Events

Abstract: Constitutional democracies depend on legislative checks to constrain who wields executive power. In the United States, the Senate must confirm the president's most consequential appointees — the officials who run federal agencies and direct the vast majority of domestic policymaking. Yet, what happens when the Senate stalls the confirmation process or when the president simply declines to nominate anyone at all? Kinane draws on her book project, Unconfirmed Power, to examine how vacancies in senior government positions function, not as administrative failures, but as a source of executive authority. The book traces a gap in the constitutional design in the Framers' failure to anticipate what happens when confirmed appointees depart and the Senate cannot keep pace, and shows how it gave rise to a statutory architecture that progressively decoupled the president's power to appoint from the appointee's power to act. What began as a pragmatic stopgap in the 1790s has, through two centuries of institutional adaptation, become a first-order instrument of presidential governance. In the modern era, this inheritance has profound consequences: an original dataset covering nearly 500 executive positions over four decades reveals that "temporary" officials are far more prevalent, more durable, and more consequential than conventional wisdom suggest.  And contemporary presidents, most visibly in the Trump administrations, have moved from exploiting this architecture incidentally to wielding it as a deliberate governing strategy. In doing so, this research engages a puzzle that extends well beyond the American case: how executives operating under time pressure exploit the gap between formal institutional constraints and the tempo of actual governance, and how provisional workarounds quietly harden into permanent power.

The Political Science Seminar Series is convened by Desmond King. For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact politics.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.