owners. Most are heavily dependent on their own professional income-producing activities. (2) Bush's executive appointees are primarily in the prime of life between 30 and 60 years. (3) Bush's executive appointees are highly educated and are drawn primarily from the Washington, D.C. area, continuing trends found in earlier studies. (4) Lawyers and Ivy League graduates are overrepresented in Bush's appointees, but overall, Bush appointed persons from a wide variety of occupational and educational backgrounds. (5) A weak positive relationship exists between preappointment assets, income, and age and the Executive Schedule level of the appointments received. Other preeppointment characteristics are not significantly related to level of appointment, and all of the characteristics together account for only about eleven percent of the total variation in level of appointment. (6) No meaningful relationships are evident between preappointment characteristics and type of appointment received. (7) Bush's executive appointments actually consist of two different subpopulations. One subpopulation consists mainly of persons living outside the D.C. area and working in the private sector. The other subpopulation consists mainly of persons living in the D.C. area and working in the federal government or in government-related law firms, interest groups, or research organizations. The existence of these two different subpopulations has important implications for practical public management.