Executive policymaking influence via the administrative apparatus

Abstract 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.