Appointments and attrition: time and executive disadvantage in the appointments process

Abstract

While 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.

Between politics and bureaucracy: a systematic literature review on the dynamics of public appointments

“…Even when research has addressed the role of Congress in confirming nominations, US studies are especially concerned with the influence of the nominee's and decision-makers' ideology on nominations (e.g. Chiou and Rothenberg, 2014; Hollibaugh, 2015a; Hollibaugh and Rothenberg, 2018; 2020).…”

“…Decisions on the profile of the nominees, therefore, involve constant strategic choices that lead to an exchange between loyalty and competence, depending on different factors, such as the area of activity of the body for which the appointment is being made (Bach, 2020; Batista and Lopez, 2021) and its proximity to the president's priority agenda (Hollibaugh and Rothenberg, 2020; Krause and O'Connell, 2019); the organization's own characteristics, such as its degree of independence, for example (Hollibaugh and Rothenberg, 2018), the level of the position (Waterman and Ouyang, 2020); and regional and temporal issues related to the interests of their political and social support bases (Palotti and Cavalcante, 2019).…”

“…Thus, when presidents need Senate approval, they tend to nominate more qualified names, reducing the candidate's potential political alignment (Hollibaugh, 2015a), as a way of minimizing the political cost of approving their nomination. That is, Congress plays an anticipatory role, favoring the qualification of nominees (Hazell et al ., 2012; Matthews and Flinders, 2015) and leading presidents to make a strategic choice between ideological proximity that favors political control and prioritization of technical competence, through merit-based choices (Hollibaugh and Rothenberg, 2020).…”

“…However, more recent studies have identified that partisanship is not enough to explain the dynamics of appointments in different countries (Albrecht, 2021; Field, 2021). Rather, appointments are the result of different factors, including cultural, temporal and organizational characteristics (Batista and Lopez, 2021; Hollibaugh and Rothenberg, 2020; Palotti and Cavalcante, 2019).…”

The Politicization Conversation: A Call to Better Define and Measure the Concept

“…Recognizing this need, elected officials manipulate administrative structure and personnel to influence agencies' willingness and capacity to respond to political demands (Bawn 1995(Bawn , 1997Hammond 1986;Hammond and Thomas 1989;Lewis 2003;McCubbins 1985;Selin 2015;Wood and Bohte 2004). This manipulation varies with context, in part because the need for credible commitment does not apply uniformly across all political environments or policy domains (e.g., Dahlström and Niklasson 2013;Di Mascio, Maggetti, and Natalini 2020;Ennser-Jedenastik 2016;Hollibaugh and Rothenberg 2020;Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014;Matthews 2020).…”