Bulletin n. 1/2015
June 2015
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Jowei Chen and Tim Johnson
    Federal employee unionization and presidential control of the bureaucracy: Estimating and explaining ideological change in executive agencies
    in Journal of Theoretical Politics , 27 (1) ,  2015 ,  151-174
    We present a formal model explaining that US presidents strategically unionize federal employees to reduce bureaucratic turnover and ‘anchor’ the ideological composition of like-minded agency workforces. To test our model’s predictions, we advance a method of estimating bureaucratic ideology via the campaign contributions of federal employees; we then use these bureaucratic ideal point estimates in a comprehensive empirical test of our model. Consistent with our model’s predictions, our empirical tests find that federal employee unionization stifles agency turnover, suppresses ideological volatility when the president’s partisanship changes, and occurs more frequently in agencies ideologically proximate to the president.
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