Suchergebnisse

Este artículo contribuye a comprender la estructura organizativa del peronismo, la fuerza política dominante en Argentina, a partir de la observación de las designaciones partidarias en el Estado. Para ello el trabajo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre el alcance, los mecanismos, las motivaciones y los criterios de las designaciones partidarias en el Estado federal argentino, con particular énfasis en lo ocurrido durante la presidencia de Néstor Kirchner (2003- 2007). El argumento más general sostiene que las designaciones han devenido en este período en una herramienta esencial para lograr un control efectivo sobre el aparato estatal mientras que sirven, simultáneamente, para reconfigurar las élites partidarias del peronismo bajo el liderazgo del presidente. Los datos, surgidos de una amplia serie de entrevistas a expertos, permiten finalmente ofrecer un nuevo marco teórico para estudiar el vínculo entre partido y gobierno en el contexto de la democracia argentina contemporánea. ; This article contributes to the understanding of the organizational structures of peronism, Argentine dominant political force, on the basis of a study on partisan appointments. It presents the main findings of a research on the scope, the workings, the motivations, and the criteria of partisan appointments in the Argentine state, with particular attention to Néstor Kirchner administration (2003-2007). The more general argument contends that appointments became in this period a crucial tool to control the state apparatus while, at the same time, they made it possible to renovate Peronist partisan elites under the leadership of the president. The data, obtained from a large series of expert interviews, make it possible to offer a new theoretical framework for the understanding of party-government linkages in contemporary Argentine democracy.

Abstract. Studies of federal judicial appointments made before 1988 discovered significant partisan ties between judicial appointees and the governments appointing them. In 1988, in response to criticism of these "patronage appointments," the Mulroney government introduced screening committees to the process. This article explores the impact of these committees. Using information gained from surveys of legal elites, we trace the minor and major political connections of federal judicial appointees from 1989 to 2003 in order to determine whether patronage has continued despite the reform to the process. We discover that political connections continued to play an important role in who was selected for a judicial appointment. However, these connections were not quite as common as those found before 1988, and the new process does appear to have prevented the politically motivated appointment of completely unqualified candidates. Interestingly, our findings also suggest that the impact of patronage varies by region and interacts with other, newer influences, in particular, concerns for group representation on the bench. The paper concludes by briefly discussing these results in the context of the relationship between judicial selection and politics with a comparative perspective.Résumé. Les études sur les nominations judiciaires fédérales réalisées avant 1988 ont découvert des liens partisans étroits entre les juges nommés à la cour et les gouvernements les nommant. En 1988, en réponse aux critiques sur le favoritisme entourant les nominations, le gouvernement Mulroney a introduit des comités d'évaluation dans le processus. Cet article explore l'impact de ces comités. En utilisant de l'information recueillie lors de sondages menés auprès de la communauté légale, nous retraçons les connexions politiques mineures et majeures des attributaires judiciaires fédéraux de 1989 à 2003 en vue de déterminer si le favoritisme a persisté malgré la réforme du système. Nous découvrons que les connexions politiques continuent à jouer un rôle important dans la sélection des juges. Toutefois, ces connexions ne sont pas aussi importantes que celles qu'on a identifiées avant 1988 et le nouveau processus semble avoir réussi à prévenir les nominations partisanes de candidats entièrement non qualifiés. Les résultats de notre recherche suggèrent également que l'effet du favoritisme varie par région et dépend aussi d'autres facteurs plus nouveaux, en particulier le souci de représentation de certains groupes au sein de la magistrature. L'article conclut en discutant brièvement ces résultats dans le contexte de la relation entre la sélection judiciaire et la politique dans une perspective comparative.

Committee rapporteurs are central to decision making in many multiparty legislatures. It is not clear, however, whether these rapporteurs are best characterized as partisan animals or technical experts seeking consensus in nonmajoritarian institutions. We addressed this question by examining which members of the European Parliament become repeat rapporteurs. Using an original dataset comprising all committee reports from the 4th and 5th European Parliaments (1994–2004), we found that the report allocation process provides a way to pursue partisan policy goals within a multiparty, consensual institution that rewards both coalition building and expertise.

PurposeAccording to the traditional view of public administration, a critical component of good policy formulation is the provision of frank and fearless advice to elected decision-makers. This advice can be provided by permanent public officials or by the people selected by the elected governments to fill key and continuing posts. However, there are major questions as to whether new Governor-in-Council (GIC) appointment processes rooted in new public governance (NPG) are yielding the expected results promised, such as less partisanism, as a consideration for appointment.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a mixed methods approach to examine the GIC process as it is used in Canada. In using these methods, the authors employed interviews with senior officials, governmental documents review and expert validation interviews to triangulate its main findings.FindingsThe paper uses the case of the revised appointment process for GIC appointments in Canada and suggests that the new arrangements do not deliver on merit-based criteria that ensures independence is protected between political executive and senior bureaucratic officials. Although new processes may be more open and transparent than past processes, the paper suggests that such processes are more susceptible to partisan influence under the guise of being merit-based.Research limitations/implicationsThe research was limited to one country context, Canada. As such, it will be necessary to expand this to other Westminster countries. Testing whether manifestations of new public governance in appointment processes elsewhere will be important to validate whether Canada is unique or not.Practical implicationsThe authors are left to wonder if this innovation of merit-based appointments in the new administrative state is obscuring the lines of accountability and whether it forms the basis for good policy advice despite promises to the contrary.Social implicationsTrust in the government is affected by decisions behind closed doors. They appear partisan, even when they may not be. Process matters if only to highlight increased value placed on meritorious appointments.Originality/valuePrevious studies on GIC appointments have generally been to explore representation as a value. That is, studies have questioned whether diversity is maintained, for example. However, few studies have explored appointment processes using institutional approaches to examine whether reforms to such processes have respected key principles, such as merit and accountability.

This research note attempts to determine under what conditions presidents will use the unilateral tool of recess appointments, specifically to independent agencies. Multivariate analysis reveals that, after controlling for the effects of other variables, presidents are more likely to make a recess appointment if they lack partisan support in the Senate and when they have high public approval. Recess appointments are not cost free and, consequently, presidents use this power strategically and sparingly.

Studies on coalition management in presidential systems usually focus on two types of goods used by the president and formateur party to hold together coalitions: exchange goods (such as individual budget amendments) and coalition goods (such as ministries). This research note analyzes, with an original dataset of party members and political appointees in Brazil, a different type of good: presidential political appointments. Our study shows that partisan political appointees vary greatly among Brazilian ministries and within them. We also found that there is a disconnect between how many seats a political party holds in Congress and the number of political appointment offices it controls. This has implications for the literature on bureaucracy and politics and the literature on coalition management. (GIGA)

According to outspoken presidential scholar Cal Mackenzie, the presidential appointments process is a national disgrace. It encourages bullies and emboldens demagogues, silences the voices of responsibility, and nourishes the lowest forms of partisan combat. It uses innocent citizens as pawns in the petty games of politicians and stains the reputations of good people. It routinely violates fundamental democratic principles, undermines the quality and consistency of public management, and breaches simple decency. In short, at a time when the quality of political leadership in government matters

Selection of federal appellate court judges is now extremely controversial. Slowed nominee processing, accusations and countercharges between Democrats and Republicans, as well as "paybacks," have characterized appointments since 1990. One tenth of the 179 active circuit judgeships authorized by the United States Congress are perennially vacant, and substantial numbers of these positions can remain open for years. The Senate Judiciary Committee increasingly votes along straight political party lines, and Democratic senators even relied on filibusters to deny nominees positions on the United States Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit as well as the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits. The existence of numerous, protracted vacancies, therefore, has detrimentally affected the whole appointments process, appellate courts and judges, entities and individuals working on selection, and attorneys and parties who take appeals to the regional circuits. For example, lengthy openings have postponed case resolution and frustrated the goal of inexpensive and equitable appellate disposition, while vacancies forced the Sixth and Ninth Circuits to cancel oral arguments, imposing unnecessary expenditures and delay. The complication's persistence appears to have undermined respect for all three federal government branches, most significantly the institutions of the presidency and the Senate, but even the judiciary. These propositions mean that federal appeals court appointments merit scrutiny, which this Article undertakes. The initial Section discusses the reasons why many circuit judgeships have lacked occupants for extensive periods and finds that several phenomena have contributed to the appellate court dilemma. An important factor is that the regional circuits are the courts of last resort for their geographic areas, in particular when treating modern policy issues such as abortion and federalism, because the Supreme Court hears so few appeals. Similarly cogent is the prevalence of divided government: until recently, during the past two decades, one political party has controlled the Executive Branch and the other the upper chamber. I find Democratic and Grand Old Party ("GOP") presidents and senators have almost identical responsibilities for the conundrum. They assumed remarkably analogous stances when each occupied the White House and possessed a Senate majority, while either could have improved the circumstances by exercising the requisite political will. Part II evaluates appellate court selection since January 2002. This analysis reveals that phenomena-which include stalled nominee consideration, divisiveness, and partisan wrangling-that have been manifested for more than a decade continued to pervade appointments and may even have intensified. One trenchant illustration was the 2002 Judiciary Committee rejection of Judges Priscilla Owen and Charles Pickering for the Fifth Circuit, with ten Democrats voting against and nine Republicans favoring the jurists-although the full Senate might well have confirmed them. The concluding segment of the Article offers proposals for the future, which should rectify or ameliorate the current situation.

Abstract.The federal government's power to appoint judges has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. While many suggest that partisan affiliation, gender and professional background may be influencing the Canadian appointment process, and some have called into question the fairness of such influences, little attention has been directed at determining whether these characteristics influence the outcome of cases. This paper studies decisions made by the Ontario Court of Appeal between 1990 and 2003 and uses a unique measure of partisan affiliation in an attempt to answer the question: do characteristics which play a role in the appointment process influence judicial decision making.Résumé.Ces dernières années ont vu une augmentation de l'attention donné à l'autorité du gouvernement fédéral en ce qui concerne la nomination judiciaire. Il y en a plusieurs qui suggèrent que l'affiliation partisan, le sexe, et l'expérience professionnelle des candidats judiciaires sont tous des caractéristiques qui peuvent influencer la procédure de nomination. Encore d'autres ont remis en question l'équité d'un choix basé sur ces influences. Cependant, la question qui n'a pas reçu beaucoup d'attention jusqu'à maintenant est si ces caractéristiques influencent le résultat des affaires juridiques. L'article qui suit examine les décisions rendu par le Cour d'appel de l'Ontario entre les années 1990 et 2003, employant une mesure unique d'affiliation partisan, avec le but de répondre à la question : Est-ce que les caractéristiques qui peuvent jouer un rôle dans la procédure de nomination influencent les décisions judiciaires?

Some of the silliest, most alarmist, most partisan-driven
dog-whistle debate over legislation this session of the Louisiana Legislature has
come over a couple of bills determining appointed officials to state boards.

HB 462 by Republican
state Sen. Valarie Hodges
would give the governor power to appoint chairmen to the boards where he has at
least half the appointments. Out of the 483 boards currently extant, when
parsing out gubernatorial apportion proportions, appointment by other elected
officials, and other statutory constraints, the bill would affect about 30
percent of these.

Political leftists, some special interests, and their
water carriers inside and outside
the Legislature have gone apoplectic over this, alleging it's some sinister
plot by GOP Gov. Jeff
Landry, who supports it, to run roughshod over that part of state
government. They appeared most perturbed by the fact that this bill would extend
this new authority to the five boards that oversee and manage higher education,
characterizing it as "politicization."

Take it from a 35-year veteran of Louisiana higher
education: anybody who doesn't think academia is already politicized, and
highly so, has no clue as to what goes on in it. And anyone who doesn't think the
boards themselves aren't reflections of the views of who appointed them – for
now every single one by Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards although a few
Landry appointments soon will receive official confirmation – doesn't live in
the real world. Public higher education is thoroughly politicized already, and
this bill does nothing to alter this one way or the other.

This nothingness is due in part to the role of the
chairmen of these various panels, which have next to no additional power over
any other member and certainly not over the collective. For example for the Board
of Regents, a majority of members can ask for a special meeting from the
chairman, and any four members can put an item on a meeting agenda. If enough
members want something, they can get it regardless of who the chairman is or how
that person got the job. More generally, as the law addresses only those boards
where a governor appoints a majority which already given time means like-minded
appointees with the governor will assume power, this change hardly alters the
dynamic concerning the pursuit of gubernatorial priorities.

Staying with higher education boards, keep in mind
that almost every state governor appoints these members, in some cases at individual
schools. Others allow their chief executive to go even further that could spark
alleged "politicization," such as governors appointing chief
executives of higher education, and a few even have direct election of higher education board
members that is thoroughly political. So, this change seems hardly radical and opposition
for this specific reason is best understood as making a mountain out of a molehill
as an attempt to score political points and spread propaganda.

Objections from largely the same quarter also have
come over SB
497 by Republican state Sen. Blake
Miguez that would remove the role of heads of the state's private
universities in nominating people to serve on the state's Board of Ethics. The
governor selects seven nominees from among those proffered by these educrats
and each legislative leader another couple, input which the bill would cut out
of the process.

In evaluating the claim that this removal as well
politicizes matters, see the above, but more specifically: the politicized
nature of higher education being as it is, any chief executive of a college is
a political animal and brings certain political prejudices to their jobs. They do
not, in any way, depoliticize the selection process. And, as author Miguez
points out, they are unduly concentrated in New Orleans that raises more questions
about political bias and regionalism.

Miguez initiated an amendment when the bill
reached the House floor that would expand membership that in the process would decrease
the proportion of gubernatorial appointees and require that a third come from
ex-legislators, another third from ex-judges, and another from none of the
above. This would put the board's composition and selection in a form similar to a majority of states,
as at present Louisiana has a format unique among them with this interposing of
a very narrow cross-section of private citizens that have vetting privileges. Therefore,
pay no attention to framing this change as some kind of weakening of ethics enforcement,
as the current system neither provided insulation from politics nor is in its
format is a better method than that proposed in the bill that mirrors many
other states'.

In both cases, while there is some principled if
uninformed opposition to each, the vast majority of that represents an unhinged
howl by political forces removed by the electorate far from political power,
whose baying attempts to cast aspersions upon and slow down the political
agendas of the winners of those elections. Both bills are in the Senate for
concurrence. Senators and Landry need to tune out the silliness from objectors
and give the necessary approvals to turn each into law.

Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses. Adapted from the source document.

House rules allow the Speaker to choose any conferees he wishes, suggesting he might use conference delegations to advance partisan goals. In practice, the Speaker nearly always selects members of the bill's jurisdictional committee(s). The authors propose a theory of conferee selection that endogenizes both partisan goals and committee participation. They argue that the Speaker's incentives lead him to appoint committee members, but he anticipates cases in which they would produce an outcome unfavorable to the majority party. In these cases, the Speaker appoints other conferees in addition to those from the jurisdictional committee, thereby "packing" the delegation in favor of the majority party position. The authors derive and test hypotheses regarding when the Speaker packs conference delegations, and what delegations look like when packed. The tests support the theory.

Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.