Presidential Cabinet Formation: Causes and Consequences

From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, Nelson W. Polsby identified and analyzed patterns of presidential cabinet formation. Initially, he contrasted the level of political experience found in President Nixon’s first and final cabinets. He interpreted a declining reliance on politically-experienced cabinet appointees as a systematic presidential effort to centralize administrative policy-making. Subsequently, Polsby discerned three and later five strategies presidents employ in assembling cabinets, finding in each an approach to the challenges of governing. He employed this framework to assess President Carter’s first cabinet, and he found in Carter’s choices a portent of a preference for administrative over political solutions to policy questions. This paper updates Polsby’s research by examining levels of political experience in the first and final cabinets assembled by presidents over the past four decades, from Nixon to Obama. It also categorizes these cabinets with regard to the alternative approaches advanced by Polsby. The Nixonian precedent, shifting away from more politically-experienced department heads over the president’s term in office, has not proved normative. George W. Bush most closely approximated it. Neither has the Carter strategy been widely emulated. Changes in the political landscape have arguably altered the climate of expectations regarding causes and consequences of presidential cabinet formation.