Publication Date
2017
Abstract
Dozens of multimember agencies across the federal government are subject to partisan balance requirements, which mandate that no more than a simple majority of agency members may hail from a single party. Administrative law scholars and political scientists have questioned whether these provisions meaningfully affect the ideological composition of federal agencies. In theory, Presidents can comply with these requirements by appointing ideologically sympathetic members of the opposite party once they have filled their quota of same-party appointees (i.e., a Democratic President can appoint liberal Republicans or a Republican President can appoint conservative Democrats). No multiagency study in the past fifty years, however, has examined whether—in practice— partisan balance requirements actually prevent Presidents from selecting like-minded individuals for cross-party appointments.
This Article fills that gap. We gather data on 578 appointees to twenty-three agencies over the course of six presidencies and thirty-six years. We identify the estimated ideological preferences of those appointees based on personal campaign contributions. We then compare the ideological preferences of co-party and cross-party appointees across agencies and across presidencies. The analysis indicates that partisan balance requirements had at most a modest impact on the ideological composition of multimember agencies from the late 1970s to the early 1990s but a stronger effect from the mid-1990s onward. This Article considers several possible explanations for these findings. The results are consistent with a story of “partisan sort”: As ideology and party affiliation have become more tightly linked, cross-party appointees have become more likely to share the ideological preferences of their co-partisans rather than those of the appointing President. The findings suggest that the increasing polarization of political parties is contributing to a concomitant increase in the ideological heterogeneity of multimember agencies subject to partisan balance mandates.
Number
649
Recommended Citation
Brian D. Feinstein /& Daniel J. Hemel, "Partisan Balance With Bite" (2017). Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers, no. 649.
