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"In this book, readers will learn about the Executive Branch of the United States government. Vibrant, full-color photos and carefully leveled text will engage young readers as they learn more about the president's duties, who else is in the executive branch, and the work they all must do to ensure that the federal government and society runs smoothly"--

This collection of essays, edited by Joel D. Aberbach and Mark A. Peterson and written by leading scholars, examines the evolution of the presidency and the executive branch as related to civic participation and democracy itself. It provides an analysis of the president's role in developing foreign and domestic policy and how they influence the policy process and other policy makers. The Executive Branch provides a historical assessment of the role of the person of the president, the favorable and problematic attributes that past presidents have brought to the challenge of leadership, and the measure of overall success captured in notions of presidential failure or greatness.

In this lively, accessible, and highly informative survey, readers come to understand the workings of American representative democracy. They learn about the Constitution, checks and balances, and how the executive branch of government is organized. The president and vice president's powers are studied, as well as those of the cabinet and staff who offer help to the executive office. Readers discover the power of the veto, how policy is crafted, how the president carries out enumerated and implied powers that are mentioned in the Constitution, and what happens when a departing president hands

The executive branch of government constitutes the pinnacle of political power. In principle, presidents and prime ministers, along with their cabinets, set the policy agenda, debate, and deliberate policy initiatives; introduce legislation; and oversee the implementation of public policies. Executives are the most visible political actors, representing the public "face" of government. Until very recently, executives were also the most masculinized of political institutions, with women absent entirely from the position of prime minister or president until the 1960s, and, at least until the last decade, holding only a small number of posts in cabinet. Yet one of the most striking global trends in recent years is the growing number of women elected to the post of prime minister or president: at the time of writing there are 12 countries where a woman occupies the top political office. A growing number of women are also being appointed cabinet ministers and, in some cases, to some of the most traditionally masculine posts. It is common today to define "parity" cabinets as those where women hold between 40% and 60% of ministerial portfolios. With that definition, countries as different as Spain, Bolivia, Sweden, and South Africa have had gender parity in cabinet. What is more, women's presence in cabinet is now a firmly established norm. Among the first questions raised by commentators after a newly elected president or prime minister announces her cabinet are, how many women were appointed? To which portfolios were they assigned?

Although state executive branch reorganization has been surrounded by controversy and expense for more than sixty years and has been occurring at an unprecedented rate during the last thirteen, much of our knowledge of it has been anecdotal, fragmentary, conceptually imprecise, and untested, asserts Dr. Garnett. His book contributes conceptual and empirical order to the study of reorganization by analyzing competing and complementary models, evaluating research methodologies, stating hypotheses, and testing those hypotheses with data drawn from more than 150 of the state reorganizations that have taken place in this century. Dr. Garnett addresses three basic questions: Why do state reorganizations occur? How are they conducted? What forms do the reorganized executive branches take? His specific action guidelines for governors and other state officials, agenda for further research, and extensive bibliography will be particularly useful.

This book examines competing and complementary theoretical perspectives on why reorganizations occur, focusing on the form or structure state reorganizations have taken. It deals with an assessment of the leading research methodologies applied thus far to the study of state executive reorganization.

AbstractWe analyse United States presidential appointee positions subject to Senate confirmation without a confirmed appointee in office. These "vacant" positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel dataset, we analyse appointee vacancies across executive branch departments and single-headed agencies from 1989 to 2013. We develop a theoretical model that uncovers the dynamics of vacancy onset and length. We then specify an empirical model and report results highlighting both position and principal–agent relations as critical to the politics of appointee vacancies. Conditional on high status positions reducing the frequency and duration of vacancies, we find important principal–agent considerations from a separation of powers perspective. Appointee positions in agencies ideologically divergent from the relevant Senate committee chair are vacant for less time than in ideologically proximal agencies. Importantly, this relationship strengthens as agency ideology diverges away from the chair and towards the chair's party extreme.