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In an era when everyone wants to be a millionaire, governments struggle to attract and retain highly qualified employees, making it more important than ever to understand what attracts people to the public service. Using contingency table analysis and logistic regression on the 1989 and 1998 General Social Surveys, we explore how individuals' demographic characteristics and the importance they place on various job qualities influence their preference for and employment in the public sector. Job security may still be the strongest attraction of government jobs, but high income and the opportunity to be useful to society also attract some Americans to the public service. Minorities, veterans, Democrats, and older Americans preferred public-sector jobs more than whites, nonveterans, Republicans, and younger Americans, who were otherwise similar. Women and college graduates were more likely than comparable men and less-educated respondents to have government jobs, but no more likely to prefer them. Overall, desire for government jobs declined markedly between 1989 and 1998.
Will governments be able to attract the workers they need in the early twenty-first century? For the past two decades, observers have warned of a "quiet crisis" of steadily deteriorating "quality, morale, and effectiveness of the federal civil service" (Levine 1986, 200), "ubiquitous anomie" throughout the federal service (Wildavsky 1988,753), and "serious morale problems [as] a tragic and endemic hallmark of the federal service" (National Commission on the Public Service 1989, 91, ix). Despite apparent morale problems, there is little systematic evidence of either declining quality or rising turnover in the public service (Crewson 1995; Lewis 1991), but that may be partly because governments have had only a limited need to hire replacement workers, due to downsizing and pension plans that tie baby boomers to their federal jobs (Ippolito 1987). As the huge wave of baby boomer retirements swells, governments may face increasing difficulty finding enough of the workers they want-especially young college graduates of diverse races with the kinds of motivation and skills that governments desire (Light 1999,128-29).
This impending wave of hiring increases the need to investigate what kinds of people are attracted to government jobs and what characteristics make those jobs appealing. In this article, we analyze the 1989 and 1998 General Social Survey (GSS) to examine how people's demographic characteristics...