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Despite their responsibility for federal policy implementation in the United States, little research has focused on how presidential nominees and appointees affect public opinion. This study offers the first systematic examination of this overlooked phenomenon. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that perceived nominee competence is associated with increased trust in government in general, whereas perceptions of favoritism or patronage—characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers—are associated with decreased levels of trust in the same. Notably, perceived nominee ideology has no perceptible effect on trust in government.

ObjectivePrevious studies of presidential appointments have consistently found that presidents place their most competent appointees into agencies responsible for policy issues high on their agendas. We examine here whether public opinion responds accordingly.MethodUsing a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we examine whether members of the public, when given the backgrounds of fictional presidential appointees, are able to infer the president's policy priorities based on the perceived competence of the appointees.ResultsResults suggest that perceived policy importance is positively associated with perceptions of competence, and negatively associated with perceptions of favoritism or patronage—characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers. Moreover, these same factors are associated with increased levels of support for the president's policy positions in the policy areas for which the nominees are responsible.ConclusionsOur findings suggest presidential appointments can influence perceptions of—and support for—policy priorities.

Media accounts of presidential appointments have often characterized the ambassadorial appointments process as overtaken by patronage concerns, with the most attractive posts set aside for those responsible for the president's election, few of whom have diplomatic experience. Here, using original data on all ambassadors, envoys, and other chiefs of mission appointed during the 68th through 112th Congresses, I leverage the credentialing process of the Foreign Service to conduct an empirical test of the determinants of professional versus nonprofessional appointments. I find that Foreign Service appointments are more likely when there exists significant ideological distance between the appointing president and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the difficulty of the posting is high, and when the attractiveness of the posting is low.

Pundits, politicians, and political scientists alike often bemoan the long delays in filling both executive and judicial vacancies. However, most political science scholarship has ignored why executives delay nomination, instead focusing on why legislatures delay confirmation. In this article, I develop a formal model that seeks to explain the causes and consequences of both types of delay. By incorporating the effects of time, nominee competence, and nonpolicy incentives, the model provides a number of important findings: (1) the passage of time exacerbates the executive's first-mover advantage and may result in less-competent nominees; (2) confirmation delay results when the executive's costs of searching for new nominees are sufficiently high and/or the pool of potential candidates for nomination is sufficiently incompetent; and (3) nomination delay results when the executive's internal vetting process indicates a candidate for nomination is sufficiently incompetent relative to the pool of potential nominees.

AbstractHow do the prospects for executive branch coordination affect legislatures' willingness to expand or contract budgets for public agencies? A theory is advanced stating the conditions whereby Congress expands and contracts the budgets of U.S. federal executive agencies based upon the type of presidential loyalty displayed by agency heads, as well as whether Congress's policy interests are aligned with or opposed by presidents. One aspect of the theory posits that executive agencies' budgets exhibit relatively lower volatility in response to unreliable executive agency heads when Congress is controlled by a different party than the president compared to instances of unified party government. The evidence offers compelling, albeit mixed, support for the theory's testable predictions while gleaning novel empirical insights for understanding how the prospects for executive branch coordination via leadership appointees affect the contingent nature of Congress's decisions in shaping the funding of U.S. federal executive agencies.

AbstractTo what extent are elected legislators able to influence administrative decision making? Recent research has been divided on this question, with some studies suggesting legislators are effectively unable to influence administrative outcomes, whereas others suggesting influence is common. Here, we examine this question in the context of Pennsylvania's Abandoned and Orphan Well Plugging Program (WPP). Despite the WPP using objective evaluative criteria to prioritize which abandoned and orphan oil and gas wells should be plugged before others, our results suggest legislators are able to influence the WPP's decisions. Specifically, we find that wells are plugged more quickly when the districts in which they are located are represented by (a) more experienced legislators, (b) legislators who sit on the state House or Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committees, and (c) more liberal/Democratic legislators. These results have implications for those interested and involved in the legislative‐administrative nexus.

Many standard models of political institutions frame outcomes as a function of the preferences of key decision makers. However, these models, and the empirical analyses they inspire, typically assume decision makers can infer the identities and ideological locations of other decision makers without error. Here, we reveal the substantive importance of this assumption. We show that partisan sorting, a common cause of polarization, can result in reduced uncertainty about the ideologies of key decision makers and the identities of key pivots. When we incorporate estimates of pivot uncertainty into empirical models of executive order issuance, we find lower levels of uncertainty are associated with higher rates of policy-relevant executive order issuance. These results have implications for the study of polarization and the use of models of institutions in political science.

AbstractSchedule C and noncareer Senior Executive Service positions hold significant influence over policy outcomes, yet they have received limited scrutiny compared to advise and consent (PAS) appointments. Such appointments offer understudied avenues for presidential control over the bureaucracy. Through a comprehensive analysis of more detailed data than has been employed to date, we reveal that these appointments are responsive to broader political dynamics, particularly those relevant to PAS appointments, including inter- and intrabranch conflicts, agency ideology, Senate workload, and the political calendar. However, statutory constraints and agency characteristics – such as the managerial expertise of appointed agency leadership – also shape their utilization. While unilateral appointments provide an advantage to Presidents, executives are constrained when using them to overcome legislative opposition or reshape resistant agencies. These lower-level appointments reflect the wider political landscape, granting the President significant – but not unrestrained – opportunities to exert influence on both the bureaucracy and policy outcomes.

Given its importance and level of conflict in recent decades, scholars have expended great effort analyzing appointment politics. However, despite descriptions that might lead to conclusions that the structure of how nominees are dealt with has changed over time, quantitative analyses have not investigated possible structural changes. We remedy this by conducting a changepoint analysis using data on executive nominations from 1885–2016. Two breaks involving Senate‐initiated institutional changes are uncovered: one associated with postwar congressional reorganization, the other with post‐Watergate era alterations to the relationship between Senate and President. By contrast, neither executive‐initiated changes nor disruptions in norms produced breaks. Thus, our analysis defines three different historical eras of the appointment process, suggests what causes one period to be replaced by another, and details what factors drove appointment politics in different eras. It also urges caution in generalizing from analyses of appointments incorporating features only measurable for more recent years.

AbstractWhile the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration, respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this gap by examining theoretical predictions and related expectations about how the passage of time affects the President's choices of nominees. We find that executives are disadvantaged as days pass and Presidents propose nominees with whom they are less ideologically compatible over time.

AbstractIn recent years, scholars have expended considerable efforts to understand the executive appointment process and the forces influencing the choices made by the president and the Senate. However, some factors integral to theoretical models have not been well integrated empirically, and other relevant factors have not been incorporated much at all. Here, we focus on one determinant corresponding to the former critique—nominee ideology—and another corresponding to the latter—the independence of decision makers in the targeted agencies. We examine a series of theoretically driven hypotheses regarding the effects of both ideology and independence on who gets nominated and if and when nominees are eventually confirmed. Results show nominee ideology and decision maker independence matter a great deal and factor into presidential strategic choices and senatorial responses in ways according to expectations. Our findings have important ramifications for understanding appointments empirically and for future theoretical development.