Research

Collaboration among federal agencies is a fundamental feature of administrative policymaking in the United States and has important consequences for political control. The prevalence of interagency policymaking has received significant recent scholarly attention but it has been difficult to characterize empirically. In this paper, we present a novel measure of interagency networks based on data on interagency connections from the 2014 and 2020 Surveys on the Future of Government Service. In these surveys thousands of appointed and career federal executives self-identified their most frequent collaborative partners outside their own agencies. We use this data to create a new measure of interagency networks in the federal government. We first present a descriptive overview of interagency networks, finding that 64.8 percent of agencies have a strong tie to at least one agency other than their own, and 8 percent of agencies have strong ties to ten or more agencies other than their own. We then illustrate the importance of these connections by evaluating the consequences of this network structure for the president’s appointments strategy in the last two presidencies. Agencies with higher network centrality get vacancies filled more quickly than other agencies. We conclude with the implications of this interagency work for political control of the bureaucracy.

Political scientists have emphasized the rightward ideological movement of congressional Republicans across recent decades, relative to a more limited leftward shift by Democrats. However, we argue that this asymmetric polarization has not translated into an equally conservative shift in lawmaking. Drawing on data on the lawmaking effectiveness of Representatives and Senators between 1973- 2021, we demonstrate that conservative Republicans in both chambers are notably less effective than their moderate Republican counterparts in advancing their bills, even when Republicans are in the majority party. In contrast, for Democrats, their liberal wing is more effective at lawmaking than are moderate Democrats. The conservative wing of the Republican Party has been limited in its effectiveness due to lower seniority, fewer committee chair positions, and less frequent bipartisan coalition-building attempts than among other Republicans. As a result, the ideological center of congressional lawmaking has not shifted to the right, instead remaining remarkably stable over time.

Paper is here. Coverage in The Washington Post is here.

Congressional election outcomes in the United States are increasingly correlated with voters' assessments of the president. For legislators, the nationalization of elections suggests that an improvement in a president's electoral standing will improve the electoral standing of those in the president's party and undermine the electoral standing of those in the opposition party. How does this electoral dynamic affect the president's ability to advance a legislative agenda? In this paper, I develop a formal model of legislative negotiation between the president and a pivotal legislator, in which actors' utilities are defined over both the spatial location of policy outcomes and how policy outcomes affect actors' electoral standing. A president can make a public appeal in support of a bill, which raises the salience of a policy issue and makes all actors more sensitive to the assignment of credit and blame. As nationalization increases, equilibrium results indicate that a president making a public appeal will increase his legislative success with copartisan legislators but decrease his success with opposition party legislators. In some cases in which raising the salience of an issue benefits the president electorally, a president will make a public appeal even if doing so leads to a policy outcome that is further from the president's ideal point.

Retirements from the U.S. House of Representatives are close to the highest level in the modern Congress. I explore this phenomenon using a mixed-methods approach. First, I conducted eleven in-depth interviews with retired Members of Congress—including several former committee chairs and party leaders—regarding their decisions to leave congressional service. These interviews indicate that the tight competition for majority party status dramatically undercuts legislators’ career satisfaction. Next, I systematically tested these claims using a within-legislator design and an ex ante measure of anticipated majority party status. I find that legislators are more likely to retire as the probability of a majority party shift increases; this association persists even after controlling for a legislator’s individual reelection probability, and is largest for Republican committee leaders who face term limits. In contrast to findings from previous eras, I find that more effective legislators in the contemporary House are more likely to retire compared to their less effective colleagues. This finding has implications for congressional reform efforts by presenting potential structural obstacles to retaining those legislators most crucial to institutional capacity.