ARTICLES
Presidential Position Taking and the Puzzle of Representation
Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha and Brandon Rottinghaus
The Public Presidency and Disciplinary Presumptions
Lawrence R. Jacobs
The Invisible Presidential Appointments: An Examination of Appointments to the Department of Labor, 2001-11
David Lewis and Richard W. Waterman
What’s So Sinister About Presidential Signing Statements?
Ian Ostrander and Joel Sievert
The Paradox of President Reagan’s Leadership
James P. Pfiffner
Charismatic Rhetoric in the 2008 Presidential Campaign: Commonalities and Differences
Jean Schroedel, Michelle Bligh, Jennifer Merolla and Randall Gonzalez
FEATURES
The Contemporary Presidency: Civil-Military Friction and Presidential Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue
Janine Davidson
Polls and Elections:The New Deal Realignment in Real Time
Helmut Norpoth, Andrew H. Sidman and Clara Suong
The Law: Obama’s Executive Privilege and Holder’s Contempt: “Operation Fast and Furious”
Louis Fisher
The Historical Presidency: The Development of Unilateral Power and the Problem of the Power to Warn: Washington through McKinley
Jeremy D. Bailey and Brandon Rottinghaus
BOOK REVIEWS
Saladin M. Ambar, How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency
Gerald Benjamin
James Axtell, ed.,The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation
Mark E. Benbow
Heath Brown,Lobbying the New President: Interests in Transition
Emily J. Charnock
David Eisenhower with Julie Nixon Eisenhower,Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969
T. Alissa Warters
Joseph J. Ellis, First Family: Abigail and John Adams
Todd Estes
Robert M. Entman,Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct
Ryan Neville-Shepard
Nigel Hamilton,American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush
David Milne
Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama
Edward A. Gutiérrez
Roy Morris, Jr., The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America
Cheryl A. Wells
Donald A. Ritchie, ed., Congress and Harry S. Truman: A Conflicted Legacy
Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr.
Clarke Rountree, The Chameleon President: The Curious Case of George W. Bush
Timothy J. Lynch
Robert Shogan,Prelude to Catastrophe: FDR’s Jews and the Menace of Nazism
Francis MacDonnell
Presidential Position Taking and the Puzzle of Representation
Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha
University of North Texas
Brandon Rottinghaus
University of Houston
A significant debate rages in the literature. Although going public success is a function of mass public support for a policy, presidents respond to partisan liberalism in their public rhetoric. This presents a puzzle: how do presidents reconcile their need to target policies that are popular with the mass public to go public successfully, when they respond primarily to partisan opinion in their speeches? Our comparison of the president’s policy proposals from 1989 through 2008 with both centrist and partisan public opinion reveals that presidents are more partisan than centrist in their policy priorities, which adds weight to the partisan representation side of this debate.
The Public Presidency and Disciplinary Presumptions
Lawrence R. Jacobs
University of Minnesota
The tendency of well-developed research fields to overtill is well known; a corresponding challenge is the tendency to misunderstand or misapply that research by scholars ploughing different plots. The mistaken or incomplete interpretation of research on the public presidency presents a particularly egregious case of poor harvesting. Although political observers and scholars outside the public presidency field project “going public” as a highly influential weapon, scholars in the field converge on modest expectations in which presidential promotions have limited, selective and conditional effects. This pattern is illustrated through content analyses of Barack Obama’s speeches and the media’s coverage of them. The findings correspond with the expectations of the public presidency field: Obama conducted extensive public promotions of his signature legislative accomplishment – health reform — and his efforts failed to move media coverage, public opinion or the legislative process. As research on the public presidency expands its scope and reach, there is a growing opportunity to correct its mis-applications and, more positively, to build an unusually diverse research community that spans political theory and the social sciences.
The Invisible Presidential Appointments:
An Examination of Appointments to the Department of Labor, 2001-11
David E. Lewis
Vanderbilt University
Richard W. Waterman
University of Kentucky
In this paper we examine what we call the president’s invisible appointments. We designate SES and Schedule C appointees as invisible because, in lieu of a scandal, these appointees serve in the bureaucracy, generally with significantly less direct attention from the press or scholars. In addressing the invisible appointees we use new data from an ongoing research project that collects and codes data from the resumes of political appointees in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. In this paper we examine data from the resumes of appointees serving in the Department of Labor during these two administrations. We describe the characteristics presidents consider when making appointments, explain which factors are most important for which positions, and compare the results to existing expectations about the factors presidents consider when making appointments.
What’s So Sinister About Presidential Signing Statements?
Ian Ostrander
Washington University in St. Louis
Joel Sievert
University of Georgia
Presidential signing statements, especially “constitutional” ones, have been characterized as line-item vetoes and a general abuse of power. But are signing statements so sinister? We suggest that the popular unilateral powers framework, as applied to signing statements, is inappropriate and that signing statements of all types function more like a dialogue with Congress. Using content analysis of all signing statements from 1977 to 2010, we demonstrate that signing statements routinely address general inter-branch themes rather than the substance of a law. We thus provide a new perspective on presidential signing statements as a continuation of inter-branch dialogue.
The Paradox of President Reagan’s Leadership
James P. Pfiffner
George Mason University
Ronald Reagan was a larger-than-life individual, a formidable politician, and an important president. But as in all presidents, his character was complex, resulting in a presidency of paradoxes, marked by some great successes and some unfortunate failures. Both Reagan’s successes and failures stemmed from his character and style of political leadership. Reagan’s broad vision and clear direction made his political ideals appealing. But paradoxically, what made his policy victories possible was his willingness, when faced with political reality, to make pragmatic compromises without seeming to abandon his ideals. This article will examine these paradoxes by analyzing the Reagan administration’s transition into office, the contrasting White House staffs of his two terms, and the high and low points of his national security policies.
Charismatic Rhetoric in the 2008 Presidential Campaign:
Commonalities and Differences
Jean Schroedel, Michelle Bligh, Jennifer Merolla,
and Randall Gonzalez
Claremont Graduate University
For all of the attention given to charisma in media accounts of presidential campaigns, there is surprisingly little systematic research on the use and effect of charismatic rhetoric, even though researchers outside of political science have attempted to deconstruct and analyze the different components of rhetorical speech. We draw from this scholarship to explore the use of different forms of charismatic rhetoric throughout the entire 2008 presidential campaign season. We use DICTION 5.0, a content analysis program designed specifically for political discourse, to explore the use of rhetoric in the campaign. We begin by mapping the prevalence of different types of rhetoric and then move on to examine the impact of partisanship and electoral context (primary vs. general election) on rhetorical choices.
FEATURES
Civil-Military Friction and Presidential Decision-Making:
Explaining the Broken Dialogue
Janine Davidson
George Mason University
This article examines the perennial mutual frustration between Presidents and their military advisors over decisions to use force. What often appears to be a personality-driven or political debate between the commander-in-chief and his strong-minded military advisors actually has deeper institutional and cultural roots. The “professional” military officer has certain expectations about how to craft “best military advice” for the President that are deeply embedded into the organizational culture and in fact hard-wired into the institutionalized and incredibly detailed military planning processes. This planning process is designed with expectations about the roles civilian leadership will play in providing guidance, which are in many ways out of synch with the expectations of the President and his civilian advisors. Ultimately, the output of the military’s planning process fails to deliver the type of nuanced advice in the form of creative options that the President needs.
The New Deal Realignment in Real Time
Helmut Norpoth
Stony Brook University
Andrew H. Sidman
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Clara Suong
University of California, San Diego
Right after the 1936 election the Gallup Poll began probing party identification. From then on until 1952, when the National Election Studies entered the field, nearly 200 surveys produced measurements of partisanship in the American electorate. We exploit this largely unexplored dataset to examine the partisan transformation commonly called the New Deal Realignment in real time. It turns out that it was not until the late 1940’s that the Democratic Party secured an enduring hold on the American electorate. The New Deal and the Depression had less to do with this change than did World War II and the postwar prosperity. The lead cohort of the Democratic surge in party identification was the generation that came of age during the 1940’s, not the 1930’s. The findings suggest that a historic crisis or a new policy program may not be enough to realign partisanship in the electorate, but that it takes the success of the ascendant party in mastering historic crises.
Obama’s Executive Privilege and Holder’s Contempt:
“Operation Fast and Furious”
Louis Fisher
The Constitution Project
In his first use of executive privilege, President Barack Obama on June 20, 2012, denied Congress access to documents related to the “Fast and Furious” operation carried out by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agency. The program permitted more than two thousand assault guns to leave the United States and enter Mexico, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Initially, the Justice Department denied that ATF ever intended to have guns flow to Mexico. Ten months later the department conceded that its statement was “inaccurate.” Congressional efforts to obtain agency documents resulted in a House contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder, prompting Obama to invoke executive privilege.
The Development of Unilateral Power and the
Problem of the Power to Warn: Washington through McKinley
Jeremy D. Bailey and Brandon Rottinghaus
University of Houston
The scholarly turn to the unilateral presidency has expanded our understanding of the presidency and executive power, but, to date, this body of work has focused on presidents since the New Deal. This is somewhat surprising, given that many of the most well known unilateral orders were issued before 1900. Rather than being isolated events, they are part of a longer list of unilateral presidential orders among early presidents that, as a group, have received little scholarly attention. This paper seeks, first, to introduce “settle down” proclamations (which are issued as warnings to the public) issued by presidents before Theodore Roosevelt as a way to further understand the development of executive power in the early presidency. Second, it uses these proclamations to test whether the findings of the unilateral presidency scholarship hold with respect to unilateral power before the twentieth century. The paper concludes by comparing unilateral power to prerogative power and proposing a path for future research.