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 Allocation of Excepted Political Positions: What and Whose Executive Priorities Do They Serve?

Abstract

Scholars have only begun to examine the roles played by non-career SES and Schedule C personnel in managing the bureaucracy. This, despite the fact that these individuals help to establish, communicate, and implement policy, and despite the broad discretion presidential administrations have in appointing them, defining their duties, and allocating their positions across the federal government. As an effort to redress this neglect, we first provide an overview of what lower-level political personnel do and of the processes and constraints that determine how they are distributed. We then examine how changes in presidential administration have affected the allocation of political SES and Schedule C positions across departments. Although dramatic infusions of these personnel into some agencies can be tied to policy objectives, they appear to be idiosyncratic and driven more by the preferences of agency leaders than by the White House. As such, they provide little support for positive theories that frame the administrative presidency in terms of centralized strategic planning.     

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.     

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.     

‘Quacking like a duck’? Bush II and presidential power in the second term

It seems a truism of American politics that second presidential terms are destined to be less successful than the period of office which they follow and yet there is very little academic analysis as to why this is the case. Whether there are inherent or structural features of the US political system that unduly affects second-term presidencies and what impact these features might have on the remainder of the Bush administration is the subject of this article. While the impact of this phenomenon is analysed in general, particular attention is focused on the effect of American foreign policy since the Bush presidency, because of Iraq, this subject will ultimately determine the success or failure of the second term. This focus also reflects the fact that second-term administrations tend to be dominated by a focus on foreign policy. The article argues that despite being returned to power with a considerable number of political advantages compared with previous presidents at this stage of their tenure, the Bush administration is already displaying many of the characteristics of an underachieving second term. The article consists of three sections: part one examines the presidential record and analyses the contention that second terms are somehow different; part two sets out the reasons that might account for this factor; and part three applies these factors to the Bush administration to see which of these features apply to the present incumbent and thus what can be expected for the remainder of his second term in office until January 2009.     

“Going Public” Reconsidered: Reagan's 1981 Tax and Budget Cuts,and Revisionist Theories of Presidential Power

This paper examines the thesis of the public presidency. In light of the success of Ronald Reagan, many revisionist scholars have criticized traditional models of presidential politics. Whereas traditional views emphasized the bargaining presidency, these recent scholars now argue that, today, the politics of rhetoric dominate the politics of bargaining. This paper examines the central case study of the going-public model, Reagan's 1981 tax and budget cuts, a critical case because it represents Reagan's central legislative success and because many scholars and pundits have credited this success to Reagan's frequent televised public appeals. The case reveals that a strong bargaining dynamic played a part in the 1981 process, and that going public strategies were not as dominant as previously thought.

What has changed significantly is the balance of incentives and constraints that influence strategic choice and the kinds of politicians in the Oval Office who make them. Contemporary presidents, after carefully considering their options, will choose going public over bargaining more often than did their predecessors.

–Samuel Kernell, Going Public     

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.     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

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.     

Religion and the US Presidency: Politics,the Media,and Religious Identity

Abstract

The relationship between religion and the presidency impacts both the viability of candidates and the manner in which decisions are made in the voting booth. Today we are living in culture where religion is front and center in politics. This article examines the role of religion in political discourse with special attention to the 2012 presidential election. It focuses on the manner in which religion and politics have become inextricably interwoven in the past sixty years. It begins by establishing the role of religion in the broader political arena. The article then turns to the manner in which religious identity and participation influence voting patterns, and how religious affiliation shapes the office of the presidency. The conclusion offers some reflections on the future of religion in presidential politics, an issue that will continue to be a significant factor in how and why voters support and marginalize particular candidates.     

The President and the Public: Inaugural Addresses in American History

This article examines presidential inaugural addresses to gain a perspective on the changing relationship between the people and the presidency throughout American political history. The analysis suggests three distinct models of inaugural address—constitutional, party, and plebiscitary—each articulating a different understanding of presidential leadership and the relationship between the presidency and the people. The constitutional presidents see themselves largely as restrained, constitutional officers with a minimal relationship to the people. The party model yields a role for the president which is more tied to the people's will, especially as expressed through party. Even though tied more strongly to the public, party presidents recognize constitutional limits on their roles and powers. Plebiscitary presidents often eschew party affiliation and the guise of constrained constitutional officer, and cast themselves as engines of the American political system fully tied to public opinion. Plebiscitary presidents often make few references to other political actors or to the Constitution. Beyond helping us to better understand the contours of American political development, this analysis challenges the prevalent assumption in studies of the presidency that nineteenth-century presidents were not popular or “public” leaders.     

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.     

The Eisenhower Administration: Bridge to the Institutionalized Legislative Presidency

Eisenhower's contributions to the modern presidency are primarily institutional and to some extent, stylistic: his reliance on the professionalism of civil servants in the Bureau of the Budget, his continuation of the annual programming process as well as the procedures for coordinating the executive branch's legislative role, his creation of a White House office to represent him on Capitol Hill, and his respect for Congress as a legislative body. What Eisenhower did not do is equally significant: he did not reject the model of an activist presidency, reverse the New and Fair Deal policies of his Democratic predecessors, or pursue his centrist agenda in a blatantly partisan manner. The Eisenhower experience demonstrates that incivility, inhumanity, and inanity are not inevitable consequences of divided government.     

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.     

Politics and Policy in the 103rd and 104th Congresses: Evaluating the Effects of Divided Government in the Postreform Era

The 1980 Reagan transition and the 1988 Bush transition offer important case studies for understanding the challenges of presidential transitions. Although not without its shortcomings, the 1980 transition was, at least comparably, the most successful of the transfers in power since the modern era of presidential transitions commenced with the Carter effort in 1976. 1988 offers useful lessons about "friendly takeovers": the passing of power from a president to a president-elect of the same party. The 1988 transition is also of interest because it offers the only instance of a sitting vice president elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836. The 1988 transition, moreover, marked the ascendancy of President George W. Bush's father to the office, and it was a transition in which he and several members of this administration participated, Chief of Staff Andrew Card most notably.     

The Politics of Credit in Presidential Signing Statements

The separation of powers often makes it difficult to understand who is responsible for legislative outcomes. Both members of Congress and presidents seek to shape perceptions of policy responsibility to their advantage. Yet, the relative size of the president's rhetorical stage gives him disproportionate influence in molding these discussions at critical moments. Given these circumstances, how, when, and why, do presidents claim credit for themselves and attribute credit to members of Congress for legislation? Using an original dataset based upon a content analysis of all presidential signing statements from 1985–2008, we find that presidential strategies to claim and attribute credit for laws are greatly impacted by both political context (approval, divided government, midterm elections, and party power) and bill-specific attributes (appropriations, salience, and veto threats). The theory and results highlight the importance of taking multiple institutions into account when thinking about credit.     

Party,Personality and Institutional Constraint: The French Presidential Election of 2007

The designer of the French presidency intended it as a supra-partisan office. Yet this ambition was thwarted by the institutional requirement for a majority in the National Assembly, in order to pass legislation. Today, parties control the presidential function, acting as gatekeepers and enablers; their role has not been usurped by media-promoted personalities. But the presidency has its own dynamic effects on party structures, beyond the mere obligation to produce a plausible candidate. A presidential campaign is the high point of party activity, and the 2007 exercise showed a wide range of effects, according to whether parties are viable candidates for government or pure protesters, or whether they fit uneasily between these positions. This article explores some of these dynamic effects.     

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.     

The Politics of Party Leader Survival and Succession: Australia in Comparative Perspective

The processes of replacement of party leaders are well-published events in media outlets across the world's democracies, but are scarcely analysed by political scientists. In this article we examine the extent to which incumbent party leaders are able to control their own fate in the face of various types of challenges that herald a possible end to their rule. It discusses three related research questions derived from this main objective: (1) what makes incumbents quit? (2) How do incumbents respond to various types of triggers heralding a possible end to their rule? (3) To what extent does incumbent behaviour prior to and following succession affect the fortunes of their successors and their party? We draw on a four-country–eight-party data set of leadership successions between 1945 and 2005, and on findings of in-depth studies of Australian cases to show that not only do Australian leaders get challenged and replaced more frequently than do other leaders, but they are also forced to combat more internal rivalry than their counterparts elsewhere.     

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times: Polarization and Presidential Success in Congress

For better or for worse, presidents receive much of the credit and much of the blame for their legislative success in Congress. Indeed, much has been written about the correlates of presidential success in Congress. In this article, we test the proposition that presidential success in Congress is mainly a function of context and the context of presidential interactions with Congress has changed over the past 50 years. Specifically, it is both the best of times and worst of times for presidential relations with the legislative branch. It is increasingly the case that because of partisan polarization in Washington, presidents can be quite successful, if they command a majority. However, if they face a divided government gridlock is the result and overcoming that gridlock has gotten to be more difficult over time.