Executive Appointments under Legislative Oversight

A large literature argues that the executive’s appointment powers may bestow them with a significant policy advantage against the legislature. In practice, however, the legislature may also deploy a variety of instruments to strike back at opportunistic executives. In this paper, we use five decades’ worth of data from the Swedish government to investigate whether the executive might adapt their appointment strategies to legislative pressures. We take advantage of a vast system of ad-hoc commissions that the Swedish ministers have developed over time to track their sensitivity to the parliament's ideological composition. We find that, while the ministers generally oversample appointees from their own partisan ranks, the overall distribution of political appointees also tends to shift along with the parliament's balance of power. In line with recent theories of interbranch relations, our results highlight both the executive’s penchant for bureaucratic opportunism and the legislature’s constraining reach.