In democratic settings, public administration cannot operate in an organizational vacuum. This is because government agencies both make and administer public policies in a richly textured political environment comprised of diverse audiences, including elected officials, clientele groups, the media, policy experts, and ordinary citizens. Naturally, public administrators confront three primary challenges that are fundamental to governance: (1) how to maintain broad-based support for an agency and its activities, (2) how to steer a vessel amid 1 Parts of this paper were originally presented by the first author as the Herbert Simon Award Lecture at the 2011 annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. For comments and discussions we thank Rick Hall, Tom Hammond, Susan Moffitt, and Mike Ting. We also acknowledge our various collaborators on our respective research projects analyzing how organizational reputations affect administrative governance who have not only enriched our work, but also has made it a lot more fun to be an academic:

The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data drawn from over 22,000 U.S. weather stations to provide election day estimates of rain and snow for each U.S. county. We find that, when compared to normal conditions, rain significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%

The frequency with which presidents issue executive orders is an important area of inquiry for students of executive politics, because this instrument can shape policy in a quick, direct manner that is outside the purview of the legislative arena. We construct a probabilistic-based empirical model that is used to explain variation in the number of presidential executive orders issued during the 1953-1994 annual period. Using event count regression techniques, these results indicate that the use of executive orders by presidents is significantly related to the legislative success they enjoy, the partisan composition of Congress, macroeconomic conditions, and the rate of growth in federal executive branch employment. The main implication of the study is that a president's willingness to issue executive orders is significantly related to a combination of legislative, public prestige, and managerial/institutional considerations. Thus, presidential use of executive orders is conditioned on different types of causal factors, and not solely attributable to the "institutionalized presidency" or legislative relations with Congress, as suggested in previous research on the topic.Past research on executive politics has examined the many tools and means by which presidents are able to shape public policy. These various means include the legislative process, veto authority, and executive orders. Presidential influence on the legislative process has been the most examined form of executive policy making (e.g., Bond and the anonymous reviewers at Amencan Politics Quarterly for their helpful comments. Statistical analysis was performed using COUNT (versions 3.0 and 4.02) and PCGIVE Professional (version 8.10). Any remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors. Data and documentation necessary to replicate the analysis can be obtained by contacting the lead author via electronic mail (krauseg@gamet.cla.sc.edu).

Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We evaluate our organizational balancing thesis using data on executive branch general revenue fund forecasts in the American states from 1987 to 2002. States with a combination of politically appointed agency executives and merit-selected subordinates generally provide more accurate revenue forecasts than states that possess uniformly politicized personnel selection systems. Conversely, states with a combination of department head-appointed executives and subordinates chosen from an at-will system (i.e., nonmerit) produce more accurate forecasts than states with uniformly autonomous personnel selection systems. Our statistical findings underscore the positive consequences associated with balancing politicized and autonomous means of selecting personnel within hierarchies of political organizations.

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