Interest Groups and Presidential Transitions

The study of interest group behavior has focused on many tactical decisions, but not on the decision to participate in presidential transitions. This is a limitation because transitions are associated with policy change and are the first opportunity to influence a new president. This article develops a theory of interest group participation in presidential transitions through an original survey administered during the 2008–2009 Obama transition. The findings suggest that groups participate based on their relationship with the outgoing administration and an evaluation of whether the transition will to lead policy change that advances or harms their interests.     

Presidential elections and Europe: the 2012 game-changer

Abstract

As well as marking 60 years since the signature of the Treaty of Rome, 2017 will see the 10th presidential election of France’s Fifth Republic. The overlap between the question of Europe and the election to France’s highest office provides the framework for this article to explore the development of the European debate in France. Prior to 2012, and despite the increasing and undeniable salience of it for French domestic concerns, the question of Europe is widely considered to have been a secondary issue in presidential elections. Focusing in particular on the period since the pivotal debate and referendum on the Maastricht Treaty and the intervening transition from ‘permissive consensus’ to ‘constraining dissensus’, this article will explain how and why Europe has seemingly defied logic to remain on the margins of successive election campaigns, before presenting the 2012 presidential elections as a game-changer on how the question of Europe featured. The conclusion offers a discussion on the ramifications for future presidential elections, starting with that of 2017.     

Electoral Messages from the District: Explaining Presidential Support in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislators are highly sensitive to those parts of their reelection constituencies whose support is least solid. Therefore, out-party members of Congress should be more supportive of the opposing party's president when that president enjoys greater electoral support among the legislators' reelection constituencies. This hypothesis is tested in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1980s and 1990s. The hypothesis is supported, even with controls for the ideology of the member and the political orientation of the district. The findings suggest legislators have a sophisticated view of their districts and perceive electoral messages from the voting patterns of their constituents. The results also imply that presidential success is conditioned by the forces that operate in the congressional election context.     

A Transformed Triangle: Court, Congress, and Presidency in Civil Rights

The relative permeability of the three elements of a triangle-the Supreme Court, Congress, and the president-to civil rights interest groups has varied over time. For almost two decades after World War II, the Supreme Court was the groups' preferred arena because Congress was resistant and presidents could thus do little or were hesitant to act. For a brief time in the mid-1960s the president and Congress became supportive of civil rights groups' claims while the Court also remained accessible. Starting in the late 1960s executive and legislative support for civil rights moderated, with presidential support declining significantly in the 1980s. When the Supreme Court adopted that latter stance, Congress became the body through which to protect civil rights by reversing the Court's decisions. In this examination of the "transformed triangle" in civil rights policymaking, we look at this change over time and at "flip-flops" in litigation as one administration changes the position espoused by its predecessor, and we also give some attention to the Supreme Court's response to congressional reversal of its rulings.     

What Kind of a President Does America Need in 2008?

Abstract

This paper asks, "What kind of a president should Americans elect in 2008?" Claiming that the shortcomings of George W. Bush's administration have a deep basis in a flawed vision, it outlines a worldview that resonates with themes in Reformed theology and that may help to set the tone for a good American presidential administration in our time. The essay also addresses the responsibilities of American voters as they assess candidates for president.     

Florida in the 2000 presidential election: historical precedents and contemporary landscapes

Given the social and spatial dynamics of the electoral college, small groups of voters can profoundly shape national outcomes. This paper examines the 2000 election in Florida in three ways. First, it offers historical depth by comparing and contrasting the 2000 and 1876 presidential elections. Second, it portrays the spatial distribution of votes across the state. Third, it applies a combinatorial analysis of the power of small groups of Florida voters to influence the 2000 presidential election to demonstrate the discrepancy between their influence compared to those of voters nationwide.     

William Howard Taft,the 1908 Election,and the Future of the American Presidency

Although the first presidential election where both major party candidates (William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan) hit the campaign trail, the election of 1908 is a neglected election. When scholars do address it, they typically focus on retiring incumbent president Theodore Roosevelt and his role therein. This article turns the focus away from Roosevelt, and also Bryan, and places it firmly on Taft, a reluctant candidate. Taft's role in 1908 is important because his very reluctance to embrace the changing expectations of the presidency helps to highlight the tensions between the old and new ways of campaigning and, more broadly, the traditional and modern presidencies.

The article first addresses Taft's decision to abandon his “front-porch” campaign. Taft's initial inclination toward a front-porch campaign reveals well his more traditional approach to the election and to the presidency in general, just as his decision to abandon this plan and “stump” for votes reflects his submission to developing trends and expectations. Second, the article examines the changing role of technology, this election being the first to feature phonograph recordings of the candidates, which would then be sold—and played—across the country. Third, the tours and speeches of Taft in the 1908 general election take center stage. The spectacle of these tours offers further evidence of the changing contours of American politics and presidential leadership, especially in elevating the personalities of the candidates. Finally, the 1908 election is examined from the standpoint of American political development and presidential history.     

La guerre d'Algérie quarante ans après: Connaissances et reconnaissance

Jacques Chirac was re-elected president in May 2002 with a huge majority. Principally this was due to the impressive showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a presidential candidate in the first-round vote. This article, by examining the results and studying the nature of the campaign and the personalities involved, provides an overview of both the presidential and the general (legislative) elections. Although, on the surface, it might have appeared that the French political system had reverted to type—a strong right-wing president combined with a right-wing government—careful analysis allows a number of structural problems to be highlighted.     

The President as Agenda Setter‐in‐Chief: The Dynamics of Congressional and Presidential Agenda Setting

In this paper, we investigate the agenda leadership capability of two American political institutions, Congress and the presidency, in an array of issue areas that include both domestic and foreign policy. The president has long been considered to have the most significant role in setting the policymaking agenda, but there is limited empirical research to support that claim. Examining the issue areas of defense, environment, health care, international affairs, law and crime, and macroeconomics from 1956 to 2005, we find statistically significant positive influence by the president on the congressional agenda in all six of the policy areas under examination, providing compelling evidence of presidential agenda leadership and a reactive Congress. Additionally, we find that the agenda relationship between the president and Congress is issue dependent, in that presidential attention has the largest substantive effect on the congressional agenda in the area of international affairs.     

Before the Honeymoon Ends: Presidential Leadership and Congressional Response

Academicians and journalists inevitably pass judgment on the progress of a president's major "honeymoon period" initiatives. Obviously, the success of those initiatives will depend on how Congress responds to new presidents. Data on aggregate congressional response to the "honeymoon" initiatives of the Carter and Reagan presidencies are presented in order to explore how members of Congress react as they evaluate and interact with a new president. Evidence suggests that, despite the conventional wisdom regarding Carter's limited political ability and inflexible nature, members of Congress were more inclined to emphasize organizational deficiencies. Conversely, while Reagan was perceived to be almost as inflexible as Carter, he received superlative marks for organizational efficiency and for providing access to Congress. The analysis then considers the importance of organization to future presidential effectiveness, and the importance of organizational concerns with respect to personal characteristics for overall presidential success.     

Nixon,Kissinger and the rapprochement with China, 1969–1972

Few would have predicted in 1969 that the new Republican administration of Richard Nixon would initiate a rapprochement between the United States and communist China during his first term as president. That he succeeded in doing so was helped by the severity of the Sino‐Soviet dispute, which erupted into armed clashes in the spring and summer of 1969. By the end of 1970 China made it clear that it would not only be willing to receive a presidential envoy, but also the president himself. Two missions to Beijing by Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger—one secret in July 1971 and the other public in the following October—paved the way for a presidential visit in February 1972. The talks in July and October 1971 and February 1972 covered a whole range of issues including the war in Indochina, the potential threat from Japan and relations with the Soviet Union. The most dif cult problem, however, proved to be that of Taiwan, where the American‐backed Nationalist government not only laid claim to be the legitimate government of the whole of China, but occupied the Chinese seat in the United Nations. A modus vivendi was eventually reached in February 1972, helped perhaps by the United Nations General Assembly vote in October 1971 which unseated the Taiwan regime in favour of mainland China. The US negotiating position was not made any easier by the intense rivalry between Kissinger and the State Department and the latter's exclusion from much of the negotiation process led to a last‐minute crisis which threatened the success of the entire project. While neither the United States nor China achieved all that they had hoped, Nixon's visit to China had an enormous symbolic impact and contributed to a reconfiguration of the global balance of power.     

The Presidency and Political Equality

When black Americans and white Americans want the president to do different things, who wins? When low-income earners prefer different government action than do middle and high-income earners, whose preferences are reflected in presidential behavior? Recent studies show that congressional behavior often most closely follows the preferences of the white and the wealthy, but we know relatively little about presidential behavior. Since the president and Congress make policy together, it is important to understand the extent of political equality in presidential behavior. We examine the degree to which presidents have provided equal representation to these groups over the past four decades. We compare the preferences of these groups for federal spending in various budget domains to presidents’ subsequent budget proposals in those domains from 1974 to 2010. Over this period, presidents’ proposals aligned more with the preferences of whites and high-income earners. However, Republican presidents are driving this overall pattern. Democratic presidents represent racial and income groups equally, but Republicans’ proposals are much more consistent with the spending preferences of whites and high-income earners. This pattern of representation reflects the composition of the president's party coalition and the spending preferences of groups within the party coalition.     

Enduring Rivals: Presidential Success and Support in the House of Representatives

We compare presidents' legislative support and success at the vote level of analysis. In so doing, we remind readers that these two outcomes measures, collected by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., may or may not reflect presidential agenda preferences. Success refers to a victory for the president on his vote positions, while support refers to margin of legislators taking the same position on the vote as the president. The vote level provides numerous characteristics of the legislation itself that serve as useful predictors of these two presidential position outcomes. These include its substantive nature, the stage of the vote on the floor, and the issue area of the vote. In addition to the characteristics of the votes themselves, we also incorporate presidential resources and environmental conditions. Virtually all of the component variables within these three concepts contribute to explaining presidents' legislative success and support in the House. We also find that, while models of overall House success and support perform similarly, controlling for party coalitional support dramatically alters the observed relationships. Therefore, without this further analysis, scholars risk misinterpreting the relationship between the president and Congress. Although we have not measured influence, we believe that these findings raise important implications for scholars of presidential-congressional relations and also suggest avenues for further research.     

Presidential Vetoes: Motivations and Classification

For all its importance, comparatively few, empirically-based studies have centered on the presidential veto, and virtually none have sought to classify vetoes by presidential motivation or policy area. This article updates and confirms the major findings of extant studies, and suggests one important caveat to the conclusions of older research: the categories of and reasons for presidential vetoes are remarkably similar from president to president, independent of party. Frequently, presidents have just as much in common with each other in doing battle with Congress than as Republicans or Democrats fighting for different ideological programs and considerations.     

Power Plus Persuasion: The Anatomy of Kennedy’s Housing Order

We examine the influence of various political actors on the substance and timing of presidential orders. Specifically, we analyze President John F. Kennedy’s decision to issue E. O. 11063, which directed the federal bureaucracy to eliminate discrimination in the sale or lease of residential property overseen by the federal government. We show that this order did not result solely from Kennedy’s policy preferences; rather, it was a product of persuasion by several political actors who coaxed Kennedy to act. This reinforces previous findings that the president’s power of the pen is often conditioned by the informal political costs of unilateral executive action.     

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.     

International accompaniment,reflexivity and the intelligibility of power in post-conflict Guatemala

ABSTRACT

‘International accompaniers’ use their physical presence as a form of peaceful intervention to deter political violence against local human rights defenders. Threatened members of Guatemala’s civil society have relied on accompaniment as part of their security strategy since the early 1980s. Approximately one thousand volunteers from a dozen countries have accompanied in Guatemala. International accompaniment has been a key component of the effort to prosecute former military general and president Efraín Ríos Montt and other perpetrators of mass human rights violations in Guatemala. Victim witnesses and their legal counsel have included accompaniment as part of their protection strategy since 2000. Important questions have nonetheless been raised with respect to accompaniment’s effectiveness as a tool for witness protection and the possibility that it reinforces power inequalities. This article builds on Gada Mahrouse’s critique of accompaniment and draws on Michel Foucault’s understanding of reflexivity and power. The authors use insights from two case studies to support the argument that accompaniment’s usefulness as a tool for witness protection depends on its ability to accommodate the witnesses’ position within webs of interconnected power dynamics and the multiple ways in which they conceive of security. It also depends on how intelligible these different power dynamics are to accompaniers. This argument is used to highlight how accompaniment in Guatemala is relevant for other situations where the prosecution of human rights atrocities is long term and depends on witness testimony.     

Presidential Coequality: The Evolution of a Concept

The assertion that the presidency is coequal in power to the other branches in the American system of government is often heard, has been suggested by all recent presidents, and has even made its way into political science. But tracing the history of the concept demonstrates that this assertion is an invention of quite recent vintage. Those who wrote and favored the Constitution did not make such claims, nor did early presidents. Even Andrew Jackson's famous and, to his generation, shocking assertion of coequality coincident with his censure was not really a claim of equal power between branches. According to our systematic analysis of presidential rhetoric it was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who initiated and popularized the idea of interbranch coequality. They did so to defend themselves in two episodes of substantial presidential vulnerability: Watergate and the ensuing midterm elections. Subsequent presidents have elevated something that would have seemed wrong and absurd to any founder into a blithe truism. This belief harms governance by creating both artificially high expectations for the president and a presumption of institutional stasis. The “second constitution” based on popular beliefs about interbranch relations continues to evolve, as much a product of happenstance as of rational design.     

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.