Presidential Position-Taking,Presidential Success,and Interest Group Activity

Do lobby groups help the American president achieve policy objectives? Existing research seldom evaluates interest groups and the president in conjunction, and as a result we have little systematic knowledge about how groups respond to presidential actions or whether they assist in realizing the president’s policy agenda. Building on existing data obtained through interviews with 776 lobbyists, combined with variables we generate describing issue salience, congressional attention, the political context, and policy adoption, we show that interest groups adjusted their lobbying activity to better reflect the president’s voiced preferences. Despite this strategy, we find that lobby groups had no significant marginal effect on policy adoption when controlling for the overwhelming influence of the president. The strong association between policy adoption and position-taking by the president withstands the inclusion of five alternative variables found in previous studies to condition the influence of the president over policy adoption.     

Presidential Diversionary Attempts: A Peaceful Perspective

This article considers the potential for presidents to attempt to distract the public when faced with difficult domestic conditions. It differs from previous work in the field by examining peaceful diversionary attempts and by including scandals as domestic conditions from which the president may seek to divert attention. The results strongly support the idea of peaceful diversionary behavior through presidential rhetoric. Comparison of economic and scandal events in terms of producing diversion suggests important differences between types of events.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Sounding Presidential: Frame Creation in the Obama Administration

Among the often-cited powers of the presidency is the power of the pulpit. Presidents attempt to influence Congress directly and indirectly through their rhetoric and its influence on national policy debates. This includes the power to shape debates through the use of frames. While much is known about framing, no past study has attempted to document all frames utilized by a policy entrepreneur in his attempt to shape the policy debate. Comprehensive understanding of frame creation is necessary to understand what frames persist and how frames are used in policymaking. This study identifies how one president, Barack Obama, framed domestic policy issues in speeches early in his administration. Identifying frames the president uses provides insights into this president's attempts to set the public agenda. The findings of this study suggest that Obama's use of specific frames is highly idiosyncratic, but that these idiosyncratic frames coalesce around identifiable policy areas, particularly macroeconomic policy. This study provides insight into how one president attempts to both frame and set his domestic policy agenda.     

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.     

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 Politics on Tour: George Washington to Woodrow Wilson

This article uses a study of presidential touring to advance an alternative view that nineteenth-century presidents embraced opportunities provided by exogenous forces to develop and maintain a relationship with the public. This argument stands in contrast to traditional accounts that the president was bounded by norms and ideas of proper behavior. Instead, I posit that presidents were much more responsive to evolving opportunities to participate effectively in political competition.     

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     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presidential Policy Attention by Policy Instrument

This article investigates how presidential policy attention is allocated across policy tools and whether there is a channeling of tool use by policy area. I also examine whether there is evidence of disproportionate information processing within presidential policy attention allocation and whether it is common across presidential policy tools. Presidential messages, hearings on administrations' legislative proposals, amicus briefs, and executive orders are employed to capture presidential policy tools. The allocation of attention via these four instruments is examined from 1957–2007 in the policy areas of defense and foreign affairs, macroeconomics, banking and commerce, civil rights, law and crime, and labor and immigration. I find that there is a canalization of presidential policy attention by instrument, and that the opportunity structure of policy tools shapes attention allocation. Additionally, I find evidence for punctuated equilibrium theory in the allocation of presidential policy attention via these four tools. When presidents do shift their attention to an issue area, they often attack the issue with some coordination of their policy instruments.     

Personal Tragedy and Presidential Performance: Calvin Coolidge as Legislative Leader

The elevation of Calvin Coolidge to the presidency in the summer of 1923 was impressively smooth. The new president was entirely comfortable in his new role and impressed Washington officialdom with his self-assuredness, political adroitness, and hard work. One of his main initial objectives was to develop a strong and productive relationship with Congress and to lobby it to enact his extensive and progressive legislative agenda. During his first year, he worked vigorously at these tasks and achieved a notable degree of success. However, in July, 1924, the president confronted a devastating personal tragedy–the death of his young son–that left a deep imprint on the remainder of his presidency. He lost interest in legislative affairs and withdrew from interaction with Congress. The result is that he has been ranked among the least successful presidential leaders of Congress in U.S. history. However, incapacitation as a result of severe clinical depression rather than either incompetence or ideology was the precipitating cause.     

Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy.     

The Politics of Cognitive Dissonance: Spin,the Media,and Race (and Ethnicity) in the 2008 US Presidential Election

This article examines the roles of spin, the media, and race (and ethnicity) in influencing voter behavior in the 2008 US presidential election. It invokes the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how political strategists effectively propagandize – i.e., “reinvent their candidates” and “reinvent their opponents' actual record” – in order to successfully garner votes for their candidates. In particular, it considers spin and how spin and the media are used to shape public opinion by causing voters to distrust the veracity, credentials, and records of opposing candidates and to set the policy agenda. It also discusses how race, ethnicity, gender, and policy issues were used in the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and describes the impact of “spinning” on voter behavior and the election outcome. Equally important, it discusses the implications of the Obama victory for Canadian governance in two pivotal areas: domestic race relations and direct parliamentary representation of minorities. The article closes with a brief discussion of the symbolism attributed to Barack Obama's electoral victory by both American and Canadian voters.     

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.     

Capturing Curiosity: Using Internet Search Trends to Measure Public Attentiveness

While scholars have made great strides in formulating theories and measuring public attention, “most important problem” and media‐based indicators are less than ideal measures. In order to address this shortcoming, this article borrows from health‐care epidemiology to measure public attention based on Internet search trends. In doing so, it reviews the innovative ways in which scientists have used search activity to track the spread of infectious disease, discusses the ease and flexibility with which search data can be gathered, and then subjects a Google‐based search measure to a series of validity tests. In particular, the analysis subjects the proposed measure to a battery of visual and statistical tests for convergent validity by comparing it with the most commonly used media‐based measure of public attention—issue coverage in the New York Times. Across a range of policy issues (health care, global warming, and terrorism), the proposed measure demonstrates convergent validity. The article concludes by posing a series of important questions that the new measure will allow researchers to address.     

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.     

Presidential Speeches and the Stages of the Legislative Process

Presidents go public frequently to increase their success in Congress. Yet scholars know little about when presidents speak within the legislative process or why. If presidential speeches are indeed a source of power for presidents, then presidents are likely to use them throughout the legislative process, not speak only to affect final passage. We argue that presidents speak generally to meet broad electoral and political goals, but target speeches according to their goals at each stage of the legislative process: to frame the debate at the agenda-setting stage, to push bills out of committee, and to finalize support from legislators at the roll call stage. We analyze 116 bills between 1989 and 2004, supplemented by Bush Library archival data and a case study of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The results illustrate that presidents speak mostly at the agenda-setting and roll call stages and presidential attention at each stage varies by informational cues provided by the larger political environment.     

Islam and politics in Turkey: the 2007 presidential elections and beyond

The changing role of Islam in the public life of Turkey is about to come under renewed scrutiny, the key issue being the potential candidates for the May 2007 presidential election. Erdoǧan, the Prime Minister and head of the first Islamist majority government in the republic's history, is likely to stand. Arguments already abound as to the legitimacy of such a move, with the opposition declaring that they will boycott the election if Erdoǧan becomes a candidate. Equally, Erdoǧan's own supporters are, in public, at least occasionally uncertain, conscious that when the late Özal moved to become president, his party suffered. Secularists grimly wonder whether they will be able to survive such an overt transfer to an Islamist figure, one whom they fear would be a great contrast to the pro‐Republican present incumbent, President Sezer. Yet, how should we face such a transition? What implications does it have for Turkey's politics, both internally in terms of the social life of the country, and in external affairs?