Prime ministers in parliamentary systems confront a challenging agency problem in leading cabinets toward cross-government priorities: ministers tend to prioritize departmental interests and may lack incentives and/or information enabling co-ordinated effort. In Canada, a novel mechanism for both increasing incentives and information provision has been developed in recent decades: the mandate letter. These letters are issued by Canadian prime ministers to their ministers, reinforcing government priorities, each minister's responsibilities, and specific policy expectations. This article examines mandate letters as mechanisms inducing interministerial policy co-ordination, focusing on the 2015–2021 period, under Justin Trudeau, as the first Canadian prime minister to release these letters publicly. Using topic modelling and social network analysis, I find that Trudeau has increasingly sought to strengthen ministerial co-ordination and ministers’ focus on crosscutting policy priorities. This case study contributes to our understanding of intraexecutive co-ordination and the agency problem in cabinet government.

This article explores women's access to ministerial power in an important but understudied arena of executive politics: cabinet committees. Specifically, we analyse the gendered patterns in the distribution of cabinet committee assignments in two ‘typical’ Westminster cases, Canada and the United Kingdom, and under two prime ministers, Justin Trudeau (2015–2021) and David Cameron (2010–2016), who both made explicit gender-equity pledges. Informed by previous research into gendered allocation of ministerial portfolios, we investigate the overall extent of women's committee assignments, the gendered dimensions of these assignments and the status of assignments, namely the ‘prestige’ of committee remits, whether committees were chaired by the prime minister and the allocation of chairing responsibilities across committees. In both cases, overall assignment broadly matched shares of women ministers at the cabinet level, but less so during the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK (2010–2015). Women's shares of committee assignments were likely to be lower on ‘masculine’ and ‘high-prestige’ committees compared to ‘neutral’, ‘feminine’ and ‘low-prestige’ committees, but commitment to gender equity is more evident in the Canadian case. While our aim is exploratory and descriptive, we offer several explanations for these patterns, including the supply of women ministers, departmentalism, party branding and the low public profile of cabinet committees.

Presidents' unilateral sway over policy is of global concern to scholars, practitioners and the general public. While pending actions provoke media speculation about how much authority presidents have to change policy without legislatures, scholarship has yet to systematically measure presidential discretion across areas of public policy. This study surveys an interdisciplinary panel of scholars, using discrete choice experiments to estimate the latent level of discretion that US presidents have in fifty-four policy areas. Consistent with models of delegation and unilateralism, these measures confirm that presidents have more discretion in foreign affairs, and that discretion promotes executive action. This approach presents the opportunity to examine differences in presidential discretion and public perceptions of presidential power, and can be applied beyond the US case.

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases over 20 years, we examine how partisan control of executive and legislative branches at both state and federal levels affect environmental policy. Moving beyond the passage of policies or environmental program spending allows us to fully understand the impact of Republicans on the environment. In addition, we take into account structural complications that may shape the relationship between Republican control and environmental outcomes. We find that the conventional wisdom that Republicans are bad for the environment has some validity, but it is dependent on what offices Republican elected officials occupy. More specifically, Republicans significantly affect toxic chemical releases when occupying governorships and controlling Congress. Our conclusions provide further insight into understanding how partisanship affects environmental outcomes, including how partisanship composition across the federal system matters.

Research finds that voters benchmark the state's unemployment level to the nation's when holding state policy makers accountable. Yet benchmarking requires some voter knowledge if the standard is to be applied correctly as an accountability rule. This article leverages the fact that voters have more knowledge about their state governors than legislatures assess how much knowledge is necessary for holding these policy makers accountable. Using pooled Cooperative Congressional Election Study data from 2006 to 2016, results find that knowledge has stronger mediating effects for the state legislature than governor. Furthermore, despite the low knowledge levels among voters about the state legislature, collectively there appears to be enough knowledge to hold that policymaking body accountable. The conclusion offers directions for future research.

Although scholarly interest in populism has increased as populist parties have risen across Europe, the subnational level has been largely overlooked. This article adopts an original subnational focus and explores an unlikely but increasingly prevalent political agenda: the combination of technocracy and populism. We focus on technocratic populism as a political and governance strategy at the municipal level and assess how the interaction of populism and technocracy plays out empirically in relation to administration and public policies and how the tensions and synergies between technocracy and populism are solved at the local level. The article argues that the local level is especially prone to this kind of intersection between technocratic and populist ideology. While the article is mainly an exercise in concept development, two illustrative cases at the city level, namely the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Rome and the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) in Prague are used to support the argument.

A substantial body of empirical work documents the influence of federal monies on state policy making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the conditioning effects of states' prior financial health. Nearly always, apportioned monies cover only a fraction of the costs of federal policy reforms. The capacity of states to deploy supplementary resources, therefore, may inform the willingness of states to comply with the federal government's policy objectives. Focusing on Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, we present new evidence that state responses to federal initiatives that carry financial rewards systematically vary with the amount of resources already on hand. States that survived the Great Recession with their education budgets largely intact, we find, tended to implement more RttT reforms overall, and especially more reforms that required substantial up-front financial commitments. These patterns of policy adoptions can be meaningfully attributed to RttT, are not the result of either prior or ancillary policy trends, and speak to the general importance of accounting for what states already have, above and beyond what the federal government is willing to offer, when studying the financial incentives of vertical diffusion.

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.

I study the consequences of interest group campaign contributions for administrative oversight. Unlike the few previous studies in this area, however, I study the influence in state bureaucracies and at the level of individual groups. Specifically, I test whether campaign contributions to state elected officials influence the outcomes of annual inspections of skilled nursing facilities in 16 states, leveraging the context of state politics in two important ways. First, I consider the differing effects of contributions to the legislative and executive branches. Second, I argue that legislative capacity for oversight influences the efficacy of contributions Regression analysis of inspection results with controls for facility characteristics provides evidence that contributing facilities have better overall inspection results, with a large reduction in citations for severe problems. Furthermore, contributions to legislators reduce overall problems, particularly in less professionalized legislatures, while those to the governor reduce severe ones.

Although significant research has been conducted on economic voting in gubernatorial elections, very few explore the impact of state fiscal conditions in these elections. The little that has been done yields conflicting results regarding the effects of state spending and found that governors are not held responsible for a state's overall fiscal health. Our study examines the impact of spending and fiscal health on gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2013. We find evidence that voters reward incumbent parties for fiscal health and spending growth and that unified government and stronger executive budget powers enhance fiscal accountability for these outcomes. These findings contradict previous research that suggests voters punish one or both parties for higher spending. We conclude by discussing the implications of this research for the debate about the balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

How candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the United States, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women.

This article explains governors' decisions to support or oppose Medicaid expansions offered under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We theorize that governors' decisions to oppose the funding should depend on both political demands and the level of need in the state, though politics and need are often in tension. We find that governors' partisanship and the composition of the legislature have substantively meaningful effects on governors' decisions, but the level of need in the state exerts little effect on governors' decisions. This suggests that for high profile, highly politicized issues such as the Affordable Care Act, political considerations outweigh the needs of citizens and state economic conditions in gubernatorial decision making.

How do people assign blame in the wake of significant government failures? If the role of the citizenry in a representative democracy is to discipline elected officials for failing to meet collective expectations, then this question is of paramount importance. Much research suggests that the base tendency of citizens is to simply blame the other party—a normatively concerning outcome. However, some argue that information, especially that from expert and nonpartisan sources, may push citizens to overlook their party affiliation and assign blame in a more performance-based fashion. Using an experimental design, we test this possibility, manipulating whether there is unified or divided government, the partisanship of key actors, and the nature of expert information that participants receive during a hypothetical budget crisis at the state level. We find strong evidence that party weighs heavily on individuals' minds when assigning blame, as expected. More importantly, we find that nonpartisan expert information about the situation does not live up to its potential to sway partisans from their priors. Rather, unbiased information appears to be used as a weapon—ignored when it challenges partisan expectations and used to magnify blame of the other party when it conforms with them.

Do judges defer to executives with increased institutional control over the executive branch? Administrative agencies play a key role in the policy implementation process. Executives could view aggressive judicial review of executive branch activity as a threat to executive power and negatively respond to perceived judicial intrusions. Governors across the country possess varying amounts of institutional authority over the agencies that comprise their states' executive branches. For example, in many states, executive branch officials are elected by the public or appointed by someone other than the governor. Increased fragmentation increases the difficulty of centralized management and decreases gubernatorial influence over the executive branch. I examine whether state supreme courts defer more to agencies in states where governors have more formal control over the executive branch. I find that state supreme courts are more likely to rule in favor of state administrative agencies in states where the governor has increased appointment power and increased power to review agency rulemaking.

I offer a novel way of documenting the flow of power between the state and federal governments. Rather than look at programs or expenditures, I examine the behavior of elected officials. Assuming that ambitious politicians gravitate toward the locus of political power, I track the flow of elected officials in the American federal system. Specifically, I look at the career paths of more than 12,000 individuals who served in the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 2012. By analyzing the movement of elected officials between the state and federal levels, I confirm the prevailing story line on the evolution of American federalism while generating a measure that can be used to assess the relative distribution of power in the system across time.

How do state legislatures use statutory language to control policy implementation by state agencies? In this article, I consider—in a specific policy area and time period—the extent to which this decision is affected by legislative anticipation of the likely actions of state courts. Previous literature has argued that the legislative use of statutory language to control bureaucrats varies with the availability of nonstatutory methods of control, but it does not explicitly consider the potential role of courts. My expectations are derived from a simple formal model of executive–legislative relations and are supported when I test them using data on the number of words added to a state's Medicaid laws from 1995 to 1996. In particular, I find that state legislatures write longer, more constraining, statutes when the likelihood that state courts intervene on their behalf is neither very high nor very low.

In this article, I evaluate whether a state's level of bureaucratic discretionary authority with respect to welfare policy makes that state more or less likely to participate in policy diffusion with other states that share similar levels of bureaucratic discretionary authority. Using data on levels of access to welfare services in the late Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) era (1976–90), I find that bureaucrats across states who are granted high-discretionary authority engage in policy diffusion with one another. Diffusion based on similarity in discretionary authority is more pronounced when bureaucrats possess high compared with no discretion and does not occur when bureaucrats possess low discretion. Moreover, diffusion between high-discretion bureaucrats operates concurrently with geographic- and economic-driven forms of diffusion that have been well documented in the policy diffusion literature. Results demonstrate that a state's choice of how much discretion to give bureaucrats can open or close channels of diffusion that are available to policymakers in that state.

Despite lofty expectations from the item veto's proponents (and fears from its opponents), formal models have suggested that the item veto is unlikely to have much effect beyond what a full veto could render. However, I show that different findings obtain when item vetoes are appreciated more fully as a dimensionality-reducing institution. I begin by developing a package veto model in a generalized multidimensional space. I then show how introducing the item veto changes the outcome by forcing veto bargaining into what is essentially a unidimensional space. As a result, executives with an item veto or other dimensionality-reducing institution (such as a single-subject rule) can be far more powerful in legislative bargaining than executives who lack these tools, other things being equal. I use simulations to demonstrate the model's main implications.