Congress, Administrators, and Presidents:
The Empirical Testing of Executive-Legislative Theories
Anthony M. Bertelli
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration and Policy
University of Georgia
204 Baldwin Hall
Athens, GA 30602
bertelli@uga.edu
(706) 542-9660
and
Christian R. Grose
Assistant Professor, Department of Government
Lawrence University
208 Briggs Hall
115 S. Drew St.
Appleton, WI 54912-0599
(920) 993-6273
christian.grose@lawrence.edu
Abstract: This paper is the first in a larger project to estimate Congress-Administrator-President
(CAP) scores, or ideal point estimates for federal cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of
congress on a common scale. In this paper, we estimate the ideological positions (ideal points) of
labor secretaries, presidents, and members of the Senate from 1991-2002 in order to answer the
following questions: (1) Are appointed administrators ideologically distinct from their appointing
presidents and their approving senators? (2) Do the ideological positions of secretaries have an
impact on distributive policy outcomes? Two sets of ideological estimates have been generated:
(a) single-congress W-NOMINATE estimates with bootstrapped standard errors, and (b) Markov
Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in a Bayesian framework. Administrative positions have
been constructed through a content analysis of congressional testimony in which an administrator
expresses a position on a bill submitted to a roll-call vote in the current Senate session. Results
indicate that most labor secretaries have ideal points distinct from their appointing presidents,
questioning the assumptions of much of the theoretical literature on the executive branch. Also,
using the CAP scores for labor secretaries and senators, we examine the effect of secretary
preferences on the allocation of distributive policy projects. We find that the distances between
the labor secretary and senators of the same party (Republican) in the 107th Cong