Career Officers and Political Appointees in American Diplomacy: Contending for Diplomatic Positions through Boundary Work
American diplomacy has long included a larger contingent of non-career appointees than is found in many other countries' diplomatic corps. Since the 1950s, successive White Houses have allocated about 30% of ambassadorships to individuals outside the diplomatic profession (so-called "political appointees"). These political appointments are a source of controversy within the career Foreign Service and in the national media. While news reports and academic studies remain focused on the formal boundary between career and non-career diplomats, this paper calls attention to the symbolic boundary determining the legitimacy of participants in American diplomacy. I argue that, in their attempt to secure their access to diplomatic positions, career members of the Foreign Service and political appointees compete for the social recognition of their respective "boundary work", that is to say, the symbolic boundaries that they respectively produce through their discourse and practices and that differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate diplomats. On the one hand, career diplomats try to protect their dominant position through turf claims establishing restrictive distinctions, based on quantitative and qualitative criteria, between legitimate and illegitimate political appointees. On the other hand, political appointees try to carve out a place for themselves by promoting less restrictive selection criteria for diplomatic appointments while at the same time downplaying the formal distinction between career and non-career practitioners. Methodologically, the paper builds on interviews with members of the Foreign Service and political appointees as well as on written primary sources.
American Diplomacy