It Takes Two: Gender, Governance Institutions, and Public Administration Labor Markets

Abstract

This dissertation presents a framework for understanding how bureaucratic jobs, matches between governments and bureaucrats, are formed that considers the simultaneous preferences of bureaucrats and the governments that seek to employ them. I apply different aspects of this framework across multiple settings to illustrate the way political context, institutions, job seeker characteristics, and job seeker preferences shape these matches between bureaucrats and governments. For the purposes of this dissertation, supply is the willingness of qualified bureaucrats to put themselves forward positions and demand is the selectorate’s appetite for bureaucrats with specific attributes. In chapters II and III I use this framework to explore the underrepresentation of women in the city management profession. In chapter II I use a mixed methods approach to determine whether supply and or demand side factors limit women’s entry into the city management profession. In chapter III I focus on supply, specifically examining whether assistant city managers view potential city manager positions through a gendered lens with a conjoint experiment. In chapters IV and V, I shift the focus to local government specialization, specifically the way specialization shapes the politicians’ preferences for human capital investments and executive bureaucrats’ preferences for working at special districts or general purpose governments. Taken together, the individual results from chapters II through VI demonstrate the importance of viewing job formation in local governments through a more holistic framework that considers how both the preferences of the selectorate and preferences of bureaucrats on the job market as they both ultimately shape job outcomes.