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.     

Cold War,Public Opinion,and Foreign Policy Spending Decisions: Dynamic Representation by Congress and the President

Conventional wisdom before the Vietnam War held that public opinion exerted no influence on U.S. foreign policy decisions. Scholars working in Vietnam's aftermath found episodic influence of public opinion on foreign policy, but missing in our understanding were longitudinal examinations of public opinion's influence on foreign policy. A number of post-Vietnam scholars subsequently revealed a long-term relationship between public opinion and defense spending. This study extends that work by analyzing responsiveness to public opinion in different foreign policy arenas by different government institutions, and by accounting for a critical variable not relevant in most previous studies: the end of the cold war. We construct a model explaining the influences of public opinion and the cold war on spending proposals for defense and foreign economic aid by the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both public opinion and the end of the cold war exert direct influence on defense spending proposals by the presidency, while the Senate and the House respond primarily to public opinion inputs and the partisan composition of the Senate. In the case of foreign economic aid, the cold war's end gives occasion for increasing spending proposals, contrary to the public's expectation that the end of the cold war minimized the need for the U.S. to provide foreign economic assistance.     

The Struggle for Australian History

Dixson, Miriam The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to the Present Ferres, Kay (ed.) The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers 1890–1930 Grimshaw, Patricia, Lake, Marilyn, McGrath, Ann and Quartly, Marian Creating a Nation 1788–1990 Summers, Anne Damned Whores and God’s Police Robinson, Portia The Women of Botany Bay     

Leadership and Coordination in Legislatures: The "President" of the First American Congress: 1774-1789

We analyze the viability of the office of President of Congress as a source of leadership in the Continental and Confederation Congresses.1 Our primary interest is in institutionally grounded, as opposed to and separate from charismatic or personal, bases for leadership. We show that virtually every institutional support for leadership power recognized to be at work in the modern Congress was absent in the Continental Congresses. We trace the origins of these limitations on leadership power and potential to a series of decisions taken during 1774 and 1775 and substantially maintained and even elaborated over the fifteen-year history of the Congress. The result was that even though the institution was awash in "leaders," men like Virginia's Peyton Randolph, Massachusetts' John Hancock, and New York's John Jay, stable and effective "leadership" from the office of President of Congress proved to be impossible.     

The Use and Abuse of Ideology: The Struggle for Africa

WILLIAM FREUND. The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Pp. 357. $19.50 (US); MAI FALMBERO, ed. The Struggle for Africa, trans. E.M.K. Andree, Mai Palmberg, and Howard Simson. London: Zed Press, 1983. Pp. iii, 286. $31.95 (Can.).Reviewed by John Flint     

Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change

In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right‐oriented react thermostatically and the left‐oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.