The President and the Environment: A Reinterpretation of Neustadt's Theory of Presidential Leadership

Neustadt's theory of presidential leadership is conventionally viewed as based on a model of the Bargaining President, in which presidents focus on twisting arms and trading favors rather than on making public appeals. However, Neustadt's theory has a deeper logic—the logic of strategic choice, in which both effective bargaining and rhetorical appeals are techniques of presidential persuasion enabled by a President's choices. This reinterpretation of Neustadt's theory is supported by an original case study of President George H.W. Bush's leadership on the 1990 Clean Air Act. The President presented an initiative in a manner that capitalized on the public mood and he made key strategic choices aimed at persuading congressional leaders to engage with his administration in a non-zero sum game to enact a law that served their mutual policy and political interests. Rhetorical appeals were few in number. Quid pro quo bargaining played a limited role.     

Public Presidential Appeals and Congressional Floor Votes: Reassessing the Constitutional Threat

The assertion that public appeals by presidents can create electoral threats to noncompliant members of Congress is central to arguments about the value of "going public" as a legislative strategy. Although recent scholarship suggests a link between popular presidential rhetoric and the likelihood of bill passage, researchers have yet to examine the impact of public presidential appeals on individual legislators. This study examines the logic of electoral threats imposed by going public. We test whether a president's going public with increased intensity leads individual members of Congress to increase their support for presidential preferences on congressional floor votes. We employ several measures to assess the intensity of presidents' public appeals, including domestic speeches, nationally televised addresses, and speeches in legislators' home states. Several logistic regression models are tested to determine whether congressional support for presidential preferences on the floor is influenced by the interaction between members' electoral vulnerability and presidents' use of popular appeals. The findings suggest that presidential speechmaking has very little impact on the likelihood that members of Congress will support the president's position on roll call votes. We argue that this suggests a necessary revision of criticisms of the "rhetorical presidency." Public presidential appeals do not seem to present a considerable threat to a constitutional order that is predicated on congressional autonomy and deliberation.     

The Blue Slip: A Theory of Unified and Divided Government, 1979–2009

In recent years, the role of presidential candidates in constructing their own coalitions to secure both the nomination and election has increased as their reliance on their own party organization has decreased. Recent presidents also have devoted more of their energies to building coalitions crucial to the adoption of their program and its policies. Yet in this era of entrepreneurial candidacy, presidential effectiveness has varied considerably. This article suggests that the extent of convergence and divergence of presidential selection and governing coalitions determines presidential effectiveness. It is also suggested that the roots of presidential governing effectiveness lie in the electoral core coalition, the product of the nomination and general election coalitions that supported the presidential candidate. The article (1) describes the developments that make this theory of presidential coalition-building pertinent to the recent presidency, and (2) sketches the theory and illustrates its applicability to Richard Nixon's sponsorship of the Family Assistance Plan.     

Development narratives and the uses of ecology: malaria control in Northwest Argentina, 1890–1940

This study traces the evolution of social–environmental models of malaria control in Northwest Argentina. Beginning in the 1890s, the rationale for malaria control hinged on a narrative that placed malaria as the root cause of the Northwest's chronic backwardness. Insalubrious rural and urban landscapes, underutilized agricultural potential, unproductive labor, and even racial decay were all bound together as a public health problem. The framework for understanding malaria in the environment was derived from miasmatic theory and medical geography, anchoring the disease firmly in particular landscapes. Wetlands, representing both economic waste and a public health hazard, were singled out as targets for reclamation. Thus ‘environmental sanitation’ techniques, especially wetland drainage, became the preferred strategy for the federal government's malaria campaign, initiated in 1907. The ‘socio-ecological’ orientation of the Italian malaria campaign under Fascism, in which large-scale wetland reclamation for malaria control seemed to produce a comprehensive transformation of rural land and life, had a strong influence in Argentina, further entrenching environmental sanitation methods. By the 1930s, however, it became apparent that Italy's wetlands served poorly as landscape analogues for Argentina's Northwest. In particular, the main mosquito vector in the region turned out not to be a stereotypical ‘swamp breeder,’ rendering pointless most wetland drainage efforts. A counter-model, which adopted the framework of ecological science, proved to be more sensitive to the behaviors and microenvironments of different mosquito species, while disentangling malaria control from the broader and mostly unrealistic social development goals of the older model.     

Presidential Influence Over the Systemic Agenda

One of the most widely accepted sources of presidential power is agenda setting. Being able to affect the media's agenda on key issues–influencing the systemic agenda and expanding the scope of conflict–has enormous consequences for the president's ability to govern effectively. Yet the literature to date has not conclusively determined the extent to which presidents consistently set agendas, especially over the media, because it has not explicitly considered variation in agenda setting influence by policy type. For these reasons, we test whether presidential public statements have increased the media's attention to three policy areas. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis, we demonstrate that presidents have some influence over the systemic agenda, at least in the short term, with policy type being an important predictor of presidential influence. Understanding when and why presidents may or may not be successful agenda setters is crucial to explaining the varying legislative impacts of presidential speech making.     

The Wrong King: Apocalypse and Transformation (or Not) in the White House

Abstract

Jonathan Z. Smith has argued that apocalyptic discourse grew out of a political desire to remove the "wrong" king from the throne. Later, though, the same discourse was used to prevent a "wrong" king from taking the throne. Thus apocalyptic discourse can either motivate or resist transformative change. In US political history it has served both purposes. This article focuses on the trend in presidential discourse, especially in foreign policy, since Franklin D. Roosevelt to use apocalyptic language to resist transformation. The electorate's desire to prevent substantive change was the determining factor in the presidential election of 2008. In Barack Obama's first year in office, though he seemed to promote transformation, his dominant message was a reassuring one: The threat of fundamental change would continue to be contained both at home and around the world. No "wrong" rulers would be allowed to disturb the security of America.     

India's Middle Classes and the Environment

The focus of most analyses of environmental struggles and discourses in colonial and postcolonial India is on rural and forest areas, and on subalterns versus elites. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in urban environmental issues, and, to some extent, in India's (variously defined)‘middle classes’. This article reviews a range of literatures — environmental, social‐cultural and political — in order to draw out themes and arguments concerning the relationships between India's middle classes and the complex meanings and materialities of the environment. Three issues are explored in detail: civic indifference and the public sphere; environmental activism; and Hinduism and ecological thinking. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing diversity and dynamism within the middle classes in relation to the environment. It argues the need to develop situated understandings of what constitutes ‘the environment’ amongst different middle class groups; and underlines the ways in which environmental issues reflect and are often emblematic of wider social and political debates.     

Capture Life: The ‘Document-Monument’ in Recent Commemorations of Hugo Chávez

The recent passing of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela from 1999 till 2013, produced a juncture in the nation's imaginary that immediately sparked numerous and diverse commemorative practices. This article explores this sudden demand for a coherent and enduring memory of the late president by analysing different official postures and commemorative strategies. These are initially placed in the context of key historiographical tropes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and then analysed in light of such tropes. Specifically, the discussion identifies a thirst for ‘documents’, used in the broad sense proposed by Jacques Le Goff, which converged on the presidential body, the social body and public space as potential stimuli for memory. In this context, the initial possibilities of embalming Chávez's body, free tattoos of his signature and its use to decorate government buildings, appeal to the archive as a source of authority and as the commencement of history, as Jacques Derrida has it, while extrapolating the president's signature as a mobile and reproducible image of power to seek the eternal presence of the ‘líder eterno’ (eternal leader) as an anchor for political unity.     

Mister Unpopular: François Hollande and the Exercise of Presidential Leadership, 2012–14

This article examines the first two years of François Hollande's presidential term from a leadership perspective. The central argument is that while Hollande has sometimes been unlucky in the face of unanticipated events and severely constrained by contextual factors outside of his control, notably France's low levels of economic growth, he has also displayed a lack of certain essential leadership qualities. He failed to grasp the scale of the economic situation in the early months of his tenure and so lost precious time in fully addressing the need for structural reforms and engaging in a persuasive pedagogic narrative. In addition, his public communication—an essential leadership quality in the era of mediatised politics—has been poor. Hollande's attempt to relaunch his presidential leadership following the disastrous set of mid-term election results in 2014 marks the start of a new phase in his tenure of the office.     

Geographies of environmental learning: an exploration of children's use of school grounds

There has been limited recent geographic research on children's use of school grounds. This study explores the impact of school grounds on the play behaviours of children in primary schools. It examines the way in which some features of school grounds stimulate more of the type of play that is likely to produce environmental learning. The paper reports on research findings from two primary schools in Canberra, Australia. At each school, multiple research techniques were employed, including behaviour mapping of children's play, interviews with children, and analysis of children's drawings of their school grounds. Children's play in one school displayed high levels of interaction with the natural environment. The paper provides insights on the potential of school grounds as sites for environmental learning.     

Japan's global environmentalism: rhetoric and reality

The 1992 Earth Summit marked the emergence of a new type of global environmentalism in which nation states increasingly sought to represent themselves as key environmental actors. Since the early 1990s, Japan has attempted to position itself rhetorically as a global environmental leader. This rhetoric must be compared to Japan's international environmental impacts, which are considerable, especially in East and Southeast Asia. Japan's domestic environmental situation is evaluated, and five key areas of international environmental impacts are discussed: official development assistance, foreign direct investment, deforestation, overfishing, and the promotion of high technology. Motivations for Japan's use of global environmentalist rhetoric including its domestic political environment, geopolitical goals, geoeconomic motivations, and the increasing globalization of the Japanese economy are analyzed. The spread of the Japanese model of development is linked to Asia's continuing environmental crises.     

Are you willing to be made nothing? Is Commonwealth reform possible?

A new round of Commonwealth reform proposals commenced at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting of 2009. An ensuing report, titled A Commonwealth of the people: time for urgent reform, contained a long list of proposals that eventually resulted in 2013 in the adoption of the Commonwealth Charter. Many classic international organizations are in need of reform, but this is, of course, challenging. This new Commonwealth reform process will not lead to satisfying changes and will not make it a more relevant actor in global governance. The year 2015 marks the Commonwealth Secretariat's first half‐century. We take this symbolic marker to push for a forward‐looking exercise, arguing that because the true nature of the Commonwealth is often misunderstood, a better understanding of the organization is essential before embarking on any successful change‐management project. In the article we identify four different kinds of Commonwealth: three of a ‘formal’ nature (the official, bureaucratic and the people's Commonwealth) and a fourth ‘informal’ one (Commonwealth Plus). By describing the potential of these four different kinds of Commonwealth, we can anticipate better the challenges with which the Commonwealth network is faced, both internal (including its mandate, its British imperial past and dominance, the organization's leadership and its membership) and external (other international organizations, other Commonwealths, rivalry with regional organizations and the rise of global policy networks). Consequently, this should lead to a better and more sustainable debate about the Commonwealth's future role in global governance.     

Democracy and environment: congruencies and contradictions in southern Africa

Using case studies from Malawi, South Africa, and Mozambique, this paper suggests that there is no necessary relationship between democracy and the environment. In Africa, democratization since the late 1980s has been the source of increased optimism about the environment, particularly as ideas of `participatory' resource management have replaced older top-down conservation models. However, this optimism may be premature. Commonly identified linkages between democracy and environment include increased accountability, development, and participation. In many African countries, however, `democracy' is an empty shell, lacking the political institutions, civil society, and economic and cultural conditions necessary to achieve real democratic competition and accountability. Moreover, the paper illustrates from the case studies that even where the goals of democracy are realized, these can have negative as well as positive environmental consequences. Hence, faith in `democracy'—wherever and in whatever form—to solve Africa's environmental problems may be misplaced. The question that needs to be asked is not whether democracy is good for the environment, but how and when it can be made to work to meet social and environmental objectives. There is room for hope: democratization in Africa has provided a more open arena for political discourse, in which questions can be asked about the specific kinds of political, social, and economic reforms and social institutions that will be needed to make `participatory' community-based resource management successful. The optimistic discourse about democracy and environment in Africa tends to obscure these difficult questions, putting at risk the true promise of democratization.     

From sustainable development to carbon control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio-environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low-carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco-state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.     

Geography and Global Change Science: Relationships Necessary,Absent, and Possible

Initiated by geoscientists, the growing debate about the Anthropocene, ‘planetary boundaries’ and global ‘tipping points’ is a significant opportunity for geographers to reconfigure two things: one is the internal relationships among their discipline's many and varied perspectives (topical, philosophical, and methodological) on the real; the other the discipline's actual and perceived contributions to important issues in the wider society. Yet, without concerted effort and struggle, the opportunity is likely to be used in a ‘safe’ and rather predictable way by only a sub‐set of human‐environment geographers. The socio‐environmental challenges of a post‐Holocene world invite old narratives about Geography's holistic intellectual contributions to be reprised in the present. These narratives speak well to many geoscientists, social scientists, and decision‐makers outside Geography. However, they risk perpetuating an emaciated conception of reality wherein Earth systems and social systems are seen as knowable and manageable if the ‘right’ ensemble of expertise is achieved. I argue that we need to get out from under the shadow of these long‐standing narratives. Using suggestive examples, I make the case for forms of inquiry across the human‐physical ‘divide’ that eschew ontological monism and that serve to reveal the many legitimate cognitive, moral, and aesthetic framings of Earth present and future. Geography is unusual in that the potential for these forms of inquiry to become normalised is high compared with other subjects. This potential will only be taken advantage of if certain human‐environment geographers unaccustomed to engaging the world of geoscience and environmental policy change their modus operandi.     

Identifying the Critical Members of the House of Representatives

This article combines the historical record of presidential-congressional relations with previous scholarly findings to develop a model that identifies the members of Congress whose support is critical to the president's ability to build enacting coalitions. It then analyzes the relationship between President Obama and the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress as a case study that demonstrates the model's utility. Conventional wisdom and political pundits suggest that presidents working in divided government will have impossible difficulty working with Congress, but history suggests otherwise. The president's ability to successfully build enacting coalitions during divided government requires him to perform two rather disparate tasks. First, the president must minimize the amount of presidential party members who cross party lines to vote against the president's position. Second, the president must entice at least some opposition party members to cross party lines and support the president's position. Using data from 1981 to 2015, I find that representatives’ behavior on presidential support votes are related to constituency-level presidential strength, electoral vulnerability, ideological moderation, and ideological extremity. I use these results to identify the critical members of the 113th Congress. When a majority of these critical members supported President Obama's positions his legislative efforts were successful. When a majority of these members opposed the president's positions, the House Republican majority defeated the president.     

The reluctant sovereign: New adventures of the US presidential Thanksgiving turkey

This article revisits the annual US presidential ritual of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, and explores the changes made to the procedures since 2003, when the author's Prickly Paradigm pamphlet on the issue was published. This includes such curious developments as the turkey being retired to Disneyland in Florida instead of a nearby petting zoo; the presidential contender Sarah Palin's attempt at pardoning her own turkey, a PR disaster with a twist; the new Virginia‐based movement to pardon a pig instead of a turkey; and President Obama's apparent reluctance in face of the ceremony — by now a spectacle so firmly implanted in US political life that it can no longer be dislodged. An extended interpretation is offered for just how all these developments relate to the deep‐seated American ambivalence towards the place of Native Americans in the nation's history, as well as towards the position of the US as a military superpower.     

Realignment Theory and the Modern American Presidency: A Reformulation

Realignment theory must be adapted to take account of changes that have occurred in the nature of the American presidency. The modern presidency is characterized by a direct, near-exclusive relationship with the public, through use of the mass media. This relationship has fundamentally altered the President's relationship with other political institutions and distanced presidential politics from congressional and local politics. The American party system, in other words, now encompasses a number of separate political processes that need to be approached as distinct theoretical problems. Realignment theory successfully explains much of what has taken place in one of those processes, presidential politics, over the last twenty years. But, given the immediacy of the modern President's relationship with the voting public, we should no longer expect broad shifts in the character of presidential electoral coalitions to be reflected at other levels of the American party system.     

The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change,Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus

Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll call votes in the House of Representatives relating to the international affairs agenda between 1953 and 1998. We find that presidents have become significantly more likely to stake out positions on economic and trade issues as compared to other international issues. We also observe that presidential positions in the realm of foreign policy are increasingly characterized by interparty and interinstitutional conflict. While this increased conflict has dramatically decreased the president's ability to successfully pass executive priorities in foreign affairs more generally, presidential success on economic and trade issues has witnessed a significantly greater decline. We infer from these results that changes to the foreign policy issue agenda represent one important factor that has affected not only the incentives for political parties to participate actively, but also the willingness of Congress to challenge the president in the foreign policy debate.Asked one day whether it was true that the navy yard in his district was too small to accommodate the latest battleships. Henry Stimson (chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee early in the century) replied, 'That is true, and that is the reason I have always been in favor of small ships.'1Carriers have been, are and will be for the foreseeable future an absolutely essential part of our deterrence force…2John Warner, senator from Virginia, home state of Newport News Shipbuilding     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 4. August 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 4 Front cover India's godly democrats In 2007 a temple priest designed a poster depicting the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, as the bread‐giving goddess Annapurna. Miss Raje appeared crowned and mounted on a lotus throne, from which she showered an assembly of parliamentarians, legislators and ministers gathered below with rays of light and golden coins. The poster sent ripples of nervy amusement through the Anglophone press, which saw in this a spectacle of all that is ludicrous and embarrassingly backward about India's popular politics today. Speaking to Anastasia Piliavsky, whose narrative is featured in this issue, the priest turned out to be neither a kook nor a serf, but a man strikingly astute, witty, assertive, and conspicuously sane. He explained that he depicted Miss Raje as the bread‐giving Goddess because she expanded the midday meal scheme in primary schools. ‘In India’, he said, ‘we respect seniors and people who have the power to bring good to people. This is an old Indian tradition. Worship is a way to show our respect’. Indeed, the worship of politicians as kings, heroes and gods is widespread in India: Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi; the head of the People's Party Mayawati; Bengal's Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee; and the Tamil Chief Minister Jayalalitha have all attracted colourful forms of mass devotion. External observers and India's cosmopolitan elite see this as a sign of a political malady, a degeneracy of their most cherished political values, most of all the equality and autonomy on which modern democracies ought to rest. But the very citizens who worship their political representatives as gods and goddesses have proven exceptionally good at democracy, both in the scale and the intensity of their involvement, and in their remarkable political choosiness. Their story – full of colour and fun as it is – holds serious political and intellectual lessons whose implications reach far beyond the subcontinent. Back cover LAW IN MYANMAR Open‐air displays of cartoons and caricatures are new to Myanmar since press freedom was introduced in 2012. Recently, Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘icon of democracy’, has become a favourite target. This cartoon, which was displayed during a cartoon festival in 2013, depicts Suu Kyi staring at the country's constitution while a famous love song plays in the background. With parliamentary elections due later this year and presidential elections next year, the former prisoner of conscience has devoted much of her energy – so far, unsuccessfully – to campaigning for an amendment to the 2008 constitution, which in its current form prevents her from being nominated as presidential candidate. The army, which dominates the legislature, has refused to accommodate her demands. Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of much‐loved General Aung San, who played a crucial role in the country's independence from British colonial rule in 1948. Having spent much of her life under house arrest in her family home in Yangon, she returned to the political sphere in 2010 as the head of her party, the National League for Democracy. Since then, the Nobel Peace Laureate has pushed for legal reforms. Meanwhile, in spite of some hard‐won liberties, human rights violations continue. In this issue, Judith Beyer examines the difficulties citizens experience in locating the specifics of their legal rights amidst a confusing array of legal texts, many of which they do not have access to.