Senior State Officials - a Uniform Administrative Elite? The Example of Prague Crown Land Offices and Their Highest-Ranking Public Servants, 1868 - 1918

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11310%2F24%3A10486121" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11310/24:10486121 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110749144-005" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110749144-005</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110749144-005" target="_blank" >10.1515/9783110749144-005</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Senior State Officials - a Uniform Administrative Elite? The Example of Prague Crown Land Offices and Their Highest-Ranking Public Servants, 1868 - 1918

Original language description

Public service in the nineteenth century is an ideal milieu for studying social mobility. Particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in the context of the various modernization processes, the tasks that the state assigned to its public servants were constantly increasing, as were the numbers of those who were required to carry them out. As the number of offices and officials grew, the composition of public service gradually became differentiated, the demands placed on the various levels of public careers became more clearly defined, and the career models applied to the various areas of the public service became more stable. In the chapter we focus on the university-educated public servants who had the widest scope of action and for whom it was possible to reach the highest levels of public administration in a meritocratic state apparatus. From this group, we selected those public servants who in the course of their careers reached a position in the sixth of the 11 ranks of the state bureaucracy and were stationed in a leading office in the provincial capital of Prague. Within the administrative elite, which may be considered as the majority of university-educated men working as drafting officials, i. e., those involved in the decision-making process of state power, these selected individuals were the very highest echelon of state administration in the crown land. We examine to what extent the social origin of senior public servants changed in three different branches of Austrian public service (political, judicial, and financial administration) and in three different periods of its development (shortly after the Austro-Hungarian settlement and the adoption of the December Constitution; at the turn of the twentieth century; and at the very end of the monarchy). As evidence of social origin, we establish the occupation or, where appropriate, the social status of the official&apos;s father. We use primarily the public servant&apos;s marriage records, which contain data on the parents of both the groom and the bride while, for officials who never wed, we rely on birth records to determine the occupation of the father. We also look at the place of birth, which we categorized in terms of its importance, the year of birth, the year of entry into service, and the year of appointment to the Sixth Rank. The aim of the chapter is to assess, with the use of survival analysis and other statistical methods, whether any of the factors under study (social status of the father or father-in-law, place of birth, branch of service, or belonging to a cohort under study) had an impact on the length of time the official had to wait before being appointed to the high rank in question. These findings help clarify to what extent the behaviors and patterns typical of public servants in the political administration as a key branch of the public service can be considered a universal model that is applicable to other public service groups, and how much variation there was between different branches of public service.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50402 - Demography

Project

<a href="/en/project/GX20-19463X" target="_blank" >GX20-19463X: Social mobility of elites in the Central European regions (1861-1926) and transition of imperial experience and structures in nation-states</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Climbing up the Social Ladder?: Social Mobility of Elites in East-Central Europe in the Long 19th Century

ISBN

978-3-11-074901-4

Number of pages of the result

26

Pages from-to

99-124

Number of pages of the book

244

Publisher name

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Place of publication

Oldenbourg

UT code for WoS chapter

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