The Link between Appointments and Appropriations in the Politics of Administrative Design.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between political control of agency decision-making and the size of agency budgets. Scholars of bureaucratic and distributive politics have respectively highlighted how political leaders can use personnel management and resource allocation to advance their agendas: with the power of appointment, they can influence the policy priorities of unruly bureaucrats; and with the power of the purse, they can funnel resources towards favored constituencies. We argue that political decisions about agency appointments and appropriations can be understood as part of the same general delegation process, with political leaders strategically matching responsive personnel and prioritized resources across policy issues and over time. To buttress this conjecture, we examine four decades worth of data from the Swedish central bureaucracy, covering all agency appropriations and leadership appointment between 1971 and 2014, and show that agencies systematically receive more generous allocations when the appointing and appropriating governments are from the same ideological bloc. We thereby affirm the strategic considerations highlighted by previous works in both bureaucratic and distributive politics, but also shed new light on how the appropriations and appointment processes are linked.