461437
1437American Politics ResearchParsneau
© The Author(s) 2011
APR41310.1177/1532673X1246
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Article
Politicizing Priority
Departments: Presidential
Priorities and Subcabinet
Experience and Loyalty
American Politics Research
41(3) 443­–470
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X12461437
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Kevin Parsneau1
Abstract
Presidents have the power to nominate the top ranks of the executive
branch and they use it toward their own goals. Presidents need a mixture
of experienced and loyal officers to promote bureaucratic competence and
responsiveness, and advance their policies within the executive branch, but
scholars’ focus has often been senatorial obstructionism rather than when
presidents prefer loyal nominees and experienced nominees. This study
uses a sample of 573 subcabinet nominations between 1961 and 2006, and
relates presidents’ nominee choices to their policy priorities and departmental jurisdictions. It finds that presidents nominate significantly more
loyalists and fewer experienced officers to higher priority departments,
indicating the importance of responsiveness, as well as their suspicion of
experienced officers. Presidents select more experienced nominees for
lower priority departments to assure competence where they are least
concerned with responsiveness. Furthermore, it finds that increased Senate ideological opposition has no significant effect on presidents’ selections.
Keywords
presidency, executive branch, nominations, bureaucracy, subcabinet
1
Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kevin Parsneau, Minnesota State University, 109 Morris Hall, Mankato, MN 56001, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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American Politics Research 41(3)
Introduction
Being President is a daunting task and presidents rely upon many others to
accomplish their goals. Following his election, Kennedy complained, “For the
last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help
me get elected President that I didn’t have time to know people who could
help me, after I was elected, to be a good president” (O’Donnell & Powers,
1972, p. 270). Presidents are elected to manage the executive branch and
enact their agenda, and the power to appoint executive officers provides them
a means to build a team of skilled and loyal officers to assist them (King &
Riddlesperger, 1996; Mackenzie, 2001). However, the Constitution also gives
the Senate the final word on nominations, drawing scholarly attention away
from the President the publicly visible Senate confirmations (DeRouen,
Peake, & Ward, 2005; McCarty & Razaghian, 1999, 2000). Nonetheless,
presidents’ decisions and policy goals are central to understanding the nomination and confirmation process of determining who holds the top political
ranks of the executive branch.
Presidents use their nomination power to build effective administrations
that promote their policies within the executive branch. As part of their
administrative presidency strategy, they politicize the executive branch by
increasing the number of political appointees and penetrating the bureaucracy with likeminded officers loyal to the presidents’ policy preferences
(Aberbach, 2009; Lewis, 2009; Moe, 1985; Nathan, 1983).1 In building their
teams, presidents must prioritize their decisions about nominees depending
upon their policy priorities and the jurisdictions of the departments (Light,
1982, 1999). They must decide in which departments they will emphasize
experienced competence, loyal responsiveness, or both. While recent scholarship has examined the interaction between presidents, Congress, and
agency ideological disposition (Lewis, 2008), there has been little discussion
of presidents’ calculations about the types of officers they nominate. They
know that their nominees will face confirmation hearings where opposition
senators have incentives to obstruct nominations, but presidents set the process in motion by deciding the types of officers in the subcabinet.
Presidents’ calculations about the value of competence, the value of
responsiveness, their own priorities, the departments’ jurisdictions, and the
Senate environment determine the combination of officers who inhabit the
top ranks of the bureaucracy. This study addresses this issue with analysis of
the nominees chosen by presidents for subcabinet offices between 1961 and
2006. I analyze nominees’ resumes, the experience and loyalty of nominees,
presidential priorities, and the Senate environment. I propose an account that
Parsneau
445
places presidential strategies at its center and fills a gap in the current literature. While the Senate may exert some influence, it has been overemphasized
and I find that presidents’ priorities and their efforts to control the bureaucracy determine the experience and loyalty of subcabinet officers.
Theoretical Framework
Presidents have incentives to nominate some experienced bureaucrats and
some political loyalists to subcabinet positions. Heclo (1977) argued that
presidents are responsible for the effective management of the executive
branch and thus select experienced nominees who are better able to promote
bureaucratic competence. Presidents must remain attentive to the danger of
lowering agency competence when politicizing agencies (Lewis, 2008), and
experienced appointees bolster agency competence because knowledge of
how departments operate links subcabinet officers to careerists, and experienced officers know how to succeed within the bureaucracy (Edwards,
2001; Light, 1987). In addition to experienced officers, presidents also need
responsive, aggressive officers advocating their preferences. Moe (1985)
argued that presidents seek “responsive competence” rather than mere “neutral competence” to control executive power. Presidents seek to populate
agencies with partisan, ideological, and personal loyalists whom they
expect to be responsive and aggressive in their promotion of presidential
preferences (Lewis, 2009; Moe, 1993). Presidents value bureaucratic effectiveness not for its own sake, but rather only to the extent that it advances
their policies.
Personal and partisan loyalties among executive officers are crucial assets
for presidents. Modern presidents, frustrated in their legislation attempts, have
resorted to administrative discretion in the implementation of existing laws
rather than through new legislation to achieve their goals (Cooper, 1986;
Howell, 2003; Nathan, 1983), and in doing so rely upon their appointees to act
as their agents (Edwards, 2001, pp. 83-84 and 101). Historically, presidents
have sought to fill departments with personal, partisan, and ideological allies
(Weko, 1995). Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger asserted that “As far as I’m concerned, anyone who supported Reagan is competent” (Lewis, 2008, p. 27).
Aberbach and Rockman (2009) argued that aggressive politicization of the
executive branch is logically connected to the “unitary executive” theory, and
in selecting appointees, the Bush (43) administration sought to “implant” its
“D.N.A. throughout government” (Rudalevige, 2008, p. 149). The need for
bureaucratic control drives presidents to place loyal operatives within bureaucracy (Warshaw, 1997).
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American Politics Research 41(3)
As they weigh their options, there is evidence that presidents treat potential
nominees’ experience as a threat to responsiveness. While subcabinet officers
may be appointed to encourage responsiveness, the bureaucracy socializes its
inhabitants to its needs and norms (Edwards & Wayne, 2006). Links between
the White House and subcabinet officers are tenuous, and officers tend to
develop their own perspective, creating the threat that they will pursue their
own or their department’s interests at the president’s expense (Edwards, 2001,
p. 97). Presidents express concern that once in office their appointees will “go
off and marry the natives” (Cronin, 1980). Nixon complained: “It is inevitable
when an individual has any government position, that after a certain length of
time he becomes an advocate of the status quo; rather than running the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy runs him” (Nixon, 1972, p. 1150). A subcabinet officer
who has previously worked in the bureaucracy will have developed loyalties
to its norms, its status quo and the bureaucrats themselves.
The complex nature of a subcabinet officer’s experience within the executive branch suggests a trade-off for presidents seeking to promote their policies through nominations. By virtue of their positions, political appointees
face cross pressures between the president and their departments they lead
(Pfiffner, 2001, p. 113). Pressures within the departments compete for loyalty
and threaten responsiveness. On the one hand, subcabinet officers must manage the bureaucracy to implement the president’s policies but, on the other
hand, experienced officers may have developed narrow views that conflict
with presidential preferences, or may have competing loyalties to careerists,
relevant congressional committees, or clientele interest groups (Edwards,
2001). Presidents must weigh the costs and benefits of selecting loyalists and
experienced officers, even as they consider how to account for the Senate’s
environment.
Presidential Priorities and Departmental Jurisdictions
The question remains when presidents emphasize policy responsiveness or
bureaucratic competence in their nominees. Presidents have policy priorities
relative to different cabinet departments (Light, 1982, 1999) and some departments have jurisdictions that are simply more important to them than others.
Light (1999) argues that presidents are constrained by internal and external
resources and, yet, they choose to concentrate upon “issues that match their
personal and political goals” (pp. 63-71). Lewis (2008) contends that presidents seek to increase the number of appointed positions in agencies where
the ideological disposition differs most from their own. Gerhardt (2000)
argues that the more important a position is to a president’s long-range goals,
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447
the higher value he places upon nominating his preferred person and the less
likely he will compromise with senators. This suggests that politicization
should exhibit patterns based upon differences between cabinet departments
and the importance of their policy jurisdictions to the president’s agenda
(Lewis, 2009), and presidents would be most aggressive in nominating loyalists to the departments closely associated with their priorities if they are to
advance the policies most central to their agendas (Edwards, 2001).
Anticipating the Senate Environment
While the presidents’ decisions are central to understanding the confirmation
process, much of the research has examined the publicly visible Senate confirmation process (McCarty & Razaghian, 1999; Ragsdale, 1996). The conventional wisdom has been that the Senate rejects nominees only in rare
cases because it defers to presidents in choosing their subordinates (Cohen,
1988, p. 10; King & Riddlesperger, 1991, 1996, p. 281). Other scholars have
argued that, even when confirming most nominees, senators can influence
executive agencies by using hearings to make their concerns known or identify negative information about nominees as rationale for others to oppose
confirmation (Gerhardt, 2000; Krutz, Fleisher, & Bond, 1998), as part of an
overall strategy of competition with presidents (Mackenzie, 1981). Positive
theorists argue that nominations are games of anticipation, and anticipation
of senatorial obstructionism can force presidents to propose less controversial persons than their preferred nominees (Cameron, 2000, pp. 55-56).
McCarty and Razaghian (1999) showed that the senators engage in dilatory
tactics, especially “holds” (Binder & Smith, 1997), because they prefer the
status quo over policies with the nominee in place. Senators’ preferences can
be reflected in the outcome even though they confirm almost all nominees
(Hill & Hammond, 1993). These works reveal aspects of the Senate environment that presidents must anticipate.
As the first mover in the game of anticipation, presidents’ actions matter
and the description of process must account for their goals. Nixon (2004)
studied appointees who had also served in Congress and concluded that ideological tilts in the Senate affect the ideology of nominees, but Nixon’s sample
primarily consisted of cabinet secretaries rather than subcabinet officers and
is thus limited in generalizability. Bertelli and Feldman (2006) argued that
presidents choose nominees to offset the influence of interest groups on policies. Lewis (2008) identified patronage and policy control as two main presidential goals in politicizing agencies, and concluded that they politicize
agencies when the ideological disposition of the agency differs from the
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American Politics Research 41(3)
president. While Lewis (2008) examined politicization through increasing
the numbers of appointed positions, his work suggests that similar strategic
considerations could affect the selection of appointees based upon partisanship and political attitudes (p. 208).
Discussions about presidential bureaucratic control have been dominated
by the debate between bureaucratic competence and responsiveness, but neither of these descriptions captures the full picture. Even as they recognize the
need for some experienced officers, they act with concern for responsiveness
rather than mere competence, and nominate more loyalists to the priority
departments. Moe (1985, 1993) accurately emphasized the importance of
responsiveness, but even “responsive competence” may overstate the concern for competence. Presidents seek competence, but they are also suspicious that experience threatens responsiveness. In nominations to higher
priority departments, they may nominate people with less experience because
they are suspicious of too much experience. However, in nominations to
lower priority departments, a president may emphasize nominees’ experience, with more concern for competence and less for responsiveness, because
they seek only to inefficiency or disaster rather than to alter the status quo.
Hypotheses
The previous discussion suggests a set of testable hypotheses relating presidential decisions about nominees’ loyalty and experience, presidential
departmental policy priorities, and anticipation of Senate reaction. Presidents
place a premium upon politicizing high-priority departments with loyalists,
and thus a president will choose people whose demonstrated loyalty to him
indicate that they will be responsive in higher priority departments
Hypothesis 1: A president making nominations to higher presidential
priority departments will nominate potential subcabinet officers
with greater loyalty to his policy agenda.
Nominees’ strong partisanship and personal connections to the president
should be positively associated with nominations made to higher priority
departments.
While a subcabinet officer’s responsive loyalty indicates that she would
aggressively promote the president’s priorities, scholars differ on their expectations about an officer’s experience in promoting presidential policies. On the
one hand, a president must nominate people whose experience ensures efficient
administration (Edwards, 2001; Light, 1987). On the other hand, a president
who views experience as a threat to responsiveness would nominate people
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449
with less experience to high-priority departments because the desire for responsiveness trumps the desire for competence (Moe, 1985; Pfiffner, 2001).
Hypothesis 2: A president making nominations to higher presidential
priority departments will nominate potential subcabinet officers
with less experience.
In departments where bureaucratic responsiveness is most important,
presidents may view experience and ties to the bureaucratic status quo as a
threat. This argument is not that presidents do not value some experience in
high-priority departments, but that there is a significantly decreased probability of nominating experienced officers to them. Looked at another way, this
hypothesis suggests that in lower priority departments where presidents do
not seek to alter the status quo, presidents nominate people with more experience. They value experience in agencies where their most important goal may
simply be to avoid problems or negative publicity.
Scholars have argued that presidents politicize agencies in anticipation of
the Senate’s reaction (Cameron, 2000; DeRouen et al., 2005; McCarty &
Razaghian, 2000; Nixon, 2004; Volden, 2002). Presidents might anticipate
stronger opposition by moderating their choices for the subcabinet to people
who are less loyal to their agenda (Cameron, 2000; Nixon, 2004).
Hypothesis 3: A president with stronger Senate opposition will nominate potential subcabinet officers with less loyalty to his agenda.
At the same time, Fiorina (1992) argued that divided government enhances
the quality of executive appointees, suggesting that presidents anticipate
strong opposition nominating people with more experience to immunize
nominations from senatorial charges of inexperience.
Hypothesis 4: A president with stronger Senate opposition will nominate potential subcabinet officers with more experience.
If anticipation of ideological or partisan opposition in the Senate’s confirmation affects presidents’ choices, it should be reflected in their choices of
subcabinet nominees.
Methodology
The unit of analysis for this study is individual nominations. The nominations are a sample of 573 nominations made between 1961 and 2006, drawn
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at random from nominations to the cabinet departments to subcabinet positions requiring Senate confirmation.2 These offices include the positions
within the executive branch that are important enough to be summarized in
the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, including undersecretaries, deputy
secretaries, associate attorneys general, inspectors general, administrators,
assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, deputy undersecretaries,
and assistant attorneys general, but not including cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, nominees to the Executive Office of the President or regulatory
boards. For each year, the number of nominations was selected according to
that year’s proportion of nominations to all qualifying offices from all years,
and the sample of nominees represents approximately one in every 5.9, or
16.9%.3 Nominations were included independent of whether they were confirmed because the relevant dependent variable is the president’s choice of
nominee, and not whether the nominee was confirmed.
Dependent Variables
The dependent variables of interest to this study measure the loyalty and
experience of the nominees, both centrally important to examining presidential promotion of responsiveness and competence. I use personal and
employment experience data on the nominees to score each nominee on the
Loyalty and Experience variables. Each is an additive index of the number of
affirmative answers to relevant questions about their employment history
and political experience at the time of their nomination. In each case, public
information from the nominee’s resume at the time of nomination, as
recorded in either Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Politics,
or in the appendix of the nominee’s committee hearing, and known to both
the president and senators, was used to calculate scores.
In the cases of both variables, it is difficult to assign values to measures
of abstract concepts such as loyalty or relevant experience.4 Even presidents and their staffs after extended interviews cannot be certain how loyal
appointees will prove to be, and senators use interviews and hearings to
determine whether nominees will put presidential interests ahead of senators’ concerns. Loyalty is measured as the number of “yes” answers to the
following two questions:
1. Did the nominee have personal ties to the president as indicated by
past employment with presidential staff or campaign?
2. Did the nominee have strong partisanship as indicated by holding a
political party office or job?
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451
Question 1 captures whether the nominee can be expected to have loyalty
based upon a personal relationship to the president (Bertelli & Juenke, 2004;
Cohen, 1988; Edwards, 2001).5 Question 2 captures whether the nominee has
strong partisan or ideological commitment to the president’s agenda.
Affirmative answers to these questions measure a nominee’s personal, partisan, or ideological loyalty to the president’s agenda. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the term “loyalist” to indicate a nominee who answers “yes” to
either Question 1 or 2.
Relevant experience for the variety of positions within the executive
branch is difficult to quantify, but these measures are based upon past scholarly works and readings of confirmation hearings.6 In order for a subcabinet
officer to be successful, there is no substitute for experience within the executive branch or the specific department and to be savvy in the ways of
Washington, DC (Edwards, 2001; King & Riddlesperger, 1996; Light &
Thomas, 2000). Experience is measured as the number of “yes” answers to
the following two questions:
3. Did the nominee have past executive branch employment?
4. Did the nominee have past employment with the relevant department?
Question 3 captures whether the nominee has any federal agency experience. Question 4 captures whether the nominee has experience with the specific department, indicating knowledge of that department’s unique workings
and familiarity with issues related to it. In effect, a score of 1 indicates a
nominee with some federal bureaucracy experience and a score of 2 indicates
experience in the department to which she is nominated. Unless otherwise
indicated, I use the term “experienced” to indicate a nominee who answers
“yes” to either Question 3 or 4.7
Independent Variables
Presidential priorities affect the selection of nominees, making the importance
of the department’s policy jurisdiction to the president’s agenda the most
important independent variable in this study. This study measures presidential
priorities relative to different departments by scoring each department for
each term as a proportion between 0 and 1 based upon policy statements in
the State of the Union Addresses and Budget Messages of the President.8
Light (1982, 1999) argued that presidents reveal their policy agendas in their
public statements, specifically the State of the Union Addresses. The Budget
Message of the President communicates the president’s top priorities in a
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American Politics Research 41(3)
public document to the legislature and is frequently more thorough than the
State of the Union Address. The more frequently a president mentions a
department, its officers or the policy jurisdiction of a department, the higher
priority score is assigned to nominations to the department.
This study’s measure combines two proportions derived from content analysis of these documents to assign scores that measure the extent to which a
department’s policy jurisdiction is featured in these public statements of presidents. The first measure is derived from Baumgartner and Jones’s9 work on
State of the Union Addresses that coded policy categories for each sentence in
the addresses. The second measure is derived specifically for this study by
coding each paragraph of each term’s first State of the Union Addresses and
Budget Message of the President. Each paragraph was coded according to
whether it had policy-relevant statements and whether those statements were
either implicit or explicit references to cabinet departments,10 and then each
department was scored according to the average proportion of implicit and
explicit statements divided by the total number of policy-relevant statements
related to that department.11
While both measures are blunt indicators of presidential priorities relative
to cabinet departments, combining two similar measures increases the reliability of the measure (Crano & Brewer, 1986). On its face, the Presidential
Priority Department variable is a combined measure that captures the importance of the policy jurisdiction to a president’s efforts to advance his priorities
within the bureaucracy. For example, in Johnson’s second term during his
advocacy for his “Great Society,” the Department of Health, Education and
Welfare had a Presidential Priority score of 0.40, compared to the highest
nonsocial service department, the Treasury Department, with a score of 0.12.
During Carter’s efforts to address the “Energy Crisis,” the Department of
Energy had a Presidential Priority score of 0.22 compared to 0.04 for the
Justice Department. During Reagan’s second term, the Treasury Department
had a Presidential Priority score of 0.32 compared to 0.14 for the Commerce
Department and 0.04 for the Department of Agriculture. The Presidential
Priority measure quantifies the importance that each department’s subcabinet
offices have relative to the president’s policy agenda.
Presidents must anticipate senatorial assertion of their confirmation powers
to delay or even defeat nominations. Even a single senator can delay confirmations to pressure presidents to alter their choices (McCarty & Razaghian,
2000). The senator at the filibuster pivot is the key voter in confirmations
(Johnson & Roberts, 2004), because he represents the vote crucial to stopping
a filibuster against a nominee (Binder & Smith, 1997; Krehbiel, 1998).
Mackenzie (2001) argues that filibusters are the key to senatorial confirmation
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453
opposition (pp. 31-32). This study operationalizes Senate Opposition as the
absolute difference between the president’s first dimension DW-Nominate score
and the filibuster pivot’s DW-Nominate score. The greater the distance between
the two, the greater would be the ideological opposition to nominations.
Control Variables
Other aspects of a subcabinet nomination can affect strategic calculations.
Previous research has argued that presidents and senators treat nominations to
foreign policy departments different from domestic departments, and I statistically control for the difference. The reason for this control is twofold. First,
there is evidence that Congress has been more deferential on foreign policy and
given generally more leeway, and there has been greater bipartisan agreement
about nominations to the defense and state departments, as well as fewer partisans and more experienced nominees to those departments (Cronin, 1980;
Ragsdale, 1996). Bertelli and Feldmann (2006) argued that the nature of the
interest group environment and oversight related to these agencies may alter
presidential choices (p. 33). Second, my presidential priority variable is based
upon public statements in which foreign policy discussion accounts for a large
proportion of the text and would swamp differences between other policy areas.
To account for the different strategic considerations and the disproportions in
references, I employ two dichotomous variables, Defense and State, equal to 1
if the nomination is to the relevant foreign policy department, and 0 if not.
Lewis (2008) examined the effects of relationship between presidents,
Congress, and the ideological predisposition of agencies in politicization of
the bureaucracy. He argued that presidents politicize by trying to change the
number of appointees with the goals of patronage or policy control. To enhance
political control, presidents seek to increase the number of appointees in agencies that they perceive as ideologically different from themselves. Thus, conservative presidents tend to politicize liberal departments and liberal presidents
tend to politicize conservative departments. While Lewis includes many other
offices and examines the number of offices rather than the types of nominees,
the ideological predisposition of the agency is still an important consideration.
To account for those effects on subcabinet nominee choices, I use Lewis’s
categories based upon extensive expert surveys to code a dichotomous,
Department Disposition, variable equal to 1 when the president is a conservative making a nomination to a liberal department or a liberal making a nomination to a conservative department.
Bureaucratic control literature emphasizes the importance of presidents
“hitting the ground running” in appointments (Edwards, 2001; Mackenzie,
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American Politics Research 41(3)
2001; McCarty & Razaghian, 2000), and to account for the importance of the
first 3 months, I use a dichotomous Honeymoon variable equal to 1 if the
nomination was made during the first 3 months of the administration and 0 if
not. In a broader context, King and Riddlesperger (1996) found that the
Senate expedites popular presidents’ nominations and others have found that
presidents can use popularity to counter Senate delays (Johnson & Roberts,
2004; Krutz et al., 1998). I account for the public support by the most recent
previous Gallup presidential approval rating prior to the nomination as a
whole number between 1 and 100 with the Presidential Approval variable.
Finally, presidents use appointments to build electoral support by choosing
nominees from key electoral groups (Gerhardt, 2000; Pfiffner, 2001). Because
electoral calculations may affect choices, I control for first-term presidents
with a dichotomous Face Election variable equal to 1 during the first term
and 0 when not.
This study employs two additional statistical controls: the rank of the position and the availability of nominees. McCarty and Razaghian (1999, 2000)
found that the senators are less tolerant of fellow senators’ dilatory tactics on
more salient, higher ranking offices, resulting in shorter confirmation times
for these nominations. Consistent with their ranking system, I control for the
effect of nomination to higher office with a dichotomous Rank variable.
Nominations to lower ranked offices, such as assistant secretaries, deputy
assistant secretaries, deputy undersecretaries, and assistant attorneys general
are scored as 0 for Rank, and nominations to higher offices such as undersecretaries, deputy secretaries, associate attorney generals, and inspectors general
are scored as 1. Furthermore, presidents with more prospective nominees to
choose from should have more leeway than presidents with fewer, and the vast
majority of nominees whose political affiliation can be determined from their
resumes are from the president’s party.12 Thus, a president whose party has
controlled the executive branch more in recent years has more potential
choices, and thus more leeway (Lewis, 2008, p. 124), and it should affect the
number of loyalist and experienced nominees. This study operationalizes the
availability of nominees with an Availability variable equal to the number of
years in the previous 12 that a president’s party has held the executive branch.13
Finally, administrative presidency scholars have noted that Nixon’s administration marks a turning point in presidential strategies. Nixon initiated a
strategy of advancing his policies through administrative procedures, reorganization, centralization, and politicizing agencies (Nathan, 1983), and later
presidents have also employed such administrative strategies to further their
policy goals (Aberbach & Rockman, 2009; Howell, 2003; Moe, 1989). The
subcabinet nominee sample begins with the Kennedy administration in 1961
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455
Figure 1. Subcabinet nominees in sample by presidential administration.
as the first administration to begin his presidency with control of his own personnel office (Mackenzie, 1990), and I account for Nixon’s development of
the administrative presidency with a dichotomous variable, Post-1968, equal
to 1 for Nixon and subsequent presidents and 0 for Kennedy and Johnson.
Subcabinet Nomination Sample
The nominations analyzed in this study are a sample of nominations to sixteen cabinet departments, including health, education, and welfare counted
twice because it was split into the education and health and human services
in 1979. Republican presidents made 59.3% of the nominations, reflecting
the additional years that Republicans controlled the White House. Of the
nominations in the sample, 76.0% were made by presidents facing reelection,
13.6% were made during the first 3 months of their administrations, and
22.1% of the nominations were to higher ranking posts in the subcabinet.
Figure 1 reports the number of nominees in the sample by administration.
The number of subcabinet nominations per administration varies from 26 for
Ford to 100 for Clinton, and generally reflects more nominations for presidents who served longer as well as a trend of increasing numbers of subcabinet offices over time. While there may be theoretical justifications for
sampling an equal number of nominees from each administration (e.g., by
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American Politics Research 41(3)
Figure 2. Subcabinet nominees in sample by agency.
increasing the probability that a Kennedy nomination would be in the sample
compared to a Reagan nomination), this study sampled proportionally across
administrations to equally weight each nomination rather than each president
and to remain consistent with earlier studies of the nomination and confirmation processes that weight each nomination equally across administration
(McCarty & Razaghian,1999; Nixon, 2004).
Figure 2 reports the number of nominations in the sample by department. The
number generally varies according to age and the size of the department, with
only 5 nominations to the Department of Homeland Security and up to 77 nominations to the Department of Defense. The Departments of Commerce with 66
nominations and the Treasury Department with 52 nominations led the domestic
policy departments, although the total nominations combined from Departments
of Health, Education, and Welfare and the two departments it divided into (education and health human services) equals treasury with 52 nominations.
The relationship between nominee loyalty and experience is important in
the examination of presidential selection of nominees who are loyalists, experienced, neither, or both. Table 1 reports the cross-tabulation of loyalist and
experienced nominees. While scholars have tended to treat loyalty and experience as a trade-off between “hacks” and “bureaucrats” (Dionne, 2001), the
relationship between nominee loyalty and experience is more complicated
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Parsneau
Table 1. Subcabinet Nominees’ Loyalty by Experience (Whole Sample).a
No experience
Experienced
(“experience” = 0) (“experience” > 0)
Nonloyalists (“loyalty” = 0)
Loyalists (“loyalty” > 0)
Totals
26.4% (151)
11.7% (67)
38.0% (218)
46.2% (265)
15.7% (90)
62.0% (355)
Totals
72.6% (416)
27.4% (157)
100.0% (573)
a
Cells report the proportion of the whole nominee sample as a percentage with the raw total
below in parentheses.
than a simple trade-off. Edwards (2001) argued that there is no necessary reason to view expertise and loyalty as opposites.
On the one hand, in any given nominees’ career, experience in the executive branch would take time away from the types of activities such as campaign and partisan work that indicate loyalty. On the other hand, there are not
disproportionate numbers of nominations in the upper right and lower left
cells of Table 1 that would indicate a trade-off, and there are a substantial
number of nominees (15.7%) who are both loyalists and experts.14 This study
cannot resolve whether presidents necessarily must choose between loyalty
and experience. However, there are a substantial number of nominees who
are both, indicating that although presidents might often see loyalty and
experience as a trade-off, they do not necessarily have to choose between the
two and often do not.
Statistical Method
This study uses ordered logistical regression for its primary analysis of presidential choices of nominees. Given the nature of the dependent variables,
Experience and Loyalty as discrete and ordered categories, ordered logistic
estimations of the relationship are the appropriate statistical methods and are
preferable to ordinary least squares regression (Borooah, 2002). Each coefficient for ordered logistic regressions is interpreted as the additive change in the
log of the odds ratio produced by a one-unit change in the independent variable.
This study offers two equations for the two dependent variables, Loyalty and
Experience, using the same set of independent variables for each equation.15
Findings
Presidents’ selections of subcabinet nominees reflect strategic decisions about
advancing their priorities as well as nominees’ loyalty and experience, and
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American Politics Research 41(3)
without as much concern for senatorial opposition as previous scholarship has
suggested. According to these findings, presidents making subcabinet nominations to their higher priority departments emphasize the need for responsiveness by nominating significantly more loyalists, and in practice presidents
view nominees’ experience with suspicion and nominate fewer experienced
nominees to their higher priority departments. This finding also means that
presidents making nominations to lower priority departments de-emphasize
responsiveness, and emphasize competence by selecting significantly more
experienced nominees. At the same time, the strength of Senate opposition
has no significant effect, indicating that anticipation of Senate opposition
plays little if any role in presidential choices. Presidents do not simply nominate a mixture of loyalists and experts, as other works suggest, but rather their
choices reflect calculations about how best to advance their higher priorities.
While previous scholarship on subcabinet offices found that presidents
desire some combination of experience and loyalty to promote their policies,
these findings reveal the strategic nature of their choices. Presidents are most
aggressive in politicizing higher priority departments. The findings in Table 2
indicate that presidents emphasize responsiveness by nominating more loyal
nominees to higher priority departments.
The significant positive coefficient for the Presidential Priority Department
variable in the responsiveness model (Table 2, left column) indicates that presidents nominate significantly more loyal officers to their higher priority departments (p = .027). Hypothesis 1 is confirmed. Presidents politicize cabinet
departments by nominating subcabinet officers whose loyalty motivates them
to aggressively promote the presidential preferences. The president’s policy
goals are central to their first move in the subcabinet confirmation game.
The conditional probability estimates in Figure 3 report the extent of the
effect of presidential priorities upon the probability of choosing subcabinet
nominees whose backgrounds indicate their loyalty to the president. In
order to aid interpretation of these results, it displays the predicted probabilities of nominations at different levels of loyalty (one or two) based upon
the importance of the department to the president’s agenda (other variables
set at their means).
Across the whole range of the values of the independent variable, the
probability of nominating someone in the most loyal category (loyalty = 2)
more than triples, increasing from 3.1% to 10.4%, and the probability of
nominating someone in the lower loyalty category (loyalty = 1) more than
doubles, increasing from 16.3% to 36.4%. Overall, presidential priorities are
associated with a 27.3% increase in the probability of nominating a loyalist
to the subcabinet across the range of data in the sample.
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Table 2. Policy Promotion Regressions.
Responsiveness
(loyalty)
Presidential Priority Department
Senate Opposition
Department Disposition
State Department
Defense Department
Presidential Approval
Honeymoon
Face Election
Rank
Availability
Post-1968
Cut 1
Cut 2
Observations
Pseudo-R2
2.89 (1.304)*
−0.302 (0.558)
0.280 (0.235)
0.263 (0.343)
−0.342 (0.369)
0.004 (0.009)
0.583 (0.296)*
−0.071 (0.250)
−0.275 (0.254)
0.083 (0.044)
0.994 (0.407)*
2.79
0.825
4.816
0.851
573
0.033
Competence
(experience)
−2.554 (1.118)*
−0.491 (0.426)
0.260 (0.188)
0.700 (0.279)*
0.066 (0.252)
−0.003 (0.007)
−0.278 (0.250)
−0.642 (0.206)**
0.372 (0.191)*
0.104 (0.034)**
−0.613 (0.274)*
−3.08
1.19
−2.15
1.19
573
0.042
Cells report the regression ordered logistic coefficients (left) and SEs (parentheses).
*Significant at the p < .05 level.
**Significant at the p < .01 level.
Anticipation of the Senate environment is not an important determinant of
nominee loyalty. Senate opposition does not significantly reduce nominee loyalty (p = .589). Hypothesis 3 is rejected. While other studies have found that
Senate opposition decreases success in confirmation (King & Riddlesperger,
1991) and delays confirmations processes (McCarthy & Razaghian, 1999,
2000), presidents appear willing to risk these costs to populate the bureaucracy with subcabinet officers responsive to their preferences. Furthermore,
the average length between nomination and confirmation for loyalists and
nonloyalists is only 3.5 days longer (50.3 and 46.8 days, respectively) and is
not statistically significant.16 Presidents choose their nominees without significant concern for opposition in the Senate.
Presidents choose people with significantly more experience to subcabinet
offices in their lower priority departments, and significantly less experience to
offices in higher priority departments. The significant negative coefficient for the
Presidential Priority Department variable in the competence model (Table 2,
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American Politics Research 41(3)
Figure 3. Conditional probabilities of nominating loyalist subcabinet officers.
Note. The area under the top line represents the probability of a nominee with a
loyalty score greater than 0, and the area between each line and the lower line (or
axis) represents the probability of a nominee with the respective loyalty score.
right column) indicates that they select experienced nominees in departments
where they do not seek to change the status quo, but nominate people with less
experience to their higher priority departments (p = .022). Hypothesis 2 is confirmed. Presidents seek competence in lower priority departments and select
experienced nominees better at managing and motivating careerists. However,
they seek responsiveness even at the potential cost of reduced competence with
less experience in higher priority departments, indicating the importance to presidents of gaining responsive implementation of their policies.
The statistical estimates in Figure 4 report the extent of the effect of presidential priorities upon nominee experience. To aid interpretation of these
results, it displays the predicted probabilities for different levels of nominee
experience based upon how important the department’s jurisdiction is to the
president’s agenda. Setting all other variables at their means, the probability
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461
Figure 4. Conditional probabilities of nominating experienced subcabinet officers.
Note. The area under the top line represents the probability of a nominee with an
experience score greater than 0, and the area between each line and the lower line
(or axis) represents the probability of a nominee with the respective experience
score.
of nominating someone in the most experienced category (experience = 2;
i.e., to a department in which they have previously served) is cut by more
than half, decreasing from 42.0 % to 18.7%, while the probability of nominating someone in the lower category (experience = 1; i.e., any executive
branch experience) drops from 24.6% to 20.1%.17
Across the range of the sample, presidential priorities are also associated
with a 27.9% decrease in the probability of nominating someone with executive branch experience. Figure 4 illustrates the extent to which presidents
select nominees with more experience in lower priority departments where
they are more concerned with administrative competence and less concerned
with promoting responsiveness.
This finding supports the view that presidents nominate fewer experienced
subcabinet officers to their higher priority departments because they view
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American Politics Research 41(3)
previous experience with suspicion. Specifically, presidents demonstrate a significant decrease in the probability of choosing nominees who have served in
the same department. A potential nominee’s previous experience in any department may suggest some decrease in responsiveness, but a nominee returning to
a department where she has already served would be that much more likely to
be influenced by that departmental status quo contrary to presidential preferences. The sharp decline of 23.3% across the range of the data indicates that
presidents worry that nominees with previous experience in the same department are less responsive. Contrary to some assumptions, presidents do not
view a potential nominee’s previous experience within a department as always
an asset, but rather they view it with suspicion in nominations to their higher
priority departments and worry about their agents “going native” where policies
matter most. However, in other departments, less important to their agendas,
presidents would still nominate experienced people to promote administrative
competence.
This empirical support for presidential suspicion of previous executive
branch experience should be kept in perspective. The evidence does not support the case that presidents entirely avoid nominating experienced subcabinet
officers. First, theoretically, presidents could choose to never nominate people
with any experience, but they often do. Second, the finding that availability
increases nominee experience, as indicated by the significant coefficient for
the Availability variable in the competence model (Table 2, right column),
indicates that presidents choose more experienced nominees when more are
available (p = .003). Presidents may be cautiously suspicious, but they clearly
realize the value of some experience among their subcabinet officers to even
higher priority departments. While there is no set minimal standard for proportion of experienced subcabinet officers, in practice subcabinet nominees
with some executive branch experience still make up 62.0% of the nominees
in the sample. This presidential strategic behavior makes sense in that it portrays presidents as avoiding experienced nominees in their highest priority
departments, but ensuring bureaucratic competence in departments whose
jurisdictions matter little to them. In these departments, presidents have little
disagreement with the status quo and hope that no bureaucratic incompetence
there hurts their administration’s reputation. While they avoid appointing “too
many” people with “too much” experience to higher priority departments,
they find some experienced people whom they trust.
The evidence also indicates that Senate opposition strength does not have
a significant effect upon nominee experience. The coefficient for Senate
opposition (Table 2, right column) is not significantly different than 0 and is
in the wrong, negative direction (p = .250). Hypothesis 4 is rejected. Senators
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publicly state that they see their role in confirmations as assuring minimal
levels of competence among subcabinet officials, but greater ideological
opposition to the president does not, in itself, result in him choosing nominees
with more experience (King & Riddlesperger, 1996). Senators may enforce a
minimum standard of competence but ideological differences with the president do not significantly alter the standard or affect presidential decisions.
In addition to identifying the ways presidential priorities affect the strategic choices of presidents, these findings reveal other strategic aspects of subcabinet nominations. The need to politicize quickly officers increases
nominee loyalty. Scholars have frequently noted the importance of presidents
seizing control of the bureaucracy early in their administration (Mackenzie,
2001; McCarty & Razaghian, 2000; Moe, 1985, 1989, 1993; Nathan, 1983)
by placing loyal subcabinet officers quickly. The significant coefficient for
the Honeymoon variable (p = .049) in the positive direction for the responsiveness regression indicates that presidents act quickly to gain control of the
bureaucracy through the nomination of officers loyal to his policy agenda.
Finally, the coefficient estimates for the Post-1968 variable are consistent
with previous research on the administrative presidency since Nixon. The
significant positive coefficient in the responsiveness model (p = .015) and
the significant negative coefficient in the competence model (p = .026) indicate that Nixon and more recent presidents have been more likely to nominate subcabinet officers who were loyalists and who were less likely to have
executive branch experience. These results should be interpreted with caution because the nature of ordered logistic regression calculations means
they are a comparison of the Kennedy and Johnson nominees to Nixon and
more recent presidents, but the findings are consistent with a picture of
changing strategies by presidents in the modern era. Nixon and his predecessors politicized the executive branch by nominating significantly more loyalists and fewer experienced officers.
Conclusion
This President-centered account argues that understanding the President is the
key to understanding the nomination and confirmation processes that determine who inhabits the top political ranks of the bureaucracy. While other
studies have enhanced the understanding of the role of obstructionist senators,
this study illuminates the strategies of the President who sets the process in
motion with his selection of his nominees, the great majority of whom
become executive officers. While Senate opposition delays confirmation and
decreases success in a few cases, senatorial opposition has no significant,
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American Politics Research 41(3)
discernable effect on presidential choices. Scholars argue that presidents
choose subcabinet nominees with an eye toward the Senate, but presidents
appear willing to risk delays or rare defeats to win the confirmation of responsive loyalists who will advance their preferred policies. These findings, along
with high confirmation rates indicate that presidents largely succeed in their
domination of the confirmation process.
Presidential decisions and goals should be central to understanding subcabinet appointments. Attention to the actual nominees that presidents choose
and the strategic selection of experienced or loyal officers reveals the centrality of presidential decisions and policy goals. Whereas other research has concluded that presidents need some combination of loyalists and experts or has
overemphasized the Senate’s role, these findings specify that in practice presidents primarily seek bureaucratic responsiveness by populating the departments, especially those central to their agendas, with loyalists. Presidents
value loyal officers and they act strategically to politicize the executive branch
with subcabinet officers whose partisan or personal loyalties ensure that they
will responsively promote presidential preferences. Presidents value experienced subcabinet officers, but they are suspicious that they agents will be
unresponsive or even resistant to their policy preferences once embedded in
the bureaucracy. Thus, presidents nominate more experienced people to the
departments where policies are not central to their policy agendas to promote
efficient administration there, but they nominate significantly fewer experienced people and more loyalists to the departments whose priorities are
important to their agendas. In both cases, the central determinants of who
inhabits subcabinet offices are presidents and their goals rather than the Senate
environment, and these findings empirically demonstrate the connection
between presidential policy priorities and their strategic politicization of executive branch agencies.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks Lawrence Jacobs for his invaluable insight and advice on this
research. I would also like to thank Timothy Johnson, Jeffrey Cohen and Karen Hult
for their help and encouragement on earlier versions of this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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465
Notes
1. The term “politicization” in scholarly literature refers to either creating new
appointee positions within the bureaucracy or populating existing posts with
political and ideological allies (Krause, Lewis, & Douglas 2006). I primarily use
the latter definition.
2. The subcabinet nomination data set was initially 240 nominations between 1973
and 1996 as part of an earlier analysis of nominations and confirmations, and
it has increased as more administrations have been added in addition to other
changes. Within each year, each sample was drawn from that year’s Journal of
the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States by using a random
number generator to select a page in the Index of Names or the Index of Civilian
Nominations and, once the page was selected, using a random number to select
the Nth entry in the index, and including in the sample the first qualified nomination selected at random. The indices index nominations by the nominees’ names
with one entry per nomination that lists page numbers for the president’s letter
announcing the nomination and Senate actions on the nomination. This method
was the best reasonable way to select a sample given the different indexing methods of nominations along with military and other civilian nominations. Indexing
in the Senate Executive Journal changes between years of the sample, but I used
whichever index contained the nominees matching the population of inference.
3. The number of nominations to the subcabinet offices for each year was calculated using the Congressional Quarterly Almanac Annual Report that reports the
number of nominations for various offices and reports on subcabinet nominations
along with other prominent nominations to the executive branch for years prior to
1996. In 1987 beginning with the 100th Congress, the Library of Congress posts
an online database of nominations at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/nomis.html.
The overall number of nominations to subcabinet offices can be calculated using
the search tool for nominations to subcabinet offices by title.
4.Edwards (2001) discusses important nominee qualities. Cohen (1988) and
Bertelli and Juenke (2004) use cabinet secretaries’ shared home states as a
measure of personal loyalty.
5. The loyalty variable measures the personal or ideological−partisan loyalty to the
president’s agenda. There are no equivalents of the ideology scores used in courts
literature or the DW-Nominate scores used in Nixon (2004) for executive officers who had also been members of Congress for the vast majority of nominees.
Gerhardt (2000) argues that partisanship can be taken as a proxy for ideological
congruence in nominations.
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American Politics Research 41(3)
6. King and Riddlesperger (1991) examined concerns mentioned by senators during
hearings. In addition, I used comments made during over 70 Senate confirmation
hearings.
7. Earlier versions of this analysis measured experience as numbers of years of experience in the executive branch and the specific department, but this method complicated data collection, often requiring adding up many posts for each nominee,
and complicated statistical analysis because estimating a single variable requires a
common metric for how presidents might value years in any executive agency relative to years in the specific department. Furthermore, statistical modeling would
require making assumptions about the additive effect of each additional year in
either the executive branch in general or the specific department, because presumably a fourth or fifth year would not be seen as the same as the first year. While such
analysis is possible, I settled on the simpler method of data collection and analysis.
8. While it is conceivable that presidents do not reveal their sincere priorities in
public addresses, Light (1987) used interviews with top staff and argued that
presidents reveal their priorities in the State of the Union.
9. As part of the “Policy Agenda Project” of the Center for American Politics and
Public Policy (Bryan Jones, John Wilkerson, and Frank Baumgartner) at the University of Washington.
10. An “implicit” reference includes any reference to a policy within a department’s
policy jurisdiction, and an “explicit” reference includes mentions of the department, one of its programs or one of its officers. A coding guide was used by two
coders to check intercoder reliability. Overall, intercoder reliability, based upon
a sample of two State of the Union Messages and two Budget Messages, was
77.8% agreement (79.2% for SUA/75.2% for BMP).
11. This method has the effect of weighting explicit references because these paragraphs
were included in the total for all references as well as the ranking for explicit references. The measure of implicit and explicit policy relevant statements was weighted
such that proportion of explicit statements constituted half the score and proportion
of all statements constituted the other half of the score. It was then averaged with the
Baumgartner and Jones proportion such that the final measure was the equivalent of
(Proportion of Policy References in Baumgartner and Jones) × 0.50 + (Proportion of
Explicit) × 0.25 + (Proportion of All Policy Relevant Statements) × 0.25.
Prior to combining them into one index, each of the measures was used separately as an independent variable to test the hypotheses. In every case of a significant predictor, the coefficients were in the same direction as the combined
index although the p values were sometimes higher. The measure derived from
my content analysis of State of the Union Addresses and Budget Messages correlated with the measure derived from Baumgartner and Jones at 0.645 (p < .000)
in the sample (where each nomination is one case) and 0.639 (p < .000) when
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467
each department’s score within each presidential term is used as the case. On its
own, each measure of presidential priorities did a reasonable job of predicting
presidential behavior but the combined index score accounts for some measurement error and improves analysis.
12. Only two nominees in this sample were affiliated with the opposition party.
13. I chose the time frame of 12 years because it represents the longest period of time
any party was out of the White House between 1961 and 2006. Availability scores
range between 0 (Clinton assuming office in 1993) and 11 (Bush [41] in his final
year of office in 1992).
14. A χ2-test indicates no significant relationship between the columns and rows with
a χ2 statistic of 2.21 with 1 degree of freedom.
15. The choice of this model to analyze these presidential decisions raises questions
about the independence of the dependent variables. Because both loyalty and
experience can be assets to presidents, it is logical to model them as a single variable measuring a nominee’s overall value to a president. Two additional regressions used the same set of independent variables to predict a combined loyalty
plus experience variable, and a dichotomous variable equal to one for nominations of experienced loyalists. In both models, only Availability (which predicts
higher probabilities in the responsiveness and the competence models) had a significant and positive coefficient. Furthermore, the Priority Department variable
was not significant in either model apparently because the effects of increasing
the probability of nominating loyalists and decreasing the probability of experienced nominees counteract one another.
16. I also used duration analysis with the statistical model, including nominee Loyalty and Experience to predict the number of days to confirmation. Neither
variable significantly affects the number of days between nomination and confirmation.
17. The increased likelihood of experienced nominees when there are more experienced nominees from the president’s party also demonstrates a concern for
responsiveness to the extent that partisanship can be taken as a measure of loyalty
to the president’s preferences.
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Author Biography
Kevin Parsneau is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at
Minnesota State University, Mankato. His general research interests are the U.S.
presidency, presidential control of the bureaucracy and executive branch
nominations.