Utah Politics and Government by Adam R. Brown

Author:Adam R. Brown [Brown, Adam R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL020000 Political Science / American Government / State & Provincial
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0783-8
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2018-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Utah’s Plural Executive

The federal Constitution creates a unitary executive branch where all powers are ultimately vested in a single person, the president of the United States. Every cabinet officer, agency director, bureaucrat, and executive branch employee answers ultimately to the president alone, who bears final responsibility for the federal government’s executive operations. To remind all of this authority, President Harry S. Truman famously kept a sign on his desk declaring, “The buck stops here.”

Only three states have followed this unitary model in their own executives. The remaining states, including Utah, have adopted a plural executive, in which voters separately elect various members of the executive branch. At the extreme, North Dakota’s plural executive includes twelve separately elected executives. Utah employs a more modest plural executive, consisting of five constitutional officers. Utahns elect a governor (jointly with a lieutenant governor), an attorney general, a treasurer, and a state auditor. Each of these constitutional officers answers only to the voters. Other than the lieutenant governor’s subservience to the governor, none of these constitutional officers outranks the others; the governor can neither command nor dismiss the attorney general, treasurer, or auditor.

Each constitutional officer has a defined executive role. The attorney general handles the state’s legal matters, provides legal counsel to offices throughout the executive branch, and manages the state’s prosecutorial efforts, which includes broad authority to investigate possible corruption or malfeasance anywhere in Utah’s government. The treasurer serves as chief financial officer, managing and investing Utah’s public funds. Only the legislature can enact the budget that spends state money, but the treasurer oversees the collection, investment, and disbursement of these funds. The state auditor conducts financial audits and performance reviews of state agencies. The auditor can also independently assess whether state and local government agencies are in compliance with existing statutory law. The lieutenant governor serves as the state’s chief election officer, charged with administering and certifying the state’s elections and other official acts. (Prior to 1976 a separately elected secretary of state conducted these functions.) The governor holds all other executive powers not specifically delegated by the constitution to one of these other offices. Voters elect the governor on a joint ticket with the lieutenant governor, who succeeds the governor in the event of death or resignation.

Plural executives weaken governors by cultivating a class of politicians with the experience and talent necessary to challenge the governor’s reelection attempts. In the forty-seven states with plural executives, gubernatorial candidates routinely come from within the executive branch itself. From 1998 through 2010, 61 percent of open gubernatorial elections—that is, elections in which the incumbent governor did not seek reelection—featured at least one major party nominee who had previously served as an elected executive.7 Plural executives serve as something of a farm team, patiently waiting their opportunity to advance to the governor’s mansion. Some of these plural executives refuse to wait; during this same period 16 percent of incumbent governors seeking reelection faced a major party challenge from another elected executive.8 Of course larger plural executives threaten governors’ electoral ambitions more than smaller ones.

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