Presidential Success on the Substance of Legislation (original) (raw)

Passing the President's Program: Public Opinion and Presidential Influence in Congress

American Journal of Political Science, 1985

Correlations between legislative support scores and presidential popularity do not accurately reflect the relationship between public opinion and presidential influence in Congress. Presidents make strategic choices to expend their public prestige to obtain congressional approval of programmatic in itiatives. Previous studies have ignored such choices as well as other features of the strategic environnent which tend to lower the apparent legislative success rates of popular presidents. A model of presidential and congressional behavior is proposed and it is estimated that a one percent increase in a president's public support level increases the president's legislative approval rate by approximately one percent (holding program size fixed).

Presidents, Policy Compromise, and Legislative Success

The Journal of Politics, 2017

Presidents play a central role in legislative activity in Latin America. Previous research highlights that some form of ideological compromise on behalf of the president is vital to sustain successful legislative coalitions. Yet, primarily due to the lack of a firm empirical basis on which to measure such presidential give-and-take, the extent to which presidents make use of such policy compromise, and under what conditions this is a viable strategy, remains unknown. Applying quantitative text analysis to 305 annual 'State of the Union' addresses of 73 presidents in thirteen Latin American countries, we remedy this situation and provide comparable time-series data for Latin American presidential movements in a one-dimensional issue space between 1980 and 2014. Our results indicate that presidents will compromise in response to changes in the median party, although this effect will be mediated by the institutional context within which the president operates.

Presidential Approval and Legislative Success

Journal of Politics, 2002

While a large body of work exists on presidents' public approval, no study identifies the conditions under which approval generates policy influence. This gap is particularly significant since empirical research has produced inconsistent findings on whether popularity affects a president's legislative success. In the following, we argue that public salience and issue complexity determine the extent to which a president can capitalize on approval, and we proceed to test this hypothesis on U.S. House of Representatives roll-call votes between 1989 and 2000. The empirical analysis provides strong support for our hypothesis, which holds across a variety of econometric specifications and estimates of approval.

The Importance of Policy Scope to Presidential Success in Congress

Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2010

The topic of presidential-congressional relations is well studied, with scholars identifying party control as a strong predictor of presidential success in Congress. Although the research recognizes the importance of policy variation to explaining political processes, few have examined its impact on presidential success in Congress. This article holds that policy scope is important to explaining presidential success in Congress in that different policies engender different levels of conflict and participation in the legislative process. Using data on individual policy proposals from 1949 to 2006, I demonstrate that the policy scope of the president's legislative agenda not only affects the likelihood of presidential success, it also conditions the impact of expected effects on presidential success.

Unification of Powers: When Effective Lawmakers Sponsor Presidential Proposals in Congress

2021

While scholars have long noted presidential powers over congressional lawmaking arising through persuasion, veto bargaining, and public appeals, we argue that an important tool is missing from this list. Specifically, presidents who are strategic in their choices of early coalition partners in Congress – such as effective sponsors of administration bills – significantly enhance their chance of legislative success. We identify more than 1,400 executive branch proposals appearing as bills in Congress between 1989 and 2006. We examine which members of Congress sponsor these bills, finding strong evidence of disproportionate sponsorship by effective champions, such as majority-party members, committee and subcommittee chairs, lawmakers with proven effectiveness in the previous Congress, party leaders, and senior lawmakers, all else equal. Analyzing the fate of these proposals, we find that much of the success of the president’s agenda in Congress depends on these critical and strategic ...

Unified Government, Bill Approval, and the Legislative Weight of the President

Comparative Political Studies, 2010

This article proposes a new approach to measuring the legislative weight of the president and Congress based on the approval of each actor’s legislative agenda. The authors focus on presidential systems where presidents possess both formal authority to introduce their own bills and a variety of prerogatives to influence the passage of legislation. The authors argue that the legislative weight of the president varies over time in response to contextual political variables. After devising a general model to measure changes in the legislative weight of the president vis-à-vis Congress, the authors empirically test their propositions using data from Argentina. The results indicate that the policy and productivity weights of the president actually increase in the absence of unified government.

New Data for Investigating the President’s Legislative Program: OMB Logs and SAPs*

Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2019

This article introduces two newly available sources of data on presidents' legislative programs. The first consists of administration legislative initiatives cleared by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for submission to Congress. We refer to these records as "OMB logs" because they record OMB's clearance actions on executive-branch legislative proposals. The second consists of memoranda, officially called Statements of Administration Policy, that OMB sends to floor leaders detailing the president's position on legislation pending floor consideration. We compare these new data on presidents' legislative initiatives and policy preferences with those contained in currently available sources-The Public Papers of the Presidents and Congressional Quarterly's scoring of presidential positions on roll-call votes-and with a long available but seldom used fifth source, the Congressional Record. Both new data sources list bills and legislative preferences that are not included in the currently available sources. We illustrate the value of these new data by calculating presidents' impressive "legislative effectiveness" in the House when all presidential initiatives are taken into account.

Institutional and Individual Influences on the President's Veto

The Journal of Politics, 2002

This article evaluates and compares "president" and "presidency" centered explanations of presidential activity with respect to one important presidential power, the veto. Using individual bill data for nine congresses characterized by divided party government, I estimate a logistic regression model of presidential vetoes. This contrasts with previous research, which has used annual aggregate data. Using individual bill data allows controls for objectionable legislation passed by Congress and enables me to measure and compare the "propensity to veto" of different presidents. I conclude that presidential vetoes are in substantial measure caused by Congress passing objectionable bills, but that even controlling for congressional behavior, presidents exhibit strikingly different veto behavior. Ford was most prone to using the veto, and Reagan, the least. Although external factors exert great influence on the president's veto decision, the individual choices and strategies of presidents also have an important influence.