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Administrative leader turnover adversely affects the organizational stability of U.S. federal executive agencies, as well as undermines presidents' policy goals. An incentive compatibility theory of administrative leader turnover is proposed that distinguishes between proponent (policy priority) versus caretaker (non-policy priority) loyalist executive appointees. This theory predicts that the proponents ' tenure will be comparatively more stable since it reflects incentive compatibility for both the president and executive appointee compared to caretakers where such a relationship is lacking. The evidence comports with this logic by demonstrating that appointee loyalty results in a longer tenure in office when their agency constitutes a stated policy priority for the president at the time of agreed upon service compared to when this happens not to be the case. Responsive competence in executive administration requires incentive compatibility that benefits both the president and executive appointees for ensuring stable leadership of U.S. federal agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on separation of powers assumes executives are constrained by legislative approval when placing agents in top policy-making positions. But presidents frequently fill vacancies in agency leadership with unconfirmed, temporary officials or leave them empty entirely. I develop a novel dataset of vacancies across 15 executive departments from 1977 to 2016 and reevaluate the conventional perspective that appointment power operates only through formal channels. I argue that presidents' nomination strategies include leaving positions empty and making interim appointments, and this choice reflects presidents' priorities and the character of vacant positions. The evidence indicates that interim appointees are more likely when positions have a substantial capacity to act on presidential expansion priorities and suggest that presidents can capitalize on their first-mover advantage to evade Senate confirmation. The results further suggest that separation of powers models may need to consider how deliberate inaction and sidestepping of formal powers influence political control and policy-making strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary delegation to independent central banks is the institutional standard for responsible monetary policy making. Governments overcome their own high inflation biases by delegating policy-making discretion to conservative central bankers with political independence and long terms of appointment. With a formal model of central bank appointments and monetary policy making, I provide results suggesting this canonical result hinges on widespread, empirically false assumptions about the nature of central bank preferences and the economic environment in which monetary policy making occurs. During periods of heightened monetary uncertainty, delegation to an independent central bank is a less effective institutional solution to achieving inflation goals than extant theory suggests. Under realistic economic conditions, monetary delegation can result in economic outcomes even worse than those we would expect if the government had maintained discretion. I test several predictions from the model drawing appointments and monetary policy voting records from central banks in Hungary and the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Previous 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. Method. Using 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. Results. Results 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. Conclusions. Our findings suggest presidential appointments can influence perceptions of--and support for--policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although laid and economics has influenced nearly every area of American law, few have been as deeply and as thoroughly “economized ” as antitrust. Beginning in the 1970s, antitrust law— traditionally informed by populist. hostility to economic concentration— was dramatically transformed by a new and overriding focus on economic efficiency. This transformation was associated with, a provocative new wave of antitrust scholarship, which claimed that economic efficiency (or “consumer welfare”) was the sole legitimate aim of antitrust policy. The U.S. Supreme Court seemingly agreed, issuing decision after decision rejecting traditional antitrust values and adopting the efficiency norm of the law and economics movement. By century’s end, the populist origins of antitrust had faded into memory, and the professional discourse of the antitrust community (scholars, practitioners, and judges) had become dominated by economic analysis. Although this transformation in antitrust law has been the subject of considerable academic commentary, its causes remain poorly understood. Many scholars assume, sometimes tacitly, that the economic analysis of law and economics scholarship had a direct, educative influence on the Supreme Court. Other scholars argue that changes in the Court’s antitrust jurisprudence were merely a reflection of changes in its composition, specifically the conservative appointments of the Nixon administration. What these opposing interpretations share in common is their limited evidentiary basis— both are derived from impressionistic, reviews of a select number of Supreme Court decisions, rather than systematic analysis of larger historical trends. This Article moves beyond previous scholarship by presenting a comprehensive, quantitative study of every Supreme. Court antitrust case from 1950 to 2010, a period including the decades before, during, and after the economic turn in antitrust. This comprehensive approach allows for more generalized conclusions regarding the real-world influence of law and economics scholarship. Based on both quantitative and qualitative evidence, this Article concludes that the Nixon appointments of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the primary cause of changes in antitrust jurisprudence, but that academic developments have infused these changes with an intellectual legitimacy they might otherwise have lacked, broadening their appeal and effectively insulating them from future changes in the composition of the Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment—a 50–50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches—to examine quotas’ influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to select (but not reappoint) female leaders. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of women perceived as qualified for these positions. Our findings support the notion that quotas can have an acceleration effect on women's representation in leadership positions, particularly when they augment the pool of female candidates for these posts. These results help dispel the myth that quotas trade short-term gains in women's descriptive representation for long-term exclusion from political power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Different beliefs about how to achieve shared goals are common in political organizations such as government agencies, campaigns, and NGOs. However, the consequences of such conflicts have not yet been explored. We develop a formal model in which a principal and an agent disagree about the right policy for achieving their shared goals. Disagreement creates a motivational problem, but we show how both observing policy outcomes and experimenting with policies can ameliorate it. We also show that the principal often defers to the agent in order to motivate him, thereby generating more informative policy outcomes and building future consensus. Most surprisingly, she sometimes allows the agent to implement his desired policy even when she is sure it is wrong, to persuade him through failure that he is mistaken. Using the model, we generate empirical implications about performance measurement and Presidential appointments in U.S. federal agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The National Labor Relations Act has never explicitly required political balance in the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB or Board) appointment process. But the Eisenhower administration demonstrated that policy shifts could be initiated through changes in NLRB composition. The Kennedy Board shifted gears again, prompting critics to say that the Board was on a "seesaw." More pronounced polarization began to emerge in the 1980s as political party divisiveness and union decline created more adversarial relationships. In the 1990s, divided government produced a "batching" of appointees (in contrast to annual Senate confirmation votes on each appointment as their term expired), horse trading of "interchangeable elites engaged in an insider's game" as Professor Calvin McKenzie said. Ultimately, the consequences of impasse through this process twice resulted in Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Act and the Constitution so as to alter the relationship between the President and the Senate. But the Senate, under Senator Reid, was to trump the practical effect of these holdings by eliminating the filibuster, which frequently stalled or stopped NLRB appointments. Paradoxically, however, through both oversight hearings and the Congressional Review Act of 1996, legislative interference with the work of the NLRB has never been more extensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legally independent central banks leave elected politicians with little direct control over monetary policy. The most important indirect channel of influence for governments thus consists in appointing 'responsive' central bank officials and removing 'hostile' ones. This premise is tested by examining the effect of partisan ties between central bank governors and governments or presidents in 30 European democracies between 1945 and 2012. Drawing on an original dataset containing information on the party affiliations of 195 governors, event history models are employed to show that affiliation with a party represented in the executive (the government or the presidency) has a large and significant positive effect on governor survival. However, affiliation with an opposition party only increases governors' hazards during the first four years of their term, suggesting that the impact of the party label may be overridden as more reliable information about a governor becomes available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy scholars have long emphasized bipartisanship in foreign policymaking, particularly in the context of presidential appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy, emphasizing the role of international crises and national security in affecting bipartisanship. In spite of their enduring nature, few systematic analyses of these claims exist. This study addresses these gaps using new data on appointees to the foreign policy bureaucracy. The results challenge the conventional wisdoms emerging from the foreign policy literature regarding the importance of factors like war, instead pointing to the importance of domestic political factors in affecting bipartisanship in appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the capacity of British ministers to appoint individuals to positions on the boards of agencies, boards and commissions was viewed as little more than one element of the ‘spoils of war’ in a highly majoritarian polity. This article examines how the politics of patronage has evolved in recent decades and argues that it is possible to identify a silent revolution that has gradually but consistently constrained the reach and discretion enjoyed by ministers in deploying their patronage powers. What is particularly distinctive about British political history since 2007 is the introduction of a far-reaching ladder of legislative scrutiny that ranges from informal pre-appointment hearings, at one end of the ladder, to a statutory veto over the minister's preferred candidate, at the other. However, this ‘outlawing of the spoils’ has evolved in a typically British way with reforms being implemented on an ad hoc and incremental basis, that is, frequently without any advance consultation or planning but rather dependent on non-formal, informal and discretionary elements to counter problems as they arise. The result is a complex and frequently overlapping mixture of regulatory and scrutiny processes that arguably offer little in terms of principled underpinning or constitutional logic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on crony capitalism in the U.S. as of January 2014, focusing on tax benefits and write-offs from certain parties such as NASCAR race drivers, companies operating in American Samoa, and the New York Liberty Zone. Political appointment are mentioned in relation to the U.S. Senate's confirmation of government official Jack Lew as the nation's Secretary of the Treasury and attorney Mary Jo White as the head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The methods used to select public officials affect the preferences they bring to office, the incentives they face while in office, and, ultimately, the policy goals they pursue. We argue that the preferences and actions of local election officials (LEOs) differ depending on whether they are elected or appointed. We test these expectations with a data set that includes the survey responses of 1,200 Wisconsin LEOs, structured interviews, census data, and returns from the 2008 presidential election. Drawing upon a natural experiment in how officials are selected, we find that, compared to appointed officials, elected officials express greater support for voter access and express less concern about ballot security and administrative costs. For appointed officials, we find that voter turnout in a municipality is lower when the LEO’s self-reported partisanship differs from the partisanship of the electorate but only in cases where the official is a Republican. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports that a congressional audit found that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) bypassed regular procedures when appointing members to the Science Advisory Board and Clear Air Scientific Advisory Committee.