Political Appointments, Careers, and Performance in the Public Sector: Evidence from U.S. Federal Judges

Abstract:

This paper studies the dynamic effects of political appointments on the careers and performance of civil servants. We focus on U.S. federal judges, who are nominated by the President on the recommendation of their home-state senators. Leveraging a novel individual-level dataset linking judges and senators over more than two centuries (1789-2019), we employ difference-in-differences and event-study designs to compare judges whose recommending senators have left office to those whose have not. Following a recommender's exit, judicial performance declines: judges author fewer and lower-quality opinions, accumulate a larger backlog of civil cases, and see more of their decisions reversed on appeal. The main channel is an erosion of career prospects: once their recommenders leave, district court judges become markedly less likely to be promoted to higher courts. These findings show that political appointments shape the performance of civil servants well beyond the selection stage, with consequences that persist and compound throughout their careers.