Constituency Bias in a Federal Career System?

Abstract

A discriminant analysis of environmentalist and industrialist constituent publics of the U.S. Forest Service along with agency responses to 26 attitude, preference, and conservation value questions demonstrates that field-level line officers of this elite federal career system share attitudes and preferences with only one of these constituencies. Rather than holding the middle-ground position between these two groups, described by Culhane in a 1981 book on politics and the public lands. Service attitudes are more consistent with a 1979 land use decision made by their agency, which allocated 58.3% of the U.S. de facto wilderness land for the use of its industrial clientele and 24.3% in favor of the environmentalist position. Group means (centroids) show that Forest Service managers' attitudes overlap heavily with their industrialist constituency, but only slightly overlap with their environmentalist constituency.