Elections, Ideology, and Turnover in the U.S. Federal Government

A defining feature of public sector employment is the regular change in elected leadership. Yet, we know little about how elections influence public sector careers. We describe how elections alter policy outputs and disrupt the influence of civil servants over agency decisions. These changes shape the career choices of employees motivated by policy, influence, and wages. Using new Office of Personnel Management data on the careers of millions of federal employees between 1988 and 2011, we evaluate how elections influence employee turnover decisions. We find that presidential elections increase departure rates of career senior employees, particularly in agencies with divergent views relative to the new president and at the start of presidential terms. We also find suggestive evidence that vacancies in high-level positions after elections may induce lower-level executives to stay longer in hopes of advancing. We conclude with implications of our findings for public policy, presidential politics, and public management

Unified description of seagull cancellations and infrared finiteness of gluon propagators

We present a generalized theoretical framework for dealing with the important issue of dynamical mass generation in Yang-Mills theories, and, in particular, with the infrared finiteness of the gluon propagators, observed in a multitude of recent lattice simulations. Our analysis is manifestly gauge-invariant, in the sense that it preserves the transversality of the gluon self-energy, and gauge-independent, given that the conclusions do not depend on the choice of the gauge-fixing parameter within the linear covariant gauges. The central construction relies crucially on the subtle interplay between the Abelian Ward identities satisfied by the nonperturbative vertices and a special integral identity that enforces a vast number of 'seagull cancellations' among the one- and two-loop dressed diagrams of the gluon Schwinger-Dyson equation. The key result of these considerations is that the gluon propagator remains rigorously massless, provided that the vertices do not contain (dynamical) massless poles. When such poles are incorporated into the vertices, under the pivotal requirement of respecting the gauge symmetry of the theory, the terms comprising the Ward identities conspire in such a way as to still enforce the total annihilation of all quadratic divergences, inducing, at the same time, residual contributions that account for the saturation of gluon propagators in the deep infrared.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures; v2: typos corrected, version matching the published on