ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a history of U.S. public personnel policy as an inherently political practice of determining who shall rule in a republic. It is organized around the tension between a “merit”-centered view and the more democratic “ordinary virtue” view that was in play during the Constitutional debates in 1787. The chapter explores the historical evolution of this tension, which has produced four evolving qualifications for office: merit, fit character, representativeness, and proper political ideas. The chapter shows how these different qualifications took hold and were given expression in each of the following periods of development: the American Founding (1787–1828); Jacksonian Democracy (1829–69), Populist Reform (1869–1910); Progressive Reform (1910–21); The New Deal (1933–76); and the Decline of the Administrative State (1976–present).
