The In-and-Outer System: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

Americans have created a unique approach to staffing the top of government. To be sure, the line between political and administrative functions is ambiguous in every nation, and it has become ever more troublesome as governments have expanded the scope of their activities in the postwar period. 1 The uniqueness of the American approach lies in peopling this vague realm of political administration the positions of executive leadership with an assortment of characters whose career stakes are tied neither to party politics nor to government administration. In other democratic nations, the essential distinction is between a relatively small number of government executives with political party credentials and, below them, a much larger number of civil servants with more or less permanent attachments to the administrative machinery. In the United States, conduct of the national government has become heavily dependent on in-and-outers. These people are most easily characterized by what they are not: they are not politicians, and they are usually not bureaucrats in any conventional sense of that term. To its critics, the American approach is a recipe for confused and ineffective