Observations on Elite Isolation in the Milliken Executive Office

Abstract

In November of 1972, I received a telephone call from George Weeks, Press Secretary to Governor William Milliken, acknowledging receipt of a letter I had written to the Governor and inviting me to spend the following winter working as a student intern in the Michigan Executive Office. I accepted the position, and with the limited knowledge I had of the structure and operation of the Executive Office, attempted to design my Senior Individualized Project around what I expected the job would entail. In my work in the Executive Office and in this paper I have attempted to combine these two interests: exposure to practical politics at the state level and an investigation of the operative result of executive office decisionmaking -- pluralist or elitist. Since the majority of the SIP was completed in the winter of work/study itself, this paper is intended as a job report and not as a formal thesis. It is written in an informal narrative style, and, due to the fact that it is written on the basis of primary research, it contains no reference to published texts.

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