Abstract
Bowman, Ann O’M., Neal D. Woods, and Milton R. Stark II. 2010. “Governors Turn Pro: Separation of Powers and the Institutionalization of the American Governorship.” Political Research Quarterly 63 (2): 304-15. Original doi:10.1177/1065912908328858.
In the course of responding to a data request from another scholar, we discovered that in the original article we made an error in adjusting our expenditure values for inflation. We apologize to PRQ readers for this error. We subsequently reran the models presented in Table 1 (p. 311) using corrected expenditure measures. The new analysis confirms the general patterns reported in the original article: government growth and workload fosters the institutionalization of governor’s offices, as does rivalry with the legislature, while bargaining relationships with external actors have a more limited impact. However, changes in the performance of particular variables in the four models we report cause us to modify our conclusions about the relative performance of these three theoretical perspectives slightly. We present our corrected results in Table 1.
Determinants of the Institutionalization of the Governorship, 1983–2004
State-clustered robust standard errors in parentheses. Parameter estimates for fixed state effects omitted.
p < .10, **p < .05, ***p < .01, one-tailed tests.
The primary differences between the original and new results involve the performance of three independent variables in the models: overall state expenditures, legislative staff expenditures, and governor’s party in the legislature. First, in our prior analyses, state expenditures were a significant determinant of governor’s office expenditures (models 2 and 4), but not of governor’s office staff (models 1 and 3). In our revised table, state expenditures are now a significant and positive determinant of both of these measures of governor’s office institutionalization (all models). Second, in our prior analyses, legislative staff expenditures were a significant determinant of governor’s office staff and governor’s office expenditures (all models). In our corrected analyses, legislative staff expenditures are a significant determinant of legislative governor’s office expenditures (models 2 and 4), but not governor’s office staff (models 1 and 3). Third, the governor’s party in the legislature is no longer statistically significant in a nonhypothesized manner in the expenditure models (models 2 and 4), although the anomalous finding remains in the staff models (models 1 and 3). Moreover, a new anomalous finding emerges: the governor’s relationship with the public now proves to be a weakly significant explanation in model 4, suggesting that a governor institutionalizes as his or her electoral margin increases, a finding that also does not conform to theory.
In the conclusion to the article, we contended that the bargaining explanation had less traction than the other two theoretical perspectives. The new results continue to support this conclusion, but we would amend it slightly to emphasize that the size and workload of government explanation appears to be the most uniformly supported of the other two explanations.
There is one other difference in the results that we feel is worth noting. In our prior analyses, the variable representing separately elected officials was not a significant determinant of either governor’s office staff or governor’s office expenditures (models 3 and 4). In the new table, separately elected officials is a significant positive determinant of governor’s office staff (model 3). This further bolsters our evidence that governor’s offices institutionalize to deal with coordination issues within the executive branch itself.