Politics Of Appointments Research Articles

Women's Work: The Gendered Nature of Appointment Politics in Subnational China

Abstract While comparative research on gender and politics has produced a sizable literature on the appointment of women to cabinet positions in democracies, we know surprisingly little about appointment practices in authoritarian contexts at subnational levels. We address this gap with the resumés of 3,681 political appointees in subnational China (2003–2020). Our analysis reveals that subnational Chinese politics meets most of the criteria scholars put forward as being indicative of gendered institutions: (1) women and men's career patterns are different; (2) women are assigned to more feminine posts, while masculine posts provide more promotion opportunities; and (3) regarding backgrounds, women are younger, better educated and more likely to be ethnic minorities as a result of the implementation of tandem quotas. The findings advance the literature on gender and politics, showing that gender's effect on appointment transcends regime types and the dichotomy of national/subnational politics.

President Trump and the Politics of Judicial Nominations

President Trump brought judicial appointments to the pinnacle of political salience while campaigning and in office. He was also the first president to inherit Senate rules making it easier to confirm judicial appointments while past partisan obstruction provided his administration with a backlog of vacancies. How then, did President Trump’s ability to gain Senate confirmation for judicial nominees compare to recent presidents? We find that he was indeed able to fill an historic number of vacancies. However, the administration was not universally successful as key nominations had to be prioritized at the expense of others. Our findings assess Trump’s legacy on judicial appointments and demonstrate the practical tradeoffs newly emerging in appointment politics.

Re-Inventing the Equity Debate: Issues in Balancing Merit with Inclusion in Leadership Selection in Federal Universities in Nigeria

Abstract In the conflicting pursuit of equity, the recession of non-indigenes in leadership positions in the nation’s federal universities is a major source of campus restiveness. This opinion article, derived from empirical research, therefore aims at bringing to the fore the substance and implications of the faulty inclusion politics and the politicised merit criteria deployed towards achieving equity in leadership selection in Nigeria’s federal universities. University of Ibadan and University of Jos were purposively selected for the study being the institutions with the most recent vice-chancellors’ selection episodes riddled with identity-based conflicts in 2020/2021. In the two universities, key informant and in-depth interviews were conducted with prominent members of the respective institutions’ governing councils, staff unions, staff ethnic associations, and vice-chancellor candidates that were not appointed, all purposively selected being notable actors in the vice-chancellors’ appointments politics. With between 70% and 79% predominance of ethno-territorial indigenes in the institutions’ workforce, the original inclusion intent of Nigeria’s federal character principle was grossly handicapped in the leadership appointment politics. The merit assessment instruments deployed in vice-chancellors’ selection processes had subjective items prone to biased scoring. These unfashionably culminated in the persistent return of indigene vice-chancellors in the two institutions for forty years.

Do Vacancies Hurt Federal Agency Performance?

AbstractThe combination of the high workload associated with keeping top executive branch positions filled and political dysfunction has led to longer and more frequent periods of vacancies in the U.S. executive branch. While scholars commonly claim that such vacancies are harmful for performance, this claim has been difficult to evaluate because of theoretical disagreement, conceptual confusion, and measurement challenges. In this article, we evaluate the relationship between vacancies and performance, describing primary mechanisms by which vacancies (as opposed to turnover) influence performance. We conduct a cross-sectional study using new data on appointee vacancies during the Trump Administration and original performance data from a 2020 survey of federal executives. The Survey on the Future of Government Service includes questions designed to measure comparative self-reported agency performance and questions targeting the mechanisms hypothesized to link vacancies and performance. The article includes efforts to define and validate the measure of performance, assess the directionality of the relationship between vacancies and performance, control for potential confounders that may explain both vacancies and performance, and evaluate the mechanisms by which vacancies negatively affect performance. The results from ordinary least squares (OLS) models suggest that persistent vacancies are correlated with lower performance. In particular, agencies with persistent vacancies (e.g., 3–4 years) have performance ratings of about 1 SD lower than those agencies with consistent confirmed leadership. The most likely mechanisms leading to these results are the effect of vacancies on leader time horizons, agency morale, and investment by key stakeholders. We conclude with implications for appointment politics and administrative politicization.

Women’s Work: The Gendered Nature of Appointment Politics in Subnational China

Women’s Work: The Gendered Nature of Appointment Politics in Subnational China

The Longer You Wait, the Longer It Takes: Presidential Transition Planning and Appointment Politics

Contemporary research on presidential appointments tends to focus on the Senate’s political climate as a primary cause of its “broken politics.” In contrast, we focus on the role the president plays in setting the stage for Senate confirmation of federal appointees. Our empirical approach suggests that an active president who demonstrates initiative in the transition planning phase of an administration can better control the agenda of the Presidentially Appointed and Confirmed by the Senate (PAS) appointment process by jump-starting it before the Senate’s policy workload accumulates and legislative politicking takes over. This approach suggests that better transition planning can hasten the overall appointments process.

The Politics of Appointment of Top Civil Servants: Career Backgrounds and Civil Service Politicization in the Czech Republic

Abstract This contribution seeks to answer the question whether the new civil service legislation that entered into force in 2015 in the Czech Republic led to the depoliticization of the country’s ministerial bureaucracy. To that end, we compare the career backgrounds of top civil servants before and after the entry into force of the new Civil Service Act. The article examines the career backgrounds of the persons appointed as ministerial deputies between 2013 and 2018, focusing on their last “pre-deputy” jobs and considering a broader set of their career attributes. A focus on the previous job reveals that even before the law was introduced, bureaucrats constituted the largest share of appointees, and their share even increased with the new legislation. The incidence of deputies appointed directly from party-related jobs dropped considerably. However, when a broader set of career attributes is considered, the share of partisans among the pre-2015 deputies nearly matches that of the career bureaucrats. Ostensibly political careers among the post-2015 deputies declined but remain significant. Hence, there has been a decline in the open politicization of the ministerial bureaucracy after 2015. Party political effects also matter, as the new ANO party, after entering the executive, has taken a different approach to top bureaucratic appointments than the other major governing Czech parties. Typically, deputies appointed into the positions under the ANO’s control would not have links to the party itself but would be recruited via non-party channels, e.g. from pre-political networks of the ANO ministers and leaders. Consequently, though less politicized by party agents, the current Czech system is more a product of choices made by government ministers of the day than a stable arrangement resulting from firmly established norms and rules.

The Structure of Appointment Politics: Consistency or Change?

Given its importance and level of conflict in recent decades, scholars have expended great effort analyzing appointment politics. However, despite descriptions that might lead to conclusions that the structure of how nominees are dealt with has changed over time, quantitative analyses have not investigated possible structural changes. We remedy this by conducting a changepoint analysis using data on executive nominations from 1885–2016. Two breaks involving Senate‐initiated institutional changes are uncovered: one associated with postwar congressional reorganization, the other with post‐Watergate era alterations to the relationship between Senate and President. By contrast, neither executive‐initiated changes nor disruptions in norms produced breaks. Thus, our analysis defines three different historical eras of the appointment process, suggests what causes one period to be replaced by another, and details what factors drove appointment politics in different eras. It also urges caution in generalizing from analyses of appointments incorporating features only measurable for more recent years.

Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Nominees: The Characteristics Approach

Despite the importance of every nomination to the Supreme Court, a unified theory that illuminates presidential selection of nominees across the modern political era remains elusive. We propose a new theory --- the approach --- that envisions nominees as bundles of characteristics, such as ideology, policy reliability, and attributes of diversity. We formalize the theory, which emphasizes the political returns to presidents from a nominee's characteristics and the costs of finding and confirming such individuals, and derive explicit presidential demand functions for these characteristics. Using newly collected data on both nominees and short-list candidates, we estimate these demand functions. They reveal some striking and under-appreciated regularities in appointment politics. In particular, the substantial increase in presidential interest in the Supreme Court's policy output and the increased availability of candidates with desired characteristics has led to significant changes in appointment politics and the composition of the Court.

Are Supreme Court Nominations a Move-the-Median Game?

We conduct a theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of move-the-median (MTM) models of Supreme Court nominations—the one theory of appointment politics that connects presidential selection and senatorial confirmation decisions. We develop a theoretical framework that encompasses the major extant models, formalizing the tradeoff between concerns about the location of the new median justice versus concerns about the ideology of the nominee herself. We then use advances in measurement and scaling to place presidents, senators, justices, and nominees on the same scale, allowing us to test predictions that hold across all model variants. We find very little support for MTM theory. Senators have been much more accommodating of the president’s nominees than MTM theory would suggest—many have been confirmed when the theory predicted they should have been rejected. These errors have been consequential: presidents have selected many nominees who are much more extreme than MTM theory would predict. These results raise serious questions about the adequacy of MTM theory for explaining confirmation politics and have important implications for assessing the ideological composition of the Court.

Secret Law: The Politics of Appointments to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the politics of appointments to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the court established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to review secret federal government requests for warrants related to national security investigations. Since the FISA Court's creation, its members have been appointed entirely at the discretion of the Chief Justice of the United States, who selects FISA Court judges from among the pool of existing U.S. District Court judges. Using data on the common space scores of the federal district judges appointed to the court, and the limited information available on the court's decisions, we explore the implications of this, both for the ideological makeup of the FISA Court's judges and for the oversight function they perform. The results suggest that the court has become decidedly more conservative in recent years, far more so than the district courts overall, with potentially serious implications for its ability to function as an effective check on the power of the executive branch.

Institutional Conflict and Perceived Property Rights in Appointment Politics

Despite the importance of political appointees in U.S. politics, most of what we know about bureaucratic appointment centers on institutional conflict between the separate legislative and executive branches, and ignores personal qualities of nominees that so often seem pivotal to the selection debate. Using data drawn from every appointment to four U.S. independent regulatory agencies, I present empirical evidence that perceived property rights relating to party, race, and gender of appointees powerfully structure appointment process and outcomes. A new model of race and gender of appointees demonstrates that race and gender of an appointee's predecessor is a significant predictor of who gets selected. A separate model of appointment duration demonstrates that partisan factors significantly contribute to delay, but that race and gender considerations do not significantly extend vacancies.

Appointment Politics and the Ideological Composition of the Judiciary

Scholars have advanced a wide range of theories regarding the role of Senate confirmation in judicial appointments. In this article, I directly test the predictions of these models using a novel measure of the ideology of judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. The main results indicate that the filibuster and majority party have predominated in appointment politics. Prompted by recent events, I also conduct a simulation-based exercise to examine the ideological composition of the judiciary under a confirmation regime in which the filibuster is not present. This exercise suggests that the Senate filibuster induces moderation in judicial appointments; the elimination of the filibuster is likely to result in a more contentious, if less dilatory, confirmation process and a more polarized judiciary.

Who is Appointed to What Position? The Politics of Appointment in Quangos of Korea

This study identifies the determinants of appointment of executives in quangos. Using data from 85 quangos in Korea over 15 years between 1993 and 2007, we investigate the degree to which various characteristics of organizational actors affect the choice of executives. Three organizational actors include presidents, sponsoring government departments, and the concerned quangos. Although results vary by executive position, the findings of the empirical analysis with multinomial probit and generalized linear mixed models support the idea that the appointment of quango executives is not the result of presidential choice but that of the interactions among the key organizational actors, with different incentives and resources, on the appointment. Compared to former bureaucrats, presidential allies are more likely to be appointed when presidents have more political support from the National Assembly and it is easier for insiders to be promoted as executives from larger and older quangos with clear legal origins.

Predicting Court Outcomes through Political Preferences: The Japanese Supreme Court and the Chaos of 1993

Empirical students of the U.S. courts successfully explain some court decisions through the party of the executive or legislature that appointed the judge. Others (including some judges) find these studies offensive. In taking offense, they miss a crucial implication: appointment politics predict judicial outcomes only when courts are independent.Japanese Supreme Court justices enjoy an independence similar to that of their American peers, but their lower-court colleagues do not. Although the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has governed Japan for most of the post-war period, it temporarily lost power in the mid-1990s. Elsewhere, Eric Rasmusen and I ask whether this non-LDP hiatus changed the administration of the lower courts. Here, I ask whether the non-LDP prime ministers appointed Supreme Court justices with different policy preferences than their LDP predecessors. I find that they did not.

Supreme Court Appointments as a Move‐the‐Median Game

A three‐stage model isolates conditions under which an executive appointment to a collective choice body, such as a court or a regulatory agency, has an immediate bearing on policy. The model strikes a balance between previous formal models that predict either excessive gridlock or excessive policy responsiveness as a consequence of the politics of appointments. I test the model using approximately four decades of data on U.S. Supreme Court appointments. Two hypotheses summarize the unique predictions of the model and are strongly corroborated. A third, less distinctive hypothesis about strategic judicial retirements is weakly supported.

Supreme Court Appointments as a Move-the-Median Game

A three-stage model isolates conditions under which an executive appointment to a collective choice body, such as a court or a regulatory agency, has an immediate bearing on policy. The model strikes a balance between previous formal models that predict either excessive gridlock or excessive policy responsiveness as a consequence of the politics of appointments. I test the model using approximately four decades of data on U.S. Supreme Court appointments. Two hypotheses summarize the unique predictions of the model and are strongly corroborated. A third, less distinctive hypothesis about strategic judicial retirements is weakly supported.

Presidents, Senates, and Failed Supreme Court Nominations

With three controversial nominations to the Supreme Court just behind us, and the prospect of more in the near future, this is an opportune time to place the politics of Supreme Court appointments in broader perspective. Ultimately, what presidents care about is getting their nominees on the Court, and therefore this article manuscript focuses on those cases in which the Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of the president. The article examines what has accounted for these failed nominations and how the politics of appointment have changed over time. In addition to shedding light on our historical experience with Supreme Court appointments, it concludes that recent decades mark a reversal of earlier tendencies. The Senate is now far more focused on ideological disagreements and jurisprudential issues than it has traditionally been, and as a consequence nominations face far greater risks now during divided government than during unified government (the opposite pattern once prevailed). The central lesson of the defeat of Robert Bork is that it matters who controls the Senate, and thus it is neither surprising nor predictive that Roberts and Alito were able to be confirmed in a Republican Senate.

Presidents, Senates, and Failed Supreme Court Nominations

With three controversial nominations to the Supreme Court just behind us, and the prospect of more in the near future, this is an opportune time to place the politics of Supreme Court appointments in broader perspective. Ultimately, what presidents care about is getting their nominees on the Court, and therefore this article manuscript focuses on those cases in which the Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of the president. The article examines what has accounted for these failed nominations and how the politics of appointment have changed over time. In addition to shedding light on our historical experience with Supreme Court appointments, it concludes that recent decades mark a reversal of earlier tendencies. The Senate is now far more focused on ideological disagreements and jurisprudential issues than it has traditionally been, and as a consequence nominations face far greater risks now during divided government than during unified government (the opposite pattern once prevailed). The central lesson of the defeat of Robert Bork is that it matters who controls the Senate, and thus it is neither surprising nor predictive that Roberts and Alito were able to be confirmed in a Republican Senate.

The Politics of Appointments to Protestant Theological Faculties in Germany: The Case of Professor Erich Geldbach

The Politics of Appointments to Protestant Theological Faculties in Germany: The Case of Professor Erich Geldbach