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.     

Presidential Environmental Appointees in Comparative Perspective

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees' frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high-level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top-tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high-level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees' political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.     

Presidential personnel innovation for Presidential appointees in Korea: toward an institutional Presidency

Most presidents may come to realise that a successful individual, gifted though he may be, cannot do everything himself. The president must be assisted by a capable staff and trusted advisors. They are key to policy effectiveness. Surprisingly, in Korea, the past record of presidential performances in these respects has been less than exemplary. Under the current incumbency President Roh (2003–2008), there is accordingly growing public expectation that improvements might take place in his nascent administration. Accordingly, this article assesses the personnel problems of Presidential appointees in the previous as well as the current administration. After a brief but critical examination of the personnel selection system, it considers the ongoing efforts to undertake reform and its innovative direction. In conclusion, it observes that whilst the personnel system for merit‐based civil servants is reasonably well established in the Korean government, the presidential personnel system for political appointments is seriously underdeveloped. The author accordingly suggests some improvements of the system for ‘spoils‐based’ appointees. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing the Adversarial Burden on Presidential Appointees: Feasible Strategies for Fixing the Presidential Appointments Process

Can the current presidential appointments process be improved? This essay highlights three kinds of problems: inexperienced appointees, a lengthening process, and tedious and adversarial inquiry. While the essay side‐steps trying to affect the prerogatives of institutions involved in the tussle over appointments, it concentrates on improving the support of presidential personnel operations and the process of inquiry that nominees face, and it identifies patterns of repetitiveness among the roughly 2,800 details that a nominee must provide in responding to some 295 individual questions in nine categories. The most adversarial and tedious categories of inquiry include identifying personal background, reporting on criminal entanglements, and assaying potential conflicts of interest. Five strategies are identified for better matching the needed experience in the White House to the demands of presidential personnel. These changes would indirectly shorten the nomination and confirmation process, and the author makes three important recommendations for structuring inquiry that could reduce the adversarial burden on nominees by nearly a third.     

Getting Dirty-Minded: Implementing Presidential Policy Agendas Administratively

With polarization in Congress persistent, with staggering issues and international threats facing the nation, and with fiscal stress an enduring fact of life, presidents have for decades turned to the tools of the administrative presidency to advance and implement their policy agendas. As the Barack Obama administration completed its first six months in office amid great challenges and hopes, the president was no exception in counting on his appointees to wield the tools of the administrative presidency to advance his protean policy agenda for America. This essay offers 10 research-based lessons for new appointees charged with advancing presidential agendas administratively to ponder as they do so.     

Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy: Logic and Evidence from Agency Leadership Appointments

Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on‐the‐job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly beneath them (Agent Monitoring Learning), and place a greater relative premium on loyalty in response to horizontal policy conflict between the White House and the Senate (Common Agency Learning). This logic obtains empirical support from the analysis of bureaucratic agent traits for Senate‐confirmed presidential appointees serving in leadership positions covering 39 U.S. federal government agencies from 1977 to 2009. Presidents’ appointment strategies reflect their increasing effectiveness at managing the bureaucracy, thus complementing their increasing reliance on administrative mechanisms to achieve policy objectives as their tenure in office rises.     

Are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the analysis of political competition?

This presidential address assesses the crisis of the Downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians’ quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical conceptualization of political competition. Based on a critical review of the literature and on the author’s works on content analysis of policy speeches, income redistribution, politicians’ quality, and political legislation cycles, this address concludes that multidimensional Downsian models of political competition are adequate to explain policy divergence and points out the serious theoretical and empirical problems that models of political selection have to solve.     

Rethinking Loyalty and Competence in Presidential Appointments

Studies in presidential appointments, particularly principal-agent models, posit that presidents employ a top-down strategy to control the bureaucracy, one that promotes loyalty over competence. However, many studies have two critical limitations: (1) treating loyalty and competence as binary constructs and (2) focusing only on presidential nomination and Senate confirmation (PAS) appointments. In this article, the authors construct a continuous measure of loyalty and competence to determine how much loyalty or competence an appointee offers a president and examine other appointment tools—Senior Executive Service (SES), Schedule C, and presidential appointments—that allow presidents to influence different levels of the bureaucracy. Findings show that presidents are more likely to reward competence with their PAS and SES appointments. In addition, few appointees score high on both loyalty and competence, explaining why presidents generally must make a trade-off between loyalty and competence.     

Which government officials leak unauthorized information to the press in Washington?

Every modern president of the United States has been bedeviled by unauthorized leaks of government information to the press. Who is responsible for such leaks? Presidents of the United States have accused civil servants of attempting to undermine them. However, journalists have suggested that the presidents' own political appointees leak more. Using interviews conducted in 2013 with both presidential political appointees and civil servants who worked in public affairs for the U.S. Treasury Department during the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as interviews with reporters with whom the Treasury officials interacted frequently, this case study finds that political appointees and civil servants leak unauthorized information that does not serve the president's interests to the press with roughly the same frequency. The findings shed light on behavior that is typically shrouded in secrecy and call into question the effort by modern U.S. presidents to gain greater control of the federal government by hiring record numbers of political appointees. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Comment on "The Great Unraveling: Federal Budgeting, 1998–2006"

To declare that the federal budgetary process is in utter shambles based principally on an analysis of a six-year interval during a single presidential administration, as Professor Irene Rubin does in the preceding article, is unfair to history and misleading. Drawing on significant budgetary experience as a U.S. Senate staff member, the author of this essay argues that (1) the contributions of emergency appropriations and earmarks to the federal budgetary imbalance are overstated, (2) the goal of perpetual budgetary balance is unsound policy, and (3) budgets—inevitably the result of a political process—are artifacts reflecting societal priorities at a given point in time.     

The Institutionalist: A Conversation with Hugh Heclo

This interview marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Hugh Heclo's classic, A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington. This engaging conversation touches on such wide-ranging themes as Heclo's early mentorship by Aaron Wildavsky; his nurturing apprenticeship at the Brookings Institution, leading to the publication of A Government of Strangers; the increasingly intense partisanship and schism within the executive branch between career federal bureaucrats and political appointees; the conduct of presidential administrations as never-ending political marketing campaigns; the cynical harnessing of religion in the service of policy objectives; public service and institutional commitment; and the need for political leadership to engage the public honestly and responsibly on matters of fiscal concern.     

What price the court of St. James? Political influences on ambassadorial postings of the United States of America

This paper explores the appointment of career diplomats and political appointees to ambassadorial positions. We present models of the strategic interaction of political donors and presidential candidates, which predicts that donations will match the quality of diplomatic posting granted by the candidate. We test this prediction and confirm it for four presidential terms representing two presidents and 764 diplomatic postings over the 2000 to 2013 period. This allows for the generation of a price list associated with a range of desirable diplomatic posts. This paper provides evidence in support of the proposition that ambassadorships, in locations that are deemed desirable such as Western Europe, are awarded as a form of patronage in return for campaign contributions.     

Does politics crowd out professional competence? The organisation of ministerial advice in Denmark and Sweden

The use of politically appointed ministerial advisors has increased noticeably in many Western countries, but we know little about how this development has affected the civil servants recruited on merit. The article asks whether political appointees accentuate or blur the line between politics and administration. Do political appointees take over political-tactical advice and leave policy advice to the permanent civil service, or do they cause permanent civil servants to be even more influenced by political considerations? And do political appointees make it easier or more difficult for the permanent civil service to be politically responsive? A Most Similar Systems Design comparison of Denmark and Sweden allows an assessment of the effects of political appointees. It is found that a large number of political appointees decreases functional politicisation of the permanent civil service; that functional politicisation tends to crowd out tasks related to more classic policy advice; and that functional politicisation increases political responsiveness.     

Updating Political Evaluations: Policy Attitudes, Partisanship, and Presidential Assessments

The pervasive influence of partisanship on political evaluations is well known and understood. Whether citizens rely on their policy attitudes has received less attention, especially in the context of how people update and revise their evaluations. This paper focuses on presidential assessments and uses panel data covering three presidencies to model the determinants of opinion change. The results indicate that policy preferences (like partisanship) exert a regular and substantial influence on how citizens update their presidential evaluations.     

Appointee Confirmation and Tenure: The Succession of U.S. Federal Agency Appointees, 1989–2009

This article analyzes the confirmation and tenure of 2,300 Senate‐confirmed, presidential appointees to U.S. government agencies between 1989 and 2009, linking patterns of appointee confirmation and tenure to institutional politics, appointee independence, and agency context. Consistent with prior research, the authors find that nominees of new, powerful, and popular presidents enjoy expedited Senate confirmation. Contentious congressional committee oversight, by contrast, tends to delay confirmation and reduce tenure. Agency heads and positions insulated from removal, such as for fixed‐term positions and inspectors general, increase tenure. Extending empirical research, the analysis highlights program‐ and agency‐level variations that speak to the many contingencies shaping appointee politics. Appointee positions associated with national security and broad statutory discretion receive expedited confirmation. Agencies with more professionals are associated with increased tenure, whereas agencies with more appointees among managers see shorter tenures. The results speak to scholarship on appointee politics and to public knowledge about the role of appointments in American government.     

The presidential party and the fifth republic

Until 1986 the prevailing interpretation of the French Fifth Republic was one of encroaching presidential domination; notwithstanding some welcome revisionism occasioned by ‘cohabitation’, presidentialism continues to permeate analysis of contemporary French politics. This article attempts a comparative assessment of the presidential party as it has functioned under the first four presidents of the French Fifth Republic: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand. It is contended that each presidential party has shared certain attributes, resulting from systemic influences in France's semi‐presidential system; while retaining distinct characteristics derived from its identity as a particular type of party, and from the experience of a varying political context. The opportunities and constraints faced by successful presidential parties outweigh in importance their dissimilarites, inherited from their experience of different models of party organisation and ideology. No presidential party that has fallen from grace has managed to survive unscathed, nor to recover its position of former influence.     

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.     

POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF SOCIO-ECONOMICS*

Avariety of efforts are currently underway to develop alternatives to the neoclassical paradigm and neoclassical analysis of economic behavior. Here, the author seeks not to argue which approach is most productive, but to demonstrate the useful policy implications of adding key noneconomic (so- cial, psychological and political) variables to a paradigm that attempts to model economic behavior. This co-deterministic paradigm is called socio- economics. The article discusses the different and often insightful policy analysis that results from employing a socio-economic set of variables in four major areas: (1) allowing for shifting preferences; (2) including institu- tional contexts and influences within which individual transactions take place; (3) recognizing the effects of political as well as economic power differences; and (4) combining macro and structural policies.     

Trump's FEMA administrator appointment: The pick he got correct

Donald Trump has made many controversial appointments since taking the office of President of the United States of America. Many of his appointees have had little to no experience in their substantive area. Some even argue that many of his appointees received their jobs from patronage. One glaring exception is Brock Long's appointment as Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Long served as the Director of the Alabama Emergency Agency, the state level equivalent of FEMA. Given that he is an experience public servant, Long may prove to be of the better appointments made by President Trump.     

Issues and the presidential primary voter

Most agree that voting in presidential general elections is largely contingent on the evaluations of the candidates, issues, and parties. Yet inpresidential primary elections the determinants of voter choices are less clear. Partisanship is inconsequential, information about candidate personalities and policy positions is scarce, and a fourth factor, expectations, may influence voters. In this paper, we reconsider the influence ofpolitical issues in presidential primaries. We argue that past work has not adequately considered how issues matter in primary elections. Primaries are intraparty affairs, and the political issues that typically divide the parties are not very relevant in primaries. Instead, we focus on the policy issues each candidate chooses to emphasize in their quest for the nomination, which we call policy priorities. With data gathered about media coverage of the presidential contenders in the 1988 primaries, and using exit poll data from the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries, we show that issues, as policy priorities, do matter in presidential primary elections. This research also implies that primary campaigns matter, since information concerning the policy priorities of the candidates reaches the intended audience.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 1992.