Presidents and Patronage

To what extent do presidents select appointees based upon campaign experience and connections? The answer to this question has important implications for our understanding of presidential management and political leadership. This article presents a theory explaining where presidents place different types of appointees and why, focusing on differences in ideology, competence, and non‐policy patronage benefits among potential appointees. We develop a formal model and test its implications with new data on 1,307 persons appointed in the first six months of the Obama administration. The empirical results broadly support the theory, suggesting that President Obama was more likely to place appointees selected for non‐policy patronage reasons in agencies off his agenda, in agencies that shared his policy views, and where appointees are least able to affect agency performance. We conclude that patronage continues to play an important role in American politics, with important consequences for campaigns, presidential politics, and governance.     

Presidents and prime ministers

An American, he has lived in Great Britain for many years and has been studying problems of political leadership in America and Europe for three decades. His books include Presidents and Prime Ministers; Managing Presidential Objectives; Understanding Big Government;and, forthcoming from Chatham House, The Post-Modern Presidency: The World Closes in on the White House.     

Presidents,Supreme Court justices,and racial equality cases: 1954–1984

This research assesses the policy success of presidents since Eisenhower in their appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court in racial equality cases from 1954–1984. The research examines presidential preferences in a much more detailed and sensitive manner than previous research. While past research has used presidential party as a measure of the policy preferences of presidents, we examine policy preferences in a very direct manner. Specifically, the preferences of presidents on racial equality issues are gauged by their public policy statements. These statements serve to tap the degree of liberalness, the level of attention, and the level of concern with judicial actions in racial equality matters. The results demonstrate that presidents have been much more successful in appointing like-minded justices than is suggested by the existing literature. In addition, it is shown that prior judicial experience is not related to presidential success. This is discussed in terms of the perennial debate over the political control of the Supreme Court and the congruence of Court policy making with majoritarian values.     

Separated Powers in the United States: The Ideology of Agencies,Presidents, and Congress

Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development.     

Precedence,privilege, preferences,plus Pareto principle: Some examples on egalitarian ethics and economic efficiency

It is demonstrated how economic theory of justice as fairness, Pareto improvements on situations involving equity, can be used to analyze the ethics contents of distributions of rights and privileges. The analysis makes use of the concept of a veil of ignorance to define a status quo. A property right to an ability or a privilege is interpreted as a transparency in the veil in respect to this ability or privilege. Three different examples are investigated, focusing on rights as collective goods, non-transferable abilities, and privileges as inherent rights.Revised version of Presidential address to the annual meeting of the European Public-Choice Society in Linz, Austria, 29 March to 1 April, 1989. I thank Johann K. Brunner, Josef Falkinger, and Björn Sandvik for many helpful comments.     

Presidents,Parties, and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior

This article investigates the consequences of fast-track legislation in the European Union. Previous research has explained why fast-track legislation occurs and evaluated its democratic repercussions. This study focuses on the European Parliament (EP)’s intra-organisational response. It first describes how the early adoption of EU legislation has informalised legislative decision-making, transformed inter-organisational relations, and induced power shifts. It then discusses the political response, showing that actors seek to redress power shifts, that reform attempts centre on the control of negotiation authority and information flows, and that reform is highly contested. The research suggests that the chance of successful redress is low in Parliament as a decentralised organisation unless two conditions are met: (i) the extent of fast-track legislation reaches a critical level, and (ii) the organisation goes through a period of wider reform; the former increases the visibility of disempowerment and reputational loss, the latter allows package deals and/or the strategic use of norms. Based on qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews an analysis is made of how Parliament’s rules of co-legislation have been contested, negotiated and reformed from the formal introduction of fast-track legislation in 1999 to the adoption of the Code of Conduct for Negotiating in the Context of Codecision Procedures in 2009. The analysis also shows that Parliament may have a price to pay for its successful fight for empowerment, namely a challenge to its institutional legitimacy and discontent of its of rank-and-file members. More generally, understanding the conditions for intra-organisational reform can inform the study of other democratic bodies which undergo a similar restriction and seclusion of de facto decision-making.     

Elite mobilities: the semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of ‘luxury tourism’ we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict interactional orders of these ‘new’ elite mobilities. Mimicking the fleeting encounters of super-elite travellers themselves, we undertook a series of ethnographically grounded but patently frugal sorties into five different spaces (or modes) of luxury travel. Drawing on our own fieldwork material and quoting the visual rhetoric of advertisers, we trace the normative production of an ostensibly enclavic landscape that imagines (or re-imagines) limitless aspirations and unbounded pleasures for all consumer-citizens regardless of their power or wealth.     

The Social Policies Presidents Make: Pre-Emptive Leadership Under Nixon and Clinton

Grounded in Stephen Skowronek's typology of presidential leadership, this paper furthers our understanding of 'pre-emptive leadership' through a comparative analysis of the welfare and Social Security reforms pursued by US presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Although not identical, their experience in these areas provides valuable insight into the difficulty of wielding power in an inhospitable political environment. The paper starts with a brief presentation of Skowronek's typology before discussing the electoral strategies employed by both presidents as they attempted to frame political identities that would allow them to compete successfully in unfavourable ideological and political circumstances. The paper then specifically focuses on the politics of welfare and Social Security reform as the two presidents used these issues as part of their efforts to craft distinctive political images and attract wider electoral support. This comparative analysis reinforces the concept of 'pre-emption' as a valuable tool in understanding presidential behaviour. However, it also underlines the limits of pre-emptive leadership. Pre-emptive strategies can be effective at election time, but they are less likely to succeed in the legislative arena. This reality complicates the presidential search for genuine policy legacies.     

The rise and decline of regional power: A historical case-study of privilege seeking

This paper comprises one of Olson's findings about the rise and decline of nations and Tullock's idea of privilege-seeking. In the historical framework of Northern Europe the history of a town being closely linked with its saltern is investigated. It is shown that throughout the centuries rent- and privilege-seeking dominated. This was primarily done to avoid competition and, finally, to get excessive revenues. The sovereigns' production-costs of the privileges were low and Tullock's results of an efficient transfer mechanism are confirmed. Additionally, the findings of coalition-forming and mortgaging support the inevitable sclerotic process. Market activities find their political counterparts which is illustrated by the building and destroying of specific coalitions. A typical delay of privilege- and coalition-seeking is observed depending on the economic and political success. Regulatory measures are explored then “exploited”, and allies are found, “utilized” and dropped, finally leaving certified rents of no value.