IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v55y2011i4p767-781.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Lengthened Shadow of Another Institution? Ideal Point Estimates for the Executive Branch and Congress

Author

Listed:
  • Anthony M. Bertelli
  • Christian R. Grose

Abstract

While the president's relationship to Congress has been carefully studied, the broader executive branch has received far less attention in that context. Scholars rely on assumptions about the relationship between the president and cabinet departments that remain untested. We construct the first statistical portrait of executive branch ideology by estimating ideal points for members of Congress, presidents, and the heads of cabinet‐level departments between 1991 and 2004 in a Bayesian framework. We empirically assess claims about the composition of the president's administrative team and the influence of institutions on the ideology of principal executive decision makers. We also test an important claim regarding the trade‐off between ideological congruence and budgetary authority to demonstrate the utility of our estimates for other scholars. Our analysis reveals a new picture of the executive branch as ideologically diverse, casting into doubt some essential assumptions in a substantial body of work on the separation of powers.

Suggested Citation

  • Anthony M. Bertelli & Christian R. Grose, 2011. "The Lengthened Shadow of Another Institution? Ideal Point Estimates for the Executive Branch and Congress," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(4), pages 767-781, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:55:y:2011:i:4:p:767-781
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00527.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00527.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00527.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jörg L. Spenkuch & Edoardo Teso & Guo Xu, 2023. "Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 91(4), pages 1171-1203, July.
    2. Jordan Carr Peterson, 2018. "All Their Eggs in One Basket? Ideological Congruence in Congress and the Bicameral Origins of Concentrated Delegation to the Bureaucracy," Laws, MDPI, vol. 7(2), pages 1-15, May.
    3. Min-Seok Pang, 2017. "Politics and Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003–2016," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 28(1), pages 33-45, March.
    4. Jowei Chen & Tim Johnson, 2015. "Federal employee unionization and presidential control of the bureaucracy: Estimating and explaining ideological change in executive agencies," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 27(1), pages 151-174, January.
    5. Mason Dyana P., 2017. "Measuring Latent Constructs in Nonprofit Surveys with Item Response Theory: The Example of Political Ideology," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 91-110, January.
    6. Moshe Maor, 2016. "Missing Areas in the Bureaucratic Reputation Framework," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(2), pages 80-90.
    7. Daniel Lee, 2014. "Third-party threat and the dimensionality of major-party roll call voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 159(3), pages 515-531, June.
    8. Don S. Lee, 2020. "Executive control of bureaucracy and presidential cabinet appointments in East Asian democracies," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 14(1), pages 82-101, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:55:y:2011:i:4:p:767-781. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.