Executive appointments: Duration, ideology, and hierarchy

Abstract

While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another. We remedy this by specifying an executive appointment model jointly incorporating delays and appointee ideologies. Besides predicting appointees’ equilibrium ideologies, and contrary to past claims about the relationship between ideology and duration, this theory details how ideological differences between the president and his opposition do not straightforwardly induce longer delays; rather, effects are conditioned by factors such as the office’s policy importance and divided government. Additionally, different pathways for parties to impact appointee ideology and duration are flexibly incorporated. Empirically, theoretical hypotheses receive support and evidence of parties impacting Senate trade-offs between delay and policy outcomes and successfully pressuring key members over high-stakes appointments are uncovered.

The Logic of Collective Inaction: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations

“…Intuitively, this may suggest that high‐level nominations such as cabinet secretaries are more difficult to delay, whereas the lowest‐level nominees may not be valuable enough to delay for reasons of policy. The data trend also comports well with the intuition of Chiou and Rothenberg () about the relative costs of delay by position. While seemingly more innocuous, delay of such midlevel appointments is still likely to hamper agency performance and disrupt executive control over policy implementation by creating “neckless” bureaucracies (Light ).…”

“…Examples of such offices include major independent regulatory board positions and higher‐ranking agency officials. When considering delaying a nominee, however, the temptation to delay high‐ranking nominees is likely to be tempered with the increased risk associated with a more visible display of obstruction (Chiou and Rothenberg ). As such, midlevel nominations may be targeted due to the combination of a lower profile and substantial policy influence.…”

“…This pattern is suggested by a variety of anecdotal accounts (Light ; Troy ) and comports well with intuition about how senators may balance the value and vulnerability of positions for delay. Furthermore, Chiou and Rothenberg () show that high‐level nominees are less often targets of delay likely due to the trade‐offs associated with publicly delaying a high‐stakes appointment. As such, when compared with high‐level positions such as cabinet secretaries or to the lowest‐level positions with little policy relevance, one would expect delay to be significantly greater in midlevel appointments.…”

The Contemporary Presidency: Powering Down the Presidency: The Rise and Fall of Recess Appointments

“…Many recent studies have noted that delay is endemic to the Senate nominations process (Chiou and Rothenberg 2013;McCarty and Razaghian 1999;O'Connell 2009) and furthermore that such delay is a leading cause of failure for nominees (Bond et al 2009). Furthermore, Corley (2006) has demonstrated that presidents are more likely to use their recess appointment powers in the face of senatorial delay, which implies that presidents have been using this power in instances of controversy or disagreement.…”

The When and Why of Nominations

“…In addition, Chiou and Rothenberg (2014) note that, as high-ranking positions are the most high profile, confirmation delay comes with potential audience costs for legislators; conceivably, Presidential delay when nominating might risk the same backlash for the most high-profile and high-ranking positions. 4 Therefore, the incentive to affect policy by quickly replacing higher-ups leads to a second hypothesis.…”