Support for Professionalism in the States: An Examination of Administrative,Executive,and Legislative Attitudes

¹ The following explanation of professionalism was provided in the survey questionnaire. PROFESSIONALISM: Responsible policies result from highly-trained and expert professionals whose codes of ethics and scientific methods call for the hearing of all sides in decisions pertaining to the implementation of public policies; the representation of all viewpoints is assured in intra-agency deliberations.

² A three-wave design was used. An initial letter and copy of the questionnaire were followed-up at two-week intervals-first by a reminder postcard and then by a second letter and another copy of the questionnaire.

³ The five states surveyed were selected in accordance to the percentage of public employees covered by merit provisions. Jay Shafritz (1974) has posited that merit systems are related to Daniel Elazar's (1972) notion of state poitical culture. Lee Sigelman (1976, p. 131) has confirmed such a relationship (R = -.341). Using the data provided by Sigelman (personal inquiries to the Council of State Governments and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management were unable to produce anything more recent with the same degree of accuracy), the states were rank ordered and grouped into five ordinal categories. One state was then randomly selected from each category. The states so selected, ranked in order of decreasing merit system percentages, are Maine (95%); Kentucky (83%); Wisconsin (78%); Florida (33%); and Iowa (7%). Changes in merit coverage are, of course, a serious concern in this instance.

⁴ Zero-order correlations are used here for two reasons. First, they provide a liberal test of the hypotheses in that they register any linear impact. Partial correlations or regression coefficients, while measuring direct impact, provide a more narrow focus. Second, there is no effort here to suggest causal patterns (as would be the case with some of the other available statistics).

⁵ Other arrangements suggest that there may be a Southern/Northern state effect. This would tend to offer some support for the notion of state political cultures.

⁶ The state effect among administrators (professionalism meets with greater approval in those states with smaller percentages under merit system coverage) may represent a reform attitude. Professionalism may indeed be seen as related to the obtaining of civil service status and protections.

⁷ Other items from the survey which are not reported here tend to show a slight priority preference for executive control by executives and for pluralism by legislators.

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