Abstract
Advocates of the political control of the bureaucracy long have contended that presidents secure power and influence by using their appointment power to place administration loyalists in various management positions throughout the bureaucracy. The basic idea is that appointees who are loyal to the president and the president’s policy proposals will successfully advance the president’s political and policy agenda. Contrarily, it has been argued that presidents are at a disadvantage if they do not appoint competent individuals to key bureaucratic positions. The appointment of loyalists alone may not only lead to some policy successes, but it also can lead to bureaucratic retrenchment, and in the worst case scenario, a major political scandal.
William Resh’s insightful book provides a new twist on this old debate. In Rethinking the Administrative Presidency, Resh examines the role trust plays in the appointee–SES (Senior Executive Service) relationship. In recent decades, an entire literature has developed around the issue of trust in government. Although that literature generally reflects perceptions of trust among the general population, Resh offers a fresh perspective by empirically examining the level of trust between bureaucratic agents and their political principals and the implications of trust for bureaucratic performance.
Resh notes, “The importance of this book is the manner in which it spells out the mechanism by which efforts at political control can harm agency performance” (p. 10). It does so by denying presidents the institutional memory and expertise that bureaucrats can provide. Resh then “models the moderating effects of politicization and other organizational-level factors on appointee-careerist trust . . .” (p. 14). As he notes, many studies of bureaucratic control focus on the Reagan presidency, when the initial goal of the administration was to impede or even halt implementation; often cited as evidence that a political control strategy is effective. Yet, as Resh argues, it is easier to obstruct implementation than it is to actually get things done, and most presidents have an affirmative policy agenda that requires developing trust between political appointees, middle management, and agency bureaucrats. Emphasizing loyalty alone can reduce trust. However, appointees, initially suspicious of the bureaucracy and intent on following the president’s agenda, soon discover that they need the bureaucrat’s institutional memory and unique expertise. Resh suggests that presidential appointees need to cultivate a working relationship with middle management and through them increase trust with the larger arena of bureaucratic agents.
But why is trust important and how can it be used to leverage power? The other important concept that Resh develops is the bureaucracy’s intellectual capital. Scholars argue that competence is an important criterion. Resh provides us with solid reasons why this is the case. The bureaucracy consists of an enormous wealth of intellectual capital. Middle managers and mainline bureaucrats, who have worked in an agency for years, can provide advice to political principals regarding which strategies and approaches are likely to achieve a desired outcome and which ones have been attempted before without success. Again, expertise is more important for presidents who seek to get things accomplished.
The book’s main focus is the presidency of George W. Bush. One of his major policy goals was the adoption and implementation of No Child Left Behind. Although Republican presidents generally are hostile to the Department of Education, Resh notes that Bush needed the support and intellectual capital of that department to accomplish his primary domestic policy goal. Thus, even for Republican presidents who have negative perceptions of the bureaucracy as a whole, building trust and developing intellectual capital are necessary precursors to policy success. Trust occurs in at least two major ways, dyadic trust between political appointees and middle management SES officials and stratified trust in which SES officials translate their perceptions of trust to the lower level bureaucracy. Meanwhile, politicization moderates the relationship between dyadic and stratified trust and intellectual capital. In testing this relationship, Resh turns many principal-agent models on their head, arguing that politicization actually can be detrimental to presidential policy success. This finding is as important as is Resh’s conclusion that presidents benefit from both trust and the intellectual capital that accompany it.
Using a variety of sources from interviews with agents and their political appointees to empirical analysis of survey data provided by the Office of Personnel Management, Resh demonstrates “that appointees’ optimistic trust in career agency employees during the” second term of the Bush administration was a necessary precursor to improved bureaucratic performance (p. 18). As Resh notes, very little work has concentrated on the second terms of our presidents. Rather, there is a more intense focus on the early years of a president’s term, the point where James Pfiffner famously states that presidents need to “hit the ground running.” Unfortunately, this is a period in which presidents and their appointees have the least amount of trust in middle managers or bureaucratic personnel. Having come to office, in most cases by replacing an administration of the other political party, these presidents arrive in Washington with the intent of changing the status quo. And, herein is the weakest part of Resh’s argument. Although he ably demonstrates the importance of trust during a second presidential administration, we have less of a sense for how trust is engendered in the first term. It is likely that there is a cycle of trust that occurs over time, with trust initially low, particularly during a president’s first 2 years (when they are least likely to face divided government). After this initial period, as presidents increasingly realize that they have less influence over congressional decision making, activist presidents then turn toward bureaucratic solutions. It is during this period that administration officials are likely to build higher levels of trust in middle managers. And the cycle repeats when the next administration arrives in Washington with the reestablishment of lower levels of trust. How precisely this cycle of trust evolves is an unexplained question. Resh does provide some insights, but clearly there is room to build on his basic thesis, and one hopes that Resh will do so in his subsequent work.
This caveat is not meant to suggest that Resh’s current work is not important. It provides a different way of thinking about the appointee–careerist nexus. Resh does not reinvent the wheel, but he gives it a delicious new spin. Drawing impressively on both quantitative and qualitative literature from public administration, organization theory, and political science, Resh demonstrates that many previous assumptions about presidential–bureaucratic relations are in need of reassessment. For presidents who enter office with a confrontational approach, they risk losing the very source of expertise and intellectual capital that actually can prove beneficial to their political agenda in the long-term. Obviously, Resh’s analysis is but a first cut, an examination primarily of one period in time. As noted, I would like to see more work on the cycle of trust that can develop in presidential administrations over time. And, of course, the analysis should be extended to examine other presidents and other times in their presidency. Still, this is an extremely important work, one that deserves careful and serious study. Resh raises issues that require the attention of bureaucratic scholars, as well as those who seek to understand the various dimensions of presidential power and influence. Resh’s book should be a key work in the literature, providing insights for future research, as well as a standard citation for scholars moving forward. It also is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classes on bureaucracy and policy making, as well as classes in political control of the bureaucracy, public administration, and organizational theory.