Elected chief executives in the United States—that is, governors and presidents—routinely attempt to achieve their domestic policy goals by influencing the decision‐making of public agencies. I provide empirical assessments of the two most frequently theorized elected executive influence tactics: political appointments and the centralization of agency decision‐making. Using an expansive survey of the leaders in over 1800 state agencies, observational and experimental evidence are used to evaluate the effectiveness of these tactics. I find that state agency leaders believe that the appointment of officials to key agency posts allows the governor to better achieve his or her policy objectives than centralizing decision‐making, and Republican governors are seen as more successful in using these tactics than Democratic ones. Overall, the results provide a real‐world sense of how one government institution—the elected chief executive—tries to steer the policymaking of public managers and the government agencies that they lead.

中文翻译：

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通过行政机构对行政决策产生影响


美国民选的首席执行官——即州长和总统——经常试图通过影响公共机构的决策来实现其国内政策目标。我对两种最常理论化的民选行政影响策略进行了实证评估：政治任命和机构决策的集中化。通过对 1800 多个州机构的领导人的广泛调查，观察和实验证据被用来评估这些策略的有效性。我发现，各州机构领导人认为，任命官员担任关键机构职位比集中决策更能使州长更好地实现其政策目标，而且共和党州长被认为比民主党州长更成功地使用这些策略。总体而言，研究结果提供了一个真实世界的感觉，即一个政府机构——民选的首席执行官——如何试图引导公共管理者及其领导的政府机构的政策制定。