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Guarding the Guardians: Oversight Appointees and the Search for Accountability in U.S. Federal Agencies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2013

Patrick S. Roberts  and
Matthew Dull
Patrick S. Roberts
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech
Matthew Dull
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 207 - 239
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

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85. We include only confirmed appointees, not service in an acting capacity. We are interested in whether a position is filled with someone who holds the full authority of the office. When a position is vacant, other appointees or careerists may be given some of the duties of the vacant position temporarily, but these substitutes do not exercise these duties with the full authority of the position. For a measure of vacancy duration, we adopted an established method: the number of days from the departure of an appointee until the Senate confirmation of the replacement. We follow previous work on appointees, with some modifications. See Nixon, David C. and Bentley, Roisin M., “Appointment Delay and the Policy Environment of the National Transportation Safety Board,” Administration and Society 37 (2006): 679–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nixon, David C., “Appointment Delay for Vacancies on the Federal Communications Commission,” Public Administration Review 61 (2001): 483–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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87. For example, there is an office of chief counsel in the Department of Treasury and a chief counsel specific to the Internal Revenue Service. For our purposes, however, we counted only the Department of Treasury’s general counsel, who is both the top legal adviser to the secretary and an adviser on policy matters. Other PAS attorneys excluded from our dataset include the solicitor in the Department of Labor and the legal adviser in the state department.

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98. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.