CEPEL

Methodology

The empirical data used in this book come from the O.P.E.R.A. research program (Operationalizing Programmatic Elites Research in America 1988-2010). This "white" program, directed by William Genieys, received funding from the French National Research Agency (250,000 euros) and ran from 2008 to 2012 (OPERA: ANR-08-BLAN-0032). The empirical study focused on the transformation of the structure of American state summits in the health and defense sectors.

The fieldwork was carried out by a team of senior and junior researchers. The team of senior members included Jean Joana (Pr. Université de Montpellier 1), Saïd Darviche, Marc Smyrl (MCF. Université de Montpellier 1), Sébastien Guignier (IEP de Bordeaux), and William Genieys (DR CNRS). The team of junior members was made up of two 'Post Docs' recruited from CEPEL-UM1, Ben Jensen (American University) and Catherine Hoeffler (Science Po Paris), and two doctoral students, Anne-Laure Beaussier and Ulrike Lepont.
The empirical data on US elites collected in the field fall into two different but complementary categories. On the one hand, a database of socio-biographical data on the positional elites studied, and on the other, numerous interviews conducted in situ in Washington DC, largely by the young researchers.

It should also be noted that the production and collection of empirical data is part of the development of the programmatic approach. This method was developed by us with the aim of analyzing the role of certain groups of actors or elites in the formulation of public policy reforms in Europe (Genieys, Smyrl, 2008; Genieys, 2010). Formulated in its first version for the study of the transformation of the summits of the French social state, it has recently been updated by Genieys and Hassenteufel (2012) with a view to its application to other case studies. Here, it is applied and adapted to the checks-and-balances power structure in the USA (i.e. Congress and the executive branch), with the aim of understanding the elitist configurations of decision-making in health and defence policies.
The programmatic approach is based on two separate but converging stages of empirical research (cf. characteristics of the programmatic approach below):
1) a quantitative stage: a longitudinal sociographic study (i.e. over a period of more than 20 years) of a sample of players characterized by the duration of the position(s) of power they hold;
2) a qualitative stage: a study based on in-depth interviews conducted on a "snowball" basis with "key informants" who are deemed to have played an important role in certain decisions or reforms in a chosen field of public action; who in turn provide us with a list of players to interview within the "decision-making" positions selected for our research.

The programmatic approach requires the first stage to be a longitudinal sociographic study, with a timeframe ranging from ten to twenty years, on the basis of which the "positional elites" will be apprehended. For the OPERA survey on the US case, we have chosen the period 1988-2010. The purpose of this time frame is to take into account a sufficiently long period to measure the continuity of elite careers at the top of the executive branch and in Congress, taking into account the effects of political alternation. We worked on three Republican and three Democratic administrations. Congress, for its part, is covered from the 100th to the 111th legislature, i.e. twelve legislatures, including 5 half-legislatures during which the incumbent president enjoyed a majority in both chambers: Clinton during the 103rd, Bush Jr during the 107th, 108th, 109th and finally Obama for the 111th.
On this basis, we first delimited a priori a population of over 3,000 actors occupying positions in the power structure (i.e. senior appointees of the executive branch and congressional staffers) from 1988 to 2010 in the health and defense sectors. We then deliberately narrowed the scope of our study of these two vast fields of public action, restricting it to 'potentially decision-making' positions in two sub-fields of policy: Medicare and the reorganization of the armed forces. The idea was then to select positions related to two major sectoral reforms: the extension of health coverage (i.e. from Clinton to Obama) and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), known as the Rumsfeld reform, concerning the change in format of the American armed forces.
An initial list of positions was drawn up with the Congressional Directories, accessible from the Lexis Nexis database
(http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=CDIR):
(i) for the legislative branch, the Staffers listed in the committees and sub-committees related to the public policy area studied (ie: health insurance and reorganization of the armed forces) were selected;
(ii) for the executive branch, the following were selected in each sector: advisors to the President on defense and health policy, Secretaries (ministers) up to 5 hierarchical levels below, agency Directors and members of the relevant staffs. Among the executive branch population selected for our study, Senate control over appointments covers the following positions: (a) the 15 cabinet agency secretaries, deputy secretaries and general counsels of these agencies; (b) director positions in the regulatory agencies; (c) members of the military staffs.
We then reduced our initial population of 2,263 identified positional actors by introducing a filter variable: by retaining for the sociographic study only those who had held positions of power in the executive or legislative branches for at least 6 years. We thus obtained a reduced population of 399 individuals who, during the period 1988-2010, remained in these positions for at least 6 years (funnel effect).
On the basis of this new sample of 399 individuals, we carried out socio-biographical research on each individual to form an OPERA Data Bank, on the basis of which we then carried out our sociographic analysis (see chapter 2 above). For each of them, we reconstructed an individual biographical sheet by cross-referencing data available in several sources: institutional websites (White House, DOD, DHHS, Congress), Who's Who in America? Leadership Library, First Street, Revolving Doors, Source Watch, Wikipedia, LegiStorm, LinkedIn, Federal Election Commission,WhoRunsGov.com at The Washington Post, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Project Vote Smart, GovTrack.us, OpenCongress.org , On The Issues.org, OpenSecrets.org.

We were then able to fill in the following questions on these individual sheets: what is their degree of feminization? What are their levels of qualification, their training universities, their original professions? What is specific about their professional careers in institutions of power? What is the average length of these careers? Are they subject to specific mobility logics? What professions will they pursue if and when they leave government activities? Can we draw up a typology of their institutional careers?

The second empirical application of the programmatic approach is qualitative. Its aim is to "grasp" the role actually played by some of the elites studied in the formulation of sectoral public action reforms. It therefore involves reconstructing the trajectories of elites and the ideas/representations they convey within the sectors of public action studied. The aim is to assess their degree of involvement (embeddedness) in the reform processes studied. In-depth interviews enable us to measure the empirical reality of this phenomenon.
In order to avoid reproducing the shortcomings of the positional approach to elites (i.e. we know that they occupy positions of power, but we don't know if or how they play them), the programmatic approach proposes narrowing down the elite sample, with those deemed to have had a proven influence on the direction of policy reform. To this end, we used exploratory interviews to test the relevance of the elite positions selected and the power of influence of those who occupy them. Interviews were conducted with key informants chosen from the public and private sectors on the basis of their presumed reputation.
This first series of in-depth interviews with elites chosen on the basis of reputation, and not necessarily part of our initial sample, enabled us to test our interview grid (see below). In addition, the "snowball effect" of asking these people to name other people of importance to them enabled us to gradually draw up a complementary list of elites considered subjectively by their peers as influential on the sectoral reforms studied. In this way, the qualitative dimension of the programmatic approach made it possible to include in the population of sectoral elites actors who might not have been part of our reduced sample of 'long timers' (those who had remained in positions of power for more than 6 years).
These semi-structured interviews were conducted using a grid common to all the team's researchers. It included three blocks of questions: (i) social background, (ii) degree of involvement in the public policy decision-making process, (iii) reform models on which they were mobilized (ideas and instruments defended). The aim was to obtain data on their personal and professional trajectories to complement the socio-biographical files produced, and to be able to reconstruct the dimensions and/or reform options around which these elites mobilized. By taking into account the historicity of their career paths, we can show how these elites can change or adapt their vision of the future of certain reforms according to the collective representations that take hold.