Organizational Complexity and Coordination

Dilemmas in U.S. Executive Politics

GEORGE A. KRAUSE
University of Pittsburgh
Modern scholarship on the institutional presidency has emphasized the formal mechanisms
that presidents employ to obtain bureaucratic compliance. This literature emphasizes presidents
effective use of both expressed and implied constitutional powers. Unfortunately, little systematic
inquiry has analyzed how extraconstitutional features of the executive branch limit the
presidents capacity for effective control over administrative agencies. This essay highlights three
problems of organizational complexity relating to presidential control over the bureaucracy that
merit greater attention from scholars of U.S. executive politics: (1) vertical coordination, (2)
horizontal coordination, and (3) credible commitment. The author sketches out elements of a
research agenda that examines presidential control over the bureaucracy in relation to each of
these coordination problems. The basic implication of this essay is a simple onefailing to
account for these organizational problems overstates the true capacity of presidential control over
executive administration.
American presidents are capable of imposing their will on administrative agencies.
Perhaps the most powerful illustration of this has been the centralization of major
executive branch regulatory review procedures through Executive Order nos. 12291 and
12498 issued by President Ronald Reagan, and Executive Order no. 13422 issued by
President George W. Bush. These executive orders were intended to both centralize and
politicize agency rulemaking activities by requiring approval from the Ofce of Infor-
mation and Regulatory Affairs within the Ofce of Management and Budget. Because of
collective-action problems and the costly nature of attempting to overturn these execu-
tive policy directives, Congress rarely is effective at halting such presidential attempts to
control the bureaucracy (Mayer 2001, 130; Moe 1993; Moe 1995: 430-431; Moe and
George A. Krause is a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of A
Two-Way Street: The Institutional Dynamics of the Modern Administrative State and co-editor of Politics,
Policy, and Organizations.
AUTHORS NOTE: I thank David Lewis, Andrew Rudalevige, Neal Woods, and participants at the Political
Control of the Bureaucracy Conference for constructive criticisms and helpful suggestions along various stages of this project.
A special debt of gratitude is owed to Bert Rockman for his insightful suggestions that has both altered and improved the
focus of this essay.
Presidential Studies Quarterly 39, no. 1 (March)
74
2009 Center for the Study of the Presidency
Howell 1999). Presidents also exert their authority over administrative agencies through
budgetary agenda-setting power (Moe and Wilson 1994, 36), the strategic selection of
political executives (Lewis 2008; Moe 1985; Nathan 1983), and their comparative
advantage over Congress attributable to less severe coordination problems (Moe 1995).
These formal mechanisms of presidential control over executive administration rest solely
on the application of expressed or implied constitutional powers.
Yet a richer understanding of presidentialbureaucratic relations requires a focus on
coordinated executive action, as opposed to unilateral presidential action. This is because
the inherent organizational dilemmas that presidents confront in the chief executive role
cannot be overcome solely by the exercise of formal authority. As Norton E. Long noted
more than half a century ago regarding the administrative presidency, The personal
unity of the Presidency cannot perform the function of Hobbes sovereign since his ofce
lacks the authority of Hobbes contract. Single headedness in the executive gives no
assurance of singleness of purpose. It only insures that the signicant pressures in a
society will be brought to bear on one ofce (1949, 260). Harold Seidman and Robert
Gilmour assert that a president does not enforce his will by dictate (1986, 79). Analyses
grounded exclusively in formal executive powers understate organizational complexity,
and thus overstate presidential capacity for controlling the bureaucracy. This problem is
further exacerbated because presidents provide little attention to the ner details of
administrative management (West 2006, 452).
The purpose of this essay is to argue that the inherent organizational dilemmas
confronted by presidents in executive administration deserve systematic scholarly
inquiry. These organizational dilemmas are extraconstitutional insofar as they exist
independent of either expressed or implied constitutional powers. Specically, I discuss
the organizational complexities associated with the executive branch and how they
limit presidential capacity for effective control over executive administration. These
organizational complexities result in problems pertaining to (1) vertical coordination
between presidents and their subordinates (both political and agency executives), (2)
horizontal coordination among subordinates, and (3) credible commitments arising
from both presidents and political executives relatively short tenure in ofce. All three
forces serve to undermine the institutional presidencys ability to effectively coordinate
action within the executive branch of government. Also, I sketch out the elements of
a research agenda intended to systematically analyze the conditions under which these
organizational complexities may affect presidential capacity to control executive
administration.
The outline of this essay is as follows. I discuss the relevance of organizational
theory for analyzing problems inherent in presidential control of the bureaucracy. In this
section, I also provide some case-specic illustrations of how organizational complexities
adversely affect presidential capacity to shape executive branch policy making. The third
section sketches out elements of a research agenda to analyze the organizational com-
plexities associated with the executive branch in order to better understand effective
coordinated action. This section focuses on analyzing how variations in these organiza-
tional dilemmas may alter presidential capacity for obtaining bureaucratic compliance.
This essay concludes by summarizing the main arguments advanced here.
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 75
Organizational Complexity and Executive Administration
Organizations involve a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of
two or more persons explicitly created to achieve specic ends (Barnard 1938, 3-7; see
also Downs 1967, 24). Because coordination is fundamental to the functioning of all
organizations (March 1988; Miller 1992; Wilson 1989, 24), a presidents capacity to
effectively coordinate the executive branch around policy goals is crucial for gaining
effective inuence over policy administration (Miller 1993).
1
Analyzing the organiza-
tional dimension of executive politics has become increasingly relevant during the
modern presidency era because of the increased responsibilities of the executive branch
(e.g., Burke 1992; Dickinson 1997). Although presidents have sought to mitigate the
effects of increasing organizational complexity through a dual strategy of centralization
and politicization (Rudalevige and Lewis 2005), this dual strategy is often insufcient for
obtaining bureaucratic compliance.
This is because a dual centralizationpoliticization strategy is predicated, at least to
a sizable degree, on increasing the size and scope of the Executive Ofce of the President
(EOP) and the executive branch. This, in turn, makes effective coordination more
challenging because the executive branch should experience diseconomies of scale
(Krause 2004). That is, as the number of decision-making units or actors involved in
executive administration increases, the probability that each unit or actor is in sync with
one another declines as a result of rising transactions costs associated with coordinated
action. Put simply, increasing EOP size yields greater organizational complexity, thereby
resulting in preference heterogeneity that makes presidential control over policy admin-
istration more difcult. This logic is consistent with Samuel Kernells observation on
presidential staff: As the White House becomes more complex, so too do these man-
agement problems. Presidents who manage their own ofces will increasingly risk being
overwhelmed with police work (1989, 224). Specically, presidential capacity to obtain
bureaucratic compliance has become increasingly tenuous as the executive branch
bureaucracy has both thickened and deepened (Light 1995), and the EOP has evolved
similarly (Dickinson and Lebo 2007; Hult and Walcott 2004). Next, I discuss three
inherent organizational dilemmas that limit presidential capacity to effectively coordi-
nate action involving executive administration: (1) vertical coordination, (2) horizontal
coordination, and (3) credible commitments.
Vertical Coordination Problems
Assessing vertical coordination means analyzing the extent to which hierarchical
relationships between actors across different levels of an organization share both a
common goal and a method for achieving that goal. Solving vertical coordination
problems requires that the president (principal) manipulate the preferences of executive
1. Two recent studies motivating the institutional presidency literature from an organizational-
theoretic tradition are Andrew Rudaleviges (2005) efforts to understand structure-induced information
ows within the Executive Ofce of the President, and William Wests (2006) analysis of the chasm between
formal presidential authority and administrative practice.
76 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2009
agencies (subordinates) in some manner. Put another way, If hierarchies are going to
reconcile efciency, transitivity, and minimal delegation in their decision-making, they
can only do so by manipulating individual preferences (Miller 1992, 120). Principals
use of hierarchical arrangements to address such dilemmas are fraught with unintended
consequences that render them of limited effectiveness (Hammond and Thomas 1989;
Hammond and Miller 1985).
2
Therefore, principals must use incentives that appeal to
both agents and their own mutually shared self-interests (Miller 1992, 115-119).
3
Vertical coordination problems do exist between presidents and those whom they
appoint to serve on their White House staff, cabinet, councils, boards, and the like.
4
Although the president serves as a unitary elected ofcial possessing considerable discre-
tion in exercising governmental authority (Moe and Howell 1999, 137), the institutional
presidency encompasses a host of individuals whose views on administration policy often
differ from those held by the chief executive. Former Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) chief Christine Todd Whitman, for example, often held and publicly aired policy
views on environmental regulation that ran counter to those espoused by others within
the George W. Bush administration (Green 2001). One notable policy disagreement
between EPA administrator Whitman and the Bush White House was over the use of
New Source Review to determine the criteria requiring rms operating older power
plants to install new pollution control technology whenever they made upgrades to their
facilities. This policy disagreement resulted in an almost two-and-a-half-year delay in
enacting New Source Review reforms originally sought by the Bush administration
(Krause and Dupay, forthcoming).
How well presidents manage these centrifugal forces is crucial in determining
whether administrative agencies comply with executive will (e.g., Burke 1992; Hart
1995). Presidents address this dilemma by centralizing authority into organizational
units that are closely linked to their ofce and their policy program, with the express
purpose of creating a unied vision for the administration (Aberbach and Rockman 1976;
Burke 1992; Moe 1985, 1995; Rourke 1987; Weko 1995; but see Rudalevige 2002). Yet
the portrait of a unied executive in constitutional terms is starkly different from the
actual conduct of executive governance (West 2006). Administration loyalists staffed
within the EOP and other executive appointed posts, for example, do not necessarily
translate into unity of purpose because these individuals can become empowered in their
position as they accrue power independent of the president (Carpenter 2001; Meier 1993,
172; Rourke 1987; Wilson 1989). Although presidents employ an administrative clear-
ance process within EOP units to prevent moral hazard problems arising from the actions
2. Both Rudalevige (2005) and Krause, Lewis, and Douglas (2006) address how such biases can be
mitigated in the realm of presidential organization and executive policy making, respectively.
3. Miller notes that devising shared incentive schemes is challenging. Hence, the use of one-sided
incentives often is ineffective for obtaining agent compliance.
4. Congress also experiences vertical coordination dilemmas. These problems can transpire between
the party leadership and the committee system. Weingast and Marshall (1988), for example, contend that
nonmarket exchange mechanisms (i.e., incentives), involving committee assignments and the ensuing
benets they bring to members of these decision-making bodies, can ameliorate the collective-action
problems that are inherent in the organization of Congress. One manifestation of this committee organizing
principle consists of incentives for members loyalty to party leadership goals (Cox and McCubbins 1993;
Rohde 1991).
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 77
of political executives, this is not a foolproof strategy. For example, Jack Goldsmith, as
director of the Ofce of Legal Council within the Department of Justice under President
George W. Bush, instituted a legal review of the implementation of the National Security
Act Surveillance Program that culminated in the infamous hospital standoff between
administration and senior Justice Department ofcials while Attorney General John
Ashcroft was recuperating from emergency gall bladder surgery (Krause and Dupay,
forthcoming). The Justice ofcials were at loggerheads with the White House over
whether the president could unilaterally bypass the procedures spelled out in the statute
or require legislative authorization for the enhanced surveillance that the White House
wanted.
The possibility of slippage in hierarchical relationships is obviously much greater
than presupposed by scholarship solely focusing on formal executive authority. Executive
coordination, for example, through presidential councils or boards, often functions
imperfectly (Wilson 1989, 268-274). Moreover, cabinet and agency heads will not
necessarily guarantee institutional loyalty (Seidman and Gilmour 1986, 168) because
presidents might select individuals to these top political executive positions for reasons
other than achieving their operational goals (Wilson 1989, 198-199). This can be
especially problematic from an organizational standpoint because political executives
often play a crucial role as policy brokers between chief executives and the permanent
bureaucracy (Aberbach and Rockman 2000). The layers of staff and policy decision
makers within the institutional presidency exacerbates information asymmetries that
place presidents at a disadvantage (Rudalevige 2005). Under such circumstances, when
formal authority does not solve vertical coordination dilemmas, an alternative presiden-
tial strategy that relies on both bargaining (Dickinson 2005; Neustadt 1990) and shared
incentives (Miller 1992, 115-119) may ameliorate this problem.
Horizontal Coordination Problems
Horizontal coordination problems occur among actors or units on the same orga-
nizational level when a lack of coherent preferences exists among subordinates. One
strategy for solving this dilemma offered by political scientists entails selective recruit-
ment of subordinates within an organization (Brehm and Gates 1997; Carpenter 2001;
Miller 1992, 95-97). Yet this strategy is by no means a panacea. If, for example, the
principal issues vague directives allowing for varied interpretations across agents, then
horizontal coordination problems will ensue. The remedy to the principals control
problem is to restrict subordinate choice through the effective application of rules (Barro
and Gordon 1983; Crozier 1964; March and Simon 1958). This line of reasoning
presupposes that unambiguous presidential policy directives reected in a rules-based
approach are necessarily compatible with the bureaucratic realities confronting subordi-
nates. Yet if these realities are not aligned with the rules, agents will subvert the rules,
irrespective of how clearly they are dened by the principal (Wilson 1989, 338-339).
Horizontal coordination problems naturally occur within the institutional presi-
dency. Such problems often are attributable to both communication gaps and interofce
78 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2009
rivalries within the Executive Ofce of the President (Edwards and Wayne 1999, 316).
5
Although unilateral powers serve as a unique feature of the institutional presidency, a
multiplicity of decision makers coexists within a given administration that make up the
actual organization of the presidency (Walcott and Hult 1995). For instance, Samuel
Kernell has chronicled the increasing size and complexity of White House staff during
the postwar era, stating that the pluralistic character of the modern White House staff.
Its division of labor and recruitment of experts with varying backgrounds will create
different opinions about the presidents priorities and interests . . . Uncontrolled, the
presidents staff becomes a cacophony of voices, leaving outsiders wondering if anyone is
in charge at the White House (1989, 236).
Because of the organizational complexity that spans the executive branch, clear
administrative and policy directives are essential for obtaining bureaucratic compliance
with presidential will. As Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman astutely note, Not
surprisingly, political leaders get irritated by administrative failures to act as they might
wish. Perhaps even more, they get irritated by a bureaucracy that specically acts in a way
that they do not wish. But for ones wish to be ones command, it is essential to rst
(clearly) articulate this wish (2000, 89-90). By failing to clearly articulate their wishes,
presidents risk undermining their own policy agenda by inviting opposition from exter-
nal actors. John Burkes study (1992, 112) of the modern institutional presidency
supports this contention, noting that conicts do occur among staff members and other
political executives that spill over into the policy-making arena.
Burkes characterization of the horizontal coordination problem is reected in the
Richard M. Nixon administrations indecision in handling the imposition of wage and
price controls during President Nixons rst term in ofce. Council of Economic Advisers
chair Paul McCracken and Labor Secretary George Shultz opposed an incomes policy on
free-market philosophical grounds, while other cabinet ofcials were proponents of this
strategy ( John Volpe, Department of Transportation; George Romney, Department of
Housing and Urban Development; and Maurice Stans, Department of Commerce). This
discordance among Nixon administration ofcials not only divided the executive branch
bureaucracy but also provided ammunition for congressional Democrats and others
wishing to see government intervention on this matter during a midterm election year at
a time when the U.S. economy was underperforming (Matusow 1998, 63-70).
Therefore, effective executive coordination requires presidents to successfully
orchestrate different voices within their administration chorus. When presidents
succeed in achieving a harmonious administration, their inuence over the bureaucracy
increases. Selective recruitment around a common mission, coupled with the appropriate
application of clearly designed rules that can be feasibly executed by subordinates, likely
will help relieve presidents horizontal coordination problems.
5. Even under the best of circumstances, when staff consensus on policy matters is very high, and
also in accordance with the presidents policy preferences, reliance on White House staff still can
produce executive coordination problems resulting from communication distortion (Edwards and Wayne
1999, 315).
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 79
Credible Commitment Problems
Organizations possess inherent credible commitment problems. These problems
involve moral hazard problems, whereby a principal seeks to deviate from the organi-
zations welfare because of his or her own myopic self-interest. This moral hazard
problem makes coordination extremely difcult because a mismatch of incentives
yields organizational inefciencies (Holmstrom 1982). Effective coordinated action is
most apt to be sustained by rational actors as long as there is a high likelihood that
individual decision makers will remain from one period to the next, and also possess
common ex ante beliefs about the others willingness to reciprocate (Axelrod 1984;
Miller 1992, 198).
Because of the transitory nature of presidents and political executives, it is hardly
surprising that unilateral efforts by American presidents to control the bureaucracy are
most apt to succeed in the short run (Waterman 1989, 189). Long notes the implications
of the American presidencys short-term orientation, stating that [t]he xed character of
presidential tenure makes it necessary that subordinates be politically expendable. The
Presidents men must be willing to accept the blame for failures not their own (1949,
263). Because turnover among political executives is sufciently high (Heclo 1977), trust
developed by time and experience between administration ofcials and the permanent
bureaucracy is lost whenever political turnover occurs (Aberbach and Rockman 2000,
171). This turnover increases bureaucratic uncertainty, thus making effective executive
coordination more difcult.
The comparatively weak institutional continuity and organizational memory asso-
ciated with the institutional presidency has important consequences for understanding
presidential capacity to obtain bureaucratic compliance. Aberbach and Rockman describe
this issue in their seminal article on the Nixon administrative presidency:
When presidential administrations change, uncertainty and tensions rise within the Ameri-
can federal bureaucracy. New program priorities and emphases and the introduction of new
personnel create some inevitable difculties of adjustment under the best of circumstances.
Politically appointed executives with typically short career spans and often limited expe-
rience in bureaucratic politics must learn to come to grips rapidly with the complexities of
their jobs. With astonishing quickness they must come to know whom they can trust
among their career subordinates; who among them will be cooperative and loyal and who
will not. (1976, 456)
This, in turn, suggests that the presidency is at a competitive institutional disadvantage
with respect to Congress insofar as it lacks the personnel stability required to handle
intra-institutional coordination dilemmas. Thus, one can infer that under conditions of
presidentialcongressional competition over the bureaucracy, effective presidential inu-
ence over public agencies becomes more difcult when the political leaders of executive
institutions have scant organizational continuity and memory. On the other hand, it may
be that this experience gives the presidents agents some comparative advantage over the
White House in departmentalEOP competition. That creates issues of vertical coordi-
nation to be discussed later.
80 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2009
Credible commitment problems also can arise within a given presidential admin-
istration. One notable example transpired when conicting monetary policy signals
emanated from the Reagan administration during the mid-1980s. The conuence of
traditional Republican and supply-side-oriented administration ofcials during this
period resulted in considerable disunity regarding U.S. monetary policy within the
presidential branch. This lack of policy unity can be traced to the replacement of
conservative Reagan administration ofcials advocating a monetarist (contractionary)
policy with political executives who espoused a supply-side prescription for expansionary
monetary policy, which resulted in conicting administration signals to the Federal
Reserve (Havrilesky 1995, 66-69). For example, the Treasury Department signaled the
Fed to ease monetary policy during the 1985-86 period, while the Council of Economic
Advisers recommended that the Fed follow an austere monetary policy (Havrilesky 1995,
68). These conicting signals resulted from turnover in the political executive ranks and
a consequent lack of philosophical unity regarding the desired direction of U.S. monetary
policy.
U.S. executive politics exhibits palpable moral hazard problems because of the
myopic incentives arising from the short tenures of presidents and their political execu-
tives. Providing presidents strong formal authority over executive administration is
antithetical to solving this credible commitment problem. Gary J. Miller best summa-
rizes this problem on a theoretical level as it relates to the separation of politics and
administration:
Furthermore, and ironically, the people who receive the surplus benets must be credibly
constrained from inuencing the activities of those who generate the benets. This means
that principalagency theory has it exactly wrong: The problem is not for principals to
impose their preferences on their agents, the problem is for principals to be restrained from
undermining efciency through their rent-seeking preferences. (2000, 313-314)
In the case of U.S. executive politics, presidents are motivated by short-term incentives
arising from electoral concerns, whereas the permanent bureaucracy does not share this
myopia (Krause and Corder 2007). One viable prescription for the credible commitment
problem is to rein in the principals (presidents) authority over executive administration
while simultaneously empowering the permanent bureaucracy by both augmenting civil
service rules and entrusting bureaucrats with ample administrative authority (Miller
2000, 325). Although such a prescription would mitigate credible commitment prob-
lems, it would do so at the expense of short-term democratic accountability in executive
administration.
Elements of a Proposed Research Agenda
Analyzing Vertical Coordination Problems in Executive Administration
Vertical coordination problems arise when hierarchical relationships between actors
across different levels of an organization lack common methods or goals. One interesting
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 81
way to characterize vertical coordination problems is through the lens of preference
divergence across different levels of the executive branch hierarchy. This focus can allow
scholars to emphasize the agency loss between presidents and their subordinates at
different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Coupled with measures of bureau outputs
that are distinct from their own preferences, theories and corresponding empirical tests
can be advanced that assess the conditions by which formal (constitutional) executive
authority is more important for effective coordinated action than informal (extraconsti-
tutional) executive authority, and vice versa. This line of inquiry also can highlight how
effective formal mechanisms such as budgetary agenda setting, appointment powers, and
unilateral directives can shape presidential control over the bureaucracy, conditional on
varying levels of executive branch policy cohesion.
The rst step in this research enterprise is to obtain unique preference (ideal point)
measures for presidents, political executives, and agency careerists. To do this, several
things are required. First, presidential preferences on policies specic to particular
administrative agencies have to be estimated. While presidential preferences are known
on a general level through legislative roll-call-based voting scores, they are unknown
with respect to specic policies administered by particular government agencies. This is
a labor-intensive yet feasible task, given the abundance of primary source material,
ranging from presidential statements to presidential directives to position taking on
legislative roll call votes. Second, arriving at estimates of agency preferences can be
handled through the use of expert surveys (Clinton and Lewis 2007), or agency heads
public positions on roll call votes before Congress (Bertelli and Grose 2007).
6
Another promising avenue of preference measurement within the executive branch
is to survey executive branch ofcials at various levels using a battery of comparable
questions that would enable researchers to place them on an ideological scale sharing a
common metric analogous with roll call votes in Congress used to construct Nominate
Scores (Poole and Rosenthal 1997). This particular type of research is currently being
undertaken by the Survey of the Future of Government Service (Bertelli et al. 2008).
An additional way to assess vertical coordination problems within the executive
branch is by examining the extent to which government agencies core organizational
missions are stable and compatible with presidential preferences. One conjecture is that
presidents should have the easiest time obtaining bureaucratic compliance from those
agencies whose organizational missions are both stable and compatible with presidential
preferences.
7
Conversely, presidents will experience greater difculty trying to direct
those agencies whose organizational missions are stable yet stand in stark opposition to
presidential preferences. The pair of intermediate cases involving an agencys evolving
organizational mission suggests that a malleable agency whose preferences are compatible
6. Nixon (2004) has cleverly used cabinet ofcials who previously served in Congress as a bridging
mechanism to derive agency preferences. Yet this technique is rather limited because (1) only a very small
proportion of executive branch ofcials have previously served in Congress, and (2) it assumes constancy of
behavior that is independent of their formal position.
7. This shared-goals argument implicitly presumes that similar methods are employed by the presi-
dent and the executive agency. If shared goals are pursued with different methods by each entity, then vertical
coordination can become even more problematic. I thank Bert Rockman for bringing this point to my
attention.
82 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2009
with the presidents should be more susceptible to presidential inuence than a malleable
agency whose preferences are incompatible with the current administration.
Horizontal Coordination Problems in Executive Administration
Horizontal coordination problems occur among actors or units on the same orga-
nizational level when a lack of coherent preferences exists among subordinates. One
fruitful way to analyze executive branch horizontal coordination problems is to jointly
examine the consequences of selective recruitment of agency personnel and the clarity
(specicity) of executive policy directives. The extent to which executive branch ofcials
are selectively chosen because of presidential loyalty is informative for understanding the
degree to which subordinates possess a shared policy vision with the administration.
Subordinates chosen based on other criteria will tend to have sharper differences of
opinion among one another because their interests, incentives, and evaluative standards
may vary considerably as a result of professional norms, task complexity, and organiza-
tional mission. In other words, presidential loyalty is the mechanism that can bring these
disparate voices together for a unied purpose. The politics-versus-administration
tension can be analyzed at the macro-organizational level by assessing the extent to which
an agency is composed of political appointees vis--vis civil service personnel (Lewis
2008). Such personnel-based information, for instance, can highlight broader issues
pertaining to executive branch trade-offs involving political responsiveness versus
bureaucratic capacity (Huber and McCarty 2004), and the optimal organizational design
for effective bureaucratic performance (Krause, Lewis, and Douglas 2006).
Analyzing the clarity of executive policy directives conveys information regarding
the range of executive discretion that presidents afford to their subordinates. Although
formal-theoretic analyses have focused on the administrative discretion arising from
enacting legislation (e.g., Epstein and OHalloran 1999; Huber and Shipan 2002),
current systematic inquiry of executive policy directives has yet to analyze their discre-
tionary content.
8
Therefore, executive politics research relies on the implicit assumption that all
types of unilateral presidential action possess equivalent intent and force for controlling
the bureaucracy. Content-coding the level of discretion contained in executive policy
directives to assess clarity would allow the exercise of presidential prerogatives to be
reconsidered, and could make an important contribution to the delegation literature by
more precisely examining the political controlbureaucratic expertise trade-off that has
heretofore mainly focused on legislatures through statutory (Hammond and Knott
1996), procedural (Bawn 1995), or oversight (Gailmard 2007) mechanisms.
Hypothetically, presidents should experience the least severe horizontal coordina-
tion problems when executive policy directives are unambiguous (i.e., afford little
discretion) and administered by presidential loyalists because, under these conditions,
subordinates are likely to concur on how to handle policy matters as a result of their
shared loyalty to the president, and because such directives provide them with little
8. Warber (2006) has classied executive orders by function, but no attempt has yet been made to
systematically analyze the discretionary content of such presidential directives.
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 83
opportunity to exercise bureaucratic discretion. Presidents should incur the most severe
horizontal coordination problems when subordinates do not possess strong loyalty to
their administrations policy agenda coupled with their own vague executive policy
directives. These circumstances afford their subordinates in the agencies considerable
discretion to interpret orders as they deem appropriate. Intermediate-level horizontal
coordination problems arise when subordinates possess considerable discretion with
regard to executive policy directives yet are loyal to the presidents agenda, or,
alternatively, when subordinates possess little discretion with respect to such directives
but have agendas inconsistent with that of the president. On one hand, subordinates
are loyal but have signicant discretion; on the other hand, subordinates loyalties are
suspect, but they have relatively little discretion. In the rst case, although subordinates
are highly loyal to the president, vague executive policy directives can lend themselves to
varying interpretations. In the second situation, subordinates are afforded little discre-
tion, but a lack of loyalty to the president leads them to exploit what little administrative
discretion they do possess. From the presidents perspective, the rst problem can be
resolved through more precise instrumentation, including monitoring, whereas the
second resolution is likely resolved through closer vetting of personnel for loyalty to the
president.
Credible Commitment Problems in Executive Administration
At the heart of credible commitment problems in executive administration lies the
temporal mismatch between presidential myopia and the long-term perspective of public
agencies. The institutional continuity and organizational memory of government agen-
cies is an important mode of analysis for assessing the source of these credible commit-
ment problems. This is because presidential myopia is institutionally xed across
administrations because of both short-term electoral pressures and relatively brief xed
terms in ofce. One useful way to view this temporal mismatch is to assess the political
responsivenessbureaucratic reputation trade-off facing executive branch ofcials. Politi-
cally insulated agencies tend to be increasingly more concerned with bureaucratic repu-
tation over the long term, while less politically insulated agencies are likely to be more
preoccupied with responding to presidential will. The underlying mechanism capturing
this relationship is that stable agencies possessing lower levels of leadership and personnel
turnover are more inclined to care about the long-term implications of their policy
decisions than less stable agencies possessing higher levels of leadership and personnel
turnover (Krause and Corder 2007). Therefore, an intriguing avenue for future research
is to examine how variations in the organizational stability of public agencies affect the
extent to which policy commitments and long-run decision making are deemed credible.
An alternative path to understanding this credible commitment problem is to
assess the different implicit (career-based) incentives facing bureaucrats within govern-
ment agencies (Alesina and Tabellini 2007; Dewatripont, Jewitt, and Tirole 1999). This
line of inquiry presumes that the type of (future) career incentives facing political
executives and agency personnel is essential for understanding their willingness to
deviate from presidential intent. Agents should be less willing to credibly commit to
84 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2009
policies for the long haul when they exhibit a greater concern for political-based career
advancement within government (e.g., enhancing the prospects of obtaining a better job
within the political party or a future partisan administration). Individuals thus seeking
future career opportunities predicted on partisan political networks should be highly
responsive to presidential will. Conversely, agents seeking career advancement within
their professional community (e.g., enhancing the prospects of obtaining a better
civil service job within an agency or seeking employment opportunities outside of
government) will be willing to credibly commit to policies for the long haul. The latter
type of individuals will assuage credible commitment problems, but they do so at the
expense of presidential responsiveness.
Concluding Remarks
This essay has attempted to highlight the intrabranch coordination problems
inherent in the U.S. executive branch. The distinction between coordinated and unilat-
eral executive action is not merely a matter of semantics. The analysis of unilateral
executive action requires scholars to focus on the constitutional foundations of presiden-
tial power. This is an important and fruitful area of scholarly inquiry because chief
executives are endowed with certain unique structural advantages to take unilateral
action that can enable them to serve as the dominant political principal to administrative
agencies in the short run (Howell 2003; Moe 1995; Moe and Howell 1999). Yet the
organizational realities that are inherent in administrative management also require a
focus on the extraconstitutional features of the institutional presidency.
This essay has discussed three organizational dilemmas faced by U.S. presidents
seeking to exert control over federal government agencies: (1) vertical coordination, (2)
horizontal coordination, and (3) credible commitment. Each of these organizational
dilemmas limits presidential capacity for controlling administrative agencies. I also have
offered some suggestions on what I deem promising research avenues for students of the
administrative presidency to pursue when it comes to analyzing the relationship between
these organizational dilemmas and presidential capacity to control the bureaucracy.
While some of the presidential management strategies advanced in this essay are hardly
novel (e.g., selective recruitment of political executives), others entail research that is in
the early formative stages (e.g., preference estimation of political executives and agency
personnel) or has yet to be systematically explored by administrative presidency scholars
(e.g., career incentives, discretion contained in executive policy directives). The encour-
aging message from this essay is that the study of the administrative presidency is a fertile
area of scholarly inquiry in which many interesting and unanswered puzzles remain
concerning the mechanisms of presidential control over the bureaucracy. Because of the
fundamental importance of coordinated executive action to executive administration,
future research on the puzzles advanced in this essay should be solidly grounded in
organizational theory that takes into account, inter alia, the clarity or ambiguity of
directives, the differential incentives of actors who are there for the long term versus those
Krause / U.S. EXECUTIVE POLITICS | 85
who are there for the short term, and the mechanisms and means for enforcing or
inducing coordination.
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