George A Krause
Biographic Data
| ID | 1102249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | George A Krause |
| GIVEN NAMES | George A |
| FAMILY NAME | Krause |
| SIGNATURE | KRAUSE G A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 928 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Partisan bias and performance improvement efforts in program administration
One critical way that public agencies can improve administrative performance is through its discretionary efforts at detecting program errors. This requires an alignment between political and administrative objectives within executive branch governance. Specifically, we hypothesize that agency efforts for detecting benefit overpayment errors from state unemployment insurance (UI) programs will be higher under Republican partisan gubernatorial con…
Proponents, Caretakers, and the Dynamics of Administrative Leadership Turnover in U.S. Executive Agencies
Administrative leader turnover adversely affects the organizational stability of U.S. federal executive agencies, as well as undermines presidents’ policy goals. An incentive compatibility theory of administrative leader turnover is proposed that distinguishes between proponent (policy priority) versus caretaker (non-policy priority) loyalist executive appointees. This theory predicts that the proponents’ tenure will be comparatively more stable …
Does Coordinated Administrative Leadership Improve US Federal Agency Management of Discrimination Problems
Although the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requires that agency EEO directors serve under the direct supervision of agency heads, considerable variation exists on whether agencies adequately implement this requirement into practice by adopting a formal mechanism termed a coordinated reporting organizational arrangement (CROA). A dual exposure−informal resolution strategy is proposed to understand how CROAs improve US federal …
How s tatus‐group power differentials shape age discrimination within U.S. federal agencies
Age discrimination is a systemic problem of the American administrative state that undermines both the caliber and performance of the U.S. federal government workforce. A theory is proposed, anchored on discrimination against age‐eligible employees (age 40 and over) representing a social identity group, to explain how status‐group power differentials between supervisors and non‐supervisors within U.S. federal agencies explain the organizational i…
Solving Collective Action Problems under Separated and Shared Powers
The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 consolidated executive budgetary powers within the presidency and Congress. I evaluate how the Act reforms altered the nature of executive budgetary influence, using an original historical database from fiscal years 1895 to 1940. I show that these reforms were not only consistent with both political branches’ objective to empower presidents to rein in profligate executive budget proposals under the decentrali…
Confirmation Dynamics
Confirmation delay is decomposed to better understand both when and why the Senate augments its efforts to vet presidential nominees. Distinctions among expedited, normal, and protracted confirmation processes are analyzed, as well as those between the work of Senate standing committees and chamber floor. A theory of ex ante moral hazard reduction is proposed that predicts as the confirmation process becomes increasingly protracted in response to…
Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy
Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on‐the‐job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly ben…
Partisan Presidential Influence over US Federal Budgetary Outcomes
Can American presidents use their budget proposal authority to achieve their own partisan policy priorities? This is an important, yet challenging, question to answer since formal executive authority is ambiguous, and budgetary powers are shared in the US separation of powers system. Indeed, the question remains open since prior empirical designs conflate external constraints (arising from political and policy conditions) with those that reflect …
Retrospective Economic Voting and the Intertemporal Dynamics of Electoral Accountability in the American States
How durable are politicians’ policymaking reputations with the electorate? A theory of reputation depreciation is advanced to explain why the electorate’s capacity to hold former officeholders accountable for prior economic stewardship is weakening not only in the time elapsed between prior elective office and seeking subsequent elective office, but also diminishing at a greater rate as the evaluative window for making retrospective economic asse…
Representative democracy and policy-making in the administrative state
This study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representative democracy. This study allows for incomplete information, as well as solving for the comparative static conditions pertaining to the extent that a politician's policy-making venue choices mirror those preferred by a rep…
Organizational Structure and the Optimal Design of Policymaking Panels
Increasing both the size and diversity of policymaking panels is widely thought to enhance the accuracy of collective policy decisions. This study advances the theoretical conditions in which improving collective accuracy necessitates an efficient trade‐off between a panel's size and its level of organizational diversity. This substitution effect between these organizational characteristics is empirically supported with data on official general‐f…
Concentrated Powers
Although executive authority is a critical element in separation of powers systems, an excessive amount is not conducive for responsible policymaking behavior. Unilateral executive powers allow elected executives to pursue policies consistent with their short-term electoral incentives. This proposition is tested by analyzing the relationship between the exercise of unilateral executive control over fiscal policymaking and fiscal-spending growth i…
Coordination dilemmas and the valuation of women in the U.S. Senate
We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members’ strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105 th —108 th Congresses. We fi…
Reputation and Public Administration
This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a…
Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations
Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐l…
The Republicans Should Pray for Rain
The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data…
Explaining Bureaucratic Optimism
We offer a theory of intertemporal bureaucratic decision making which proposes that an agency's forecast optimism is related to the extent to which it discounts future reputation costs associated with bureaucratic incompetence. Agency forecasts of the distant future are more likely to be optimistic than short-term forecasts. We claim that unstable organizations will discount reputation costs at a steeper rate than stable organizations, and theref…
Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence
Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We …
Beyond the Norm
US federal agency macroeconomic forecasts are generally made in a manner consistent with the unbiasedness-forecast rationality (UFR) hypothesis. While this inference may be valid under normal policy conditions, cognitive biases can make ex ante policy analysis more difficult when macroeconomic circumstances deviate from the norm. I test whether policy forecasting under abnormal macroeconomic conditions generates predictions that exhibit cognitive…
Electoral Incentives, Political Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Performance
Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real pe…
Power Shift
Much extant research on the distribution of power in the American federal system is drawn from qualitative case studies of particular acts of government. This often limits the empirical testing of generalizable hypotheses. To address this shortcoming, we develop an aggregate time series measure of policy centralization by the U.S. federal government for the 1947-1998 annual period utilizing relevant public laws and executive orders. On a substant…
Coping with Uncertainty
Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securiti…
Separated Powers and Institutional Growth in the Presidential and Congressional Branches
A central feature of the modern presidential and congressional branches has been its institutional development. Growth in the presidential and legislative branches reflect distinct short-run and long-run dynamics. In the former case, Presidents exhibit greater responsiveness to congressional branch efforts than vice versa. However, in the long run a steadystate equilibrium exists, whereby the Presidency cannot permanently exploit Congress. This p…
Race, Issue Heterogeneity and Public Policy
Does the voting behaviour of African-American legislators differ significantly from their white colleagues on legislative issues of importance to the black community? This question is important for two reasons. First, the underlying premise behind creating more majority-black legislative districts is that black legislators do a better job of representing the policy interests of black constituents than do white lawmakers.Charles Cameron, David Eps…
Opportunity, Constraints, and the Development of the Institutional Presidency
A central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional actors who are constrained by external forces that occur across administrations. We argue that development of the institutional presidency is an important consideration in understanding presidential behavior. We maint…
Reputation and Public Administration
This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a…
The Republicans Should Pray for Rain
The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data…
Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence
Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We …
Voters, Information Heterogeneity, and the Dynamics of Aggregate Economic Expectations
Theory: It is argued here that previous studies analyzing the formation of voters' economic expectations overlook important subtleties found in a differentiated (heterogeneous) electorate. Since different segments of the electorate possess varying information capabilities, it is asserted that they will form their prospective economic evaluations differently from one another. Hypotheses: The impact of expectational electoral cycles, news coverage …
Opportunity, Constraints, and the Development of the Institutional Presidency
A central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional actors who are constrained by external forces that occur across administrations. We argue that development of the institutional presidency is an important consideration in understanding presidential behavior. We maint…
The Institutional Dynamics of Policy Administration
Theory: A dynamic systems model of administrative politics that (1) relaxes restrictive causal assumptions among the president, Congress, and an administrative agency, (2) emphasizes aggregate institutional behavior, and (3) analyzes both anticipated and unanticipated policy behavior is set forth as a more general means to investigate agency-political relationships. Hypotheses: The main set of hypotheses focus on the aggregate institutional relat…
State Legislative Professionalism and Gubernatorial Effectiveness, 1978-1991
Concentrated Powers
Although executive authority is a critical element in separation of powers systems, an excessive amount is not conducive for responsible policymaking behavior. Unilateral executive powers allow elected executives to pursue policies consistent with their short-term electoral incentives. This proposition is tested by analyzing the relationship between the exercise of unilateral executive control over fiscal policymaking and fiscal-spending growth i…
Race, Issue Heterogeneity and Public Policy
Does the voting behaviour of African-American legislators differ significantly from their white colleagues on legislative issues of importance to the black community? This question is important for two reasons. First, the underlying premise behind creating more majority-black legislative districts is that black legislators do a better job of representing the policy interests of black constituents than do white lawmakers.Charles Cameron, David Eps…
Explaining Bureaucratic Optimism
We offer a theory of intertemporal bureaucratic decision making which proposes that an agency's forecast optimism is related to the extent to which it discounts future reputation costs associated with bureaucratic incompetence. Agency forecasts of the distant future are more likely to be optimistic than short-term forecasts. We claim that unstable organizations will discount reputation costs at a steeper rate than stable organizations, and theref…
Federal Reserve Policy Decision Making
While a significant body of literature in the field of bureaucratic politics has developed recently focusing on the principal-agent relationship and its effect on policy outputs, there has been very little research exploring the foundations of decision making in multiagent bureaucracies. This paper sets forth a general theoretical framework for analyzing the nature of consensual decision making in multiagent bureaucratic agencies while allowing f…
Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations
Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐l…
Separated Powers and Institutional Growth in the Presidential and Congressional Branches
A central feature of the modern presidential and congressional branches has been its institutional development. Growth in the presidential and legislative branches reflect distinct short-run and long-run dynamics. In the former case, Presidents exhibit greater responsiveness to congressional branch efforts than vice versa. However, in the long run a steadystate equilibrium exists, whereby the Presidency cannot permanently exploit Congress. This p…
Coping with Uncertainty
Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securiti…
Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy
Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on‐the‐job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly ben…
Partisan and Ideological Sources of Fiscal Deficits in the United States
Past research investigating the relationship between politics of fiscal institutions and fiscal deficits has primarily focused on how different configurations of partisan control over the executive and legislative branches produce distinct policy outcomes. Such models rely on the strength of majoritarian parties in Congress and party affiliation of president, as reflected in the theory of divided party government. In this study, a simple, fluid u…
Power Shift
Much extant research on the distribution of power in the American federal system is drawn from qualitative case studies of particular acts of government. This often limits the empirical testing of generalizable hypotheses. To address this shortcoming, we develop an aggregate time series measure of policy centralization by the U.S. federal government for the 1947-1998 annual period utilizing relevant public laws and executive orders. On a substant…
Electoral Incentives, Political Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Performance
Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real pe…
Organizational Structure and the Optimal Design of Policymaking Panels
Increasing both the size and diversity of policymaking panels is widely thought to enhance the accuracy of collective policy decisions. This study advances the theoretical conditions in which improving collective accuracy necessitates an efficient trade‐off between a panel's size and its level of organizational diversity. This substitution effect between these organizational characteristics is empirically supported with data on official general‐f…
Fooling Some of the Public Some of the Time? A Test for Weak Rationality With Heterogeneous Information Levels
Journal Article Fooling Some of the Public some of the Time? A Test for Weak Rationality with Heterogeneous Information Levels Get access GEORGE A. KRAUSE, GEORGE A. KRAUSE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JIM GRANATO JIM GRANATO Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 2, August 1998, Pages 135–151, https://doi.org/10.1086/297837 Pu…
Representative democracy and policy-making in the administrative state
This study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representative democracy. This study allows for incomplete information, as well as solving for the comparative static conditions pertaining to the extent that a politician's policy-making venue choices mirror those preferred by a rep…
Information diffusion within the electorate
Retrospective Economic Voting and the Intertemporal Dynamics of Electoral Accountability in the American States
How durable are politicians’ policymaking reputations with the electorate? A theory of reputation depreciation is advanced to explain why the electorate’s capacity to hold former officeholders accountable for prior economic stewardship is weakening not only in the time elapsed between prior elective office and seeking subsequent elective office, but also diminishing at a greater rate as the evaluative window for making retrospective economic asse…
Coordination dilemmas and the valuation of women in the U.S. Senate
We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members’ strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105 th —108 th Congresses. We fi…
Testing for the Strong Form of Rational Expectations with Heterogeneously Informed Agents
In recent years, political scientists have tested for the existence of rational expectations (RE) using survey-based aggregate data on subjective economic perceptions. These tests suffer from several conceptual shortcomings of a nontrivial nature. In this study, the meaning of RE is clarified, and also a test for strong rational expectations (SRE) where citizens possess heterogeneous information levels is set forth. These empirical tests provide …
Federal Reserve Policy Decision Making
While a significant body of literature in the field of bureaucratic politics has developed recently focusing on the principal-agent relationship and its effect on policy outputs, there has been very little research exploring the foundations of decision making in multiagent bureaucracies. This paper sets forth a general theoretical framework for analyzing the nature of consensual decision making in multiagent bureaucratic agencies while allowing f…
State Legislative Professionalism and Gubernatorial Effectiveness, 1978-1991
Agent heterogeneity and consensual decision making on the Federal Open Market Committee
The Institutional Dynamics of Policy Administration
Theory: A dynamic systems model of administrative politics that (1) relaxes restrictive causal assumptions among the president, Congress, and an administrative agency, (2) emphasizes aggregate institutional behavior, and (3) analyzes both anticipated and unanticipated policy behavior is set forth as a more general means to investigate agency-political relationships. Hypotheses: The main set of hypotheses focus on the aggregate institutional relat…
Presidential Use of Executive Orders, 1953-1994
The frequency with which presidents issue executive orders is an important area of inquiry for students of executive politics, because this instrument can shape policy in a quick, direct manner that is outside the purview of the legislative arena. We construct a probabilistic-based empirical model that is used to explain variation in the number of presidential executive orders issued during the 1953-1994 annual period. Using event count regressio…
Voters, Information Heterogeneity, and the Dynamics of Aggregate Economic Expectations
Theory: It is argued here that previous studies analyzing the formation of voters' economic expectations overlook important subtleties found in a differentiated (heterogeneous) electorate. Since different segments of the electorate possess varying information capabilities, it is asserted that they will form their prospective economic evaluations differently from one another. Hypotheses: The impact of expectational electoral cycles, news coverage …
Of Silicon and Political Science – Computationally Intensive Techniques of Statistical Estimation and Inference
If the automobile business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls Royce would cost $2.75 and run for 3 million miles on one gallon of gas.Forrester, Hight-Tech SocietyTom Forrester, High-Tech Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 18.The computer power available to political scientists has increased at least one thousandfold since 1970. We can now make millions of calculations in a few seconds, generate beautiful and meaningful gr…
Policy Preference Formation and Subsystem Behaviour
Past research on policy subsystems has not attempted to explain the manner in which policy preferences for customary subsystem participants are formed as part of a system. The purpose of this research is to narrow the gap between the theoretical conceptualization and empirical articulation of policy subsystems. This study examines the formation of policy preferences for standard subsystem participants in the area of commercial bank regulation for…
Fooling Some of the Public Some of the Time? A Test for Weak Rationality With Heterogeneous Information Levels
Journal Article Fooling Some of the Public some of the Time? A Test for Weak Rationality with Heterogeneous Information Levels Get access GEORGE A. KRAUSE, GEORGE A. KRAUSE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JIM GRANATO JIM GRANATO Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 2, August 1998, Pages 135–151, https://doi.org/10.1086/297837 Pu…
A Two Way Street
Opportunity, Constraints, and the Development of the Institutional Presidency
A central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional actors who are constrained by external forces that occur across administrations. We argue that development of the institutional presidency is an important consideration in understanding presidential behavior. We maint…
Testing for the Strong Form of Rational Expectations with Heterogeneously Informed Agents
In recent years, political scientists have tested for the existence of rational expectations (RE) using survey-based aggregate data on subjective economic perceptions. These tests suffer from several conceptual shortcomings of a nontrivial nature. In this study, the meaning of RE is clarified, and also a test for strong rational expectations (SRE) where citizens possess heterogeneous information levels is set forth. These empirical tests provide …
Partisan and Ideological Sources of Fiscal Deficits in the United States
Past research investigating the relationship between politics of fiscal institutions and fiscal deficits has primarily focused on how different configurations of partisan control over the executive and legislative branches produce distinct policy outcomes. Such models rely on the strength of majoritarian parties in Congress and party affiliation of president, as reflected in the theory of divided party government. In this study, a simple, fluid u…
Information diffusion within the electorate
Race, Issue Heterogeneity and Public Policy
Does the voting behaviour of African-American legislators differ significantly from their white colleagues on legislative issues of importance to the black community? This question is important for two reasons. First, the underlying premise behind creating more majority-black legislative districts is that black legislators do a better job of representing the policy interests of black constituents than do white lawmakers.Charles Cameron, David Eps…
Separated Powers and Institutional Growth in the Presidential and Congressional Branches
A central feature of the modern presidential and congressional branches has been its institutional development. Growth in the presidential and legislative branches reflect distinct short-run and long-run dynamics. In the former case, Presidents exhibit greater responsiveness to congressional branch efforts than vice versa. However, in the long run a steadystate equilibrium exists, whereby the Presidency cannot permanently exploit Congress. This p…
Power Shift
Much extant research on the distribution of power in the American federal system is drawn from qualitative case studies of particular acts of government. This often limits the empirical testing of generalizable hypotheses. To address this shortcoming, we develop an aggregate time series measure of policy centralization by the U.S. federal government for the 1947-1998 annual period utilizing relevant public laws and executive orders. On a substant…
Coping with Uncertainty
Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securiti…
Electoral Incentives, Political Business Cycles and Macroeconomic Performance
Conventional wisdom suggests that macroeconomic outcomes do not follow a political business cycle (PBC) pattern. In this study, the nature of the electoral underpinnings of such opportunistic behaviour are investigated by analysing alternative formulations of PBC theory: (1) a naïve-unconditional PBC, (2) an electoral security-conditional PBC, (3) an electoral uncertainty-conditional PBC; and (4) a partisan-conditional PBC. Data on the US real pe…
Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence
Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We …
Beyond the Norm
US federal agency macroeconomic forecasts are generally made in a manner consistent with the unbiasedness-forecast rationality (UFR) hypothesis. While this inference may be valid under normal policy conditions, cognitive biases can make ex ante policy analysis more difficult when macroeconomic circumstances deviate from the norm. I test whether policy forecasting under abnormal macroeconomic conditions generates predictions that exhibit cognitive…
The Republicans Should Pray for Rain
The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data…
Explaining Bureaucratic Optimism
We offer a theory of intertemporal bureaucratic decision making which proposes that an agency's forecast optimism is related to the extent to which it discounts future reputation costs associated with bureaucratic incompetence. Agency forecasts of the distant future are more likely to be optimistic than short-term forecasts. We claim that unstable organizations will discount reputation costs at a steeper rate than stable organizations, and theref…
Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations
Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐l…
Coordination dilemmas and the valuation of women in the U.S. Senate
We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members’ strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105 th —108 th Congresses. We fi…
Political science (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Economics (30 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (26 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Public Administration (20 works) · Public Administration (18 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (17 works) · Sociology (13 works)