The Loyalty Premium: The Value of a Unified Partisan Appointment Process

• In Event: The Relationship between the Legislature and Other Political Institutions

Abstract

A critical element of executive branch coordination requires that presidents have the capacity to select executive appointees that are aligned with their own policy interests. We seek to evaluate the ability of presidents to obtain more ideologically loyal executive appointees under unified partisan control of the Senate appointment and confirmation processes. Current regression-based approaches, premised on average differences between appointment outcomes that reflect widely variable political conditions, cannot offer empirical leverage on the 'value-added' offered to presidents who experience a unified executive appointment process.

We implement a 'bounds-based' regression discontinuity design (RDD) modeling approach to isolate the value of the president's party controlling the U.S. Senate has on the former's capacity to appoint individuals with higher levels of ideological loyalty to the president. Our RDD approach since it accounts for sample selection using a bounds approach that is void of both exclusionary restrictions and selectivity instruments. This is an important feature to our empirical modeling and design since two distinct sources of non-random selection bias arise when evaluating the value of partisan control of the executive appointment process: (1) some executive nominees chosen by presidents are not confirmed by the Senate, and (2) some executive nominees' ideology is not observed (i.e., missing data). Extending Ostrander (2016) U.S. federal executive PAS appointment database, coupled with CF score ideal point estimates from Bonica's (2023) updated DIME database, we analyze over 10,000 U.S. federal PAS executive appointees between 1987-2020. Our empirical investigation analyzes different types of appointees nominated under different conditions to empirically differentiate when presidents benefit from unified partisan control of the executive appointment process from those instances where it does not enhance U.S. federal executive branch coordination.

Authors

• Jason S. Byers, University of Connecticut

• George A. Krause, University of Georgia