Populism and the professional backgrounds of U.S. presidential appointees

Populist politicians have risen to power in several democracies in the last decade, based on an anti-establishment agenda and a claim to be the true representatives of the people. While the effects of populism on many areas of democracy have been well researched, scholars have only recently started to investigate the interplay between populism and the bureaucracy. Since populists in power need the advice and cooperation of their bureaucracy but strongly distrust it, how will a populist government deal with the bureaucracy? One important issue is what kind of professional competences populist governments will seek when appointing personnel to the bureaucracy. Based on their anti-elitist and anti-expert views and distrust of the bureaucratic establishment, we would expect populist governments to appoint bureaucrats with a different set of competences than other governments, that is, to put less emphasis on higher education and bureaucratic experience and greater emphasis on political experience and business background. The paper tests this argument in the context of U.S. presidential appointments to the bureaucracy. In the U.S., the president has the capacity to steer the federal administrative machine through the power to appoint up to 4000 positions, including leadership offices. The paper investigates how the professional backgrounds of presidential appointees to leadership offices differed between the Trump administration and the Obama and Bush administrations. To do so, it analyzes a self-compiled data set with biographical information on 374 appointees under these three administration. The analysis shows that Trump appointees were more likely to have political experience working for the presidential campaign and similar than both Obama and Bush appointees, more likely to have a business background than Obama appointees, less likely to have higher education than Bush