Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy: Logic and Evidence from Agency Leadership Appointments

Abstract

Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on‐the‐job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly beneath them (Agent Monitoring Learning), and place a greater relative premium on loyalty in response to horizontal policy conflict between the White House and the Senate (Common Agency Learning). This logic obtains empirical support from the analysis of bureaucratic agent traits for Senate‐confirmed presidential appointees serving in leadership positions covering 39 U.S. federal government agencies from 1977 to 2009. Presidents’ appointment strategies reflect their increasing effectiveness at managing the bureaucracy, thus complementing their increasing reliance on administrative mechanisms to achieve policy objectives as their tenure in office rises.

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

“…It is useful to compare our findings to those presented by Krause and O'Connell (2016), who find that Presidents manage the executive branch better over the course of their administrations (which is also in line with Hollibaugh's (2015b) broader arguments, though the temporal frame of reference is different). Here, we observe Presidents nominating more ideologically divergent individuals over time (as measured by both time since vacancy onset and time since the start of a Congress); Krause and O'Connell (2016) find that Presidents tend to emphasize appointee loyalty during the first months of an administration, and competence in the later months, though in later months and years they also require more certainty about appointee traits before being willing to trade loyalty for competence (or vice versa).…”

“…It is useful to compare our findings to those presented by Krause and O'Connell (2016), who find that Presidents manage the executive branch better over the course of their administrations (which is also in line with Hollibaugh's (2015b) broader arguments, though the temporal frame of reference is different). Here, we observe Presidents nominating more ideologically divergent individuals over time (as measured by both time since vacancy onset and time since the start of a Congress); Krause and O'Connell (2016) find that Presidents tend to emphasize appointee loyalty during the first months of an administration, and competence in the later months, though in later months and years they also require more certainty about appointee traits before being willing to trade loyalty for competence (or vice versa). However, three factors muddle the comparison between their findings and ours: (a) while Krause and O'Connell (2016) measure time since the beginning of an administration, our main analyses measure time since vacancy onset and/or the start of a new Congress (though the Appendix includes models where Year in Administration is included as a covariate, and our substantive results are unchanged); (b) Krause and O'Connell's findings are in terms of how much loyalty is emphasized relative to competence, and we do not have similarlyscaled competence measures in our models; and (c) Krause and O'Connell measure "loyalty" while we measure ideological divergence, and although the two are likely related to some degree, the former measure probably also taps nonideological factors commonly associated with patronage (which Hollibaugh (2015a) argues is sometimes negatively associated with ideological convergence between Presidents and appointees).…”

Rethinking Loyalty and Competence in Presidential Appointments

“…Presidents make patronage appointments as rewards for support or for coalition building with other key political principals or to reward contributors (Mackenzie ; Patterson ; Patterson and Pfiffner ; Tolchin and Tolchin , ; Waterman, Bretting, and Stewart ). Recent scholarly works also explain how presidents match certain appointee background characteristics with specific federal bureaucratic positions (Hollibaugh, Horton, and Lewis ; Krause and O'Connell ; Lewis ; Lewis and Waterman ) or with specific agencies (Parsneau ). And presidents often encounter impediments at the recruitment stage, as some candidates find the Federal Bureau of Investigation background check and other requirements too problematic to accept a presidential appointment (Mackenzie ; Sullivan ), thus limiting the overall pool of potential presidential appointees.…”

Building State Capability

“…The facilitation process should also ensure that lessons are visibly and practically used to adapt the next steps in any experimental iteration (such that those in the reform group can actually see the impact of their experience). In this respect, it is important to 13 Readings reflecting on this kind of learning in different organizational contexts include (among others) Gertler (2003), Klein et al (2015), Krause and O'Connell (2016), Kruger et al (2015), Lam (2000), Le and Raven (2015), Li and Armstrong (2015), Liu and Maula (2015), and Yeniyurt et al (2015). We particularly like Pulakos et al (2015: 51) which addresses the importance of iteration and experiential learning in results management reforms in governments.…”