Personnel, Politics, and Policymaking

• In Event: Models of Bureaucracy

Abstract

We present a theory of political appointments across multiple agencies in which appointees affect bureaucratic policymaking by influencing their agency’s policy priorities. We show that the appointer should be concerned with the agency’s ideological bias only when this bias is similar to the appointer’s. Otherwise, the appointer should make his or her decisions based entirely on the agencies’ productivities and the ideological variabilities of their policies. To our knowledge, this is the first theory of political appointments to demonstrate how agencies’ structural and process-based characteristics affect the appointers’ incentives when allocating scarce appointees.

Authors

• Emily H. Moore, Washington University in St. Louis

• John W. Patty, University of Chicago