The purpose of this assignment is to understand the formal and informal dimensions
of gubernatorial power and how an individual governor utilizes his or her powers
to shape public policy in one of your states. .
How powerful are your governors?
Prepare a presentation that compares your states' governors in terms of their institutional and personal powers.
1. How powerful are your governors in terms of their formal and informal powers?
To compare their formal or institutional powers, you can use UNC Political Science Professor Thad Beyle (Gubernatorial Power: The Institutional Power Ratings for the 50 Governors of the United States) web page which identifies six key institutional powers are (separately elected executive branch officials, tenure potential, appointment powers in six major functional areas, budget power, veto power, and gubernatorial party control) and provides data for different years. Make sure to review his definitions file so you know what he is measuring. In thinking about how to present your analysis, you have a couple of different options.You can either either do a state by state comparison (see the Mountain States Group 2005 Presentation) or compare all your states at the same time (see here for 2 different ways of doing this)
For their informal or personal powers, the key variables are their electoral margin of victory, previous political experience, approval rating, and the degree to which the governor’s party control the legislature. You can find this information by searching the Governor's name on Wikipedia to find their margin of victory in their previous election and whether they are an incumbent, etc), previous political experience or prestige (the Governor's official web page), approval rating (see Approval Ratings), although you might be able to find more data with more digging), and the degree to which the governor’s party control the legislature (see the state legislature's web page and use a calculator). The previous powerpoint shows a couple of different ways of showing the information. It is always nice to have a photo of the governors as well.
--keep in mind the questions of how has the office changed over time, and how are states different?
Gubernatorial Power in Action
Select a single state's governor based on your analysis of their formal and informal powers. Do a case study on how powerful and successful he or she is.
a. What are their priorities? Look at the Governor's official webpage and read their state of the state addresses for the last three years.
b. How do they use combination of institutional and personal powers to achieve their political goals? How politically skillful is the governor? What is the state conventional wisdom about the governor? State political blogs are a great place to start. Governing Magazine has a nice state political blog with a special section on governors. On the bottom left of their 13th Floor webpage they also have links to a bunch of state specific political blogs. Check out the National Governors Association, Republican Governors Association and Democratic Governors Association. Is your governor mentioned there?
Be creative and thoughtful.
Spend about 4 minutes on the formal and informal power and 6 minutes on the case study.