Also, staffing up while the race is still on can also cause internal unrest. The classic example of what not to do, says Vanderbilt professor of political science David E. Lewis, is the 1976 Jimmy Carter campaign. Carter was criticized for surrounding himself with Georgians who lacked the background to run the federal government, and his winning campaign fed into a transition that his speechwriter described as "a bloody power struggle as old debts were settled" and victors fought over spoils. "The fact that anyone is doing transition planning or floating names for particular positions," says Lewis, "or carving up the new administration without your input while you're running the campaign, it generates anxiety and uncertainty. There's a sense of unfairness, like, 'We're the ones who are working day-to-day to get the president elected and you're sitting back in some cushy air-conditioned office making recommendations and decisions about who's going to staff the administration?'"

In short, it's easy to see why candidates wouldn't want to be expected to suggest who might be in their cabinets. Except in rare instances, it isn't going to help you get elected. It might even drag you down.

But things look different when you think about it from the voter's perspective.

There are, several of the academics agreed, potentially enormous benefits. The heavy lift of vetting, fears of hubris, and the trickiness of composing a balanced cabinet are all valid concerns, writes Mark Peterson, professor of public policy, political science, and law at UCLA. "That said, substantively it should be a viable idea. It would certainly inform voters to know more about what the team would look like."

There are potentially long-lasting upsides to this thing. For the new president-elect, fleshing out full cabinets -- Health and Human Services? Agriculture? HUD? -- can be an afterthought. This can, in turn, lead to something like what public affairs expert Hugh Heclo described in a book in the late 1970s called A Government of Strangers: In recent years, presidents have often come into office without much experience on the national stage. Getting the bureaucracy up and running involves a lot of fumbling in the dark. In the rush of transition, administrations get staffed with people who the president doesn't know very well, and, horizontally, often don't know each other very well. It all makes it particularly tempting to pick from the pool of folks who have already been through the ringer. "George Shultz is a gimme," says the University of Wisconsin at Madison political science professor Ken Mayer, of the man who has run Labor, Treasury, and State. "People who have served in nine different capacities are easy."

Jillson of SMU picks up the thread. "Since the president, then, doesn't know [the members of his cabinet and other executive branch staff] very well, he can't place deep confidence in them, and that leads presidents to depend upon their White House counsellors, their own close appointees." The result? An intimate, some might say insular, circle of advisers made up of people that the new president knows because they helped him get elected. Take Obama's Davids -- Axelrod and Plouffe, who worked largely as media consultants, including on Obama's pre-presidential campaigns, before taking high-ranking and enormously powerful positions in the White House. Maybe expecting presidential candidates to float some cabinet names early wouldn't help all that much to broaden the administration, but it would mean that campaigns -- and candidates -- would have to spend a little extra time getting to know who might be good at actually governing come January.