How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death near the end of the Trump presidency set off a fight in which Republicans moved to rapidly replace her over Democrats’ objections. I use a survey that was in the field at the time to assess whether this period affected the Court’s legitimacy. I find that Democrats who responded in the days just after Justice Ginsburg’s death saw the Court as less legitimate than those who responded shortly before it. These findings connect to broader questions about the sources of Court legitimacy, the mechanisms through which it changes, and the impact of contestation over appointments.

In this paper, I create a simulation model that predicts the portfolio of judges the president chooses to fill vacancies in the judiciary. I find that the president’s strategy in terms of appointments depends on constraint from the Senate, the talent pool of possible judges to appoint, the ideology of the courts in the judiciary, and the number of vacancies to be filled. The model is successful in replicating results that have been found in previous research, while also generating new hypotheses about previously unexplored aspects of the appointment process.

This article explores diversity within top leadership positions in state governments, specifically, the role that position selection method plays in promoting the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities into positions of power. We hypothesize that minorities will be more likely to serve in appointed positions as governors consider diversity in making appointments and less likely to serve in elected positions due to the additional hurdles for candidates of color. Using an original data set of state executive leaders from 2001 to 2017 from all 50 states, we find evidence that institutional design influences levels of diversity among state executive leaders. Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be appointed than elected to state executive leadership positions. In addition, we find that Democratic governors are more likely than Republican governors to appoint minorities. Ultimately, this evidence is important for understanding how institutional design can have consequences for descriptive representation, specifically for groups that have been historically excluded from political life.

Judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are prominent jurists of high merit. However, little is known about certain extra-legal factors of the candidates that guide states in their selection and appointment process. This article focuses on examining extra-legal factors that matter for states in the selection process. Such extra-legal factors demonstrate that elections of candidates to the Court constitute another aspect of a broader political struggle to define the meaning of international law. The article situates the discussion on the selection process in the broader context of the discussion on biases in international law to suggest that the election of candidates to the Court becomes both an instrument and a procedure for controlling the discourse. The characteristics of the judges thus matter as a proxy to control the production and direction of such discourse. This article then explores the ways in which some states have greater strategic advantage in the selection and election processes that enables them to control the discourse to define the meaning of international law effectively.

Drawing on accounts of regulatory capture in which an industry’s influence activities pull regulation in its direction, apart from incentives or information, this article develops a formal model of capture as a shift in a policy-making agent’s preferences, due to costly actions by the industry. One type of action is rentseeking that produces only capture, whereas the other type also improves regulatory quality by producing information that reduces policy uncertainty. The model shows how the ability to capture the agent can incentivise the interest group to produce more information. Thus, aligning an agent’s preferences with a political principal’s and immunising him from capture is not generally optimal; instead, the principal prefers an agent who is susceptible to capture associated with quality improvements but also initially more opposed to the group than the principal. A comparison of two Securities and Exchange Commission rulemakings illustrates the logic of the model.

The average real salary of agricultural economists has risen approximately 20 percent over the last two decades. Currently agricultural economists' salaries are approximately 6 percent above the average college of agricultural salary and 1 percent above the average of all university faculty. Over the last two decades agricultural economists' salaries have remained among the highest in the college of agriculture and their numbers have risen as a percentage of total agricultural faculty. Conversely our profession, and the college of agriculture in general, has experienced declines in salary levels and faculty numbers relative to average university salaries and total faculty numbers.