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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2019

Gary E. Hollibaugh Jr*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Lawrence S. Rothenberg
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: gary.hollibaugh@pitt.edu

Abstract

While the importance of political appointments is a matter of consensus, theorists and empiricists generally focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration, respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this gap by examining theoretical predictions and related expectations about how the passage of time affects the President’s choices of nominees. We find that executives are disadvantaged as days pass and Presidents propose nominees with whom they are less ideologically compatible over time.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

Replication materials are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RQHRKE.

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