Scholars of the unilateral presidency are left with an empirical puzzle regarding whether and how divided government influences presidential use of executive orders. While the strategic model suggests that presidents should issue more executive orders when faced with an adverse situation vis‐à‐vis Congress, most of the research finds just the opposite. We offer a more appropriate test of the strategic model by examining how presidential‐congressional adversity influences presidential decisions to issue symbolic, routine, and major policy executive orders. We find support for the strategic model and present new findings to demonstrate that presidents behave differently with respect to distinct types of executive orders during periods of unified and divided government.
Recent studies examine politicians' decisions to use social media, as well as the content of the messages that these political actors disseminate on social media platforms. We contribute to this literature by examining how race competitiveness and a candidate's position in the race relative to her opponent affect their decisions to issue attacks. Through content analysis of nearly 15,000 Facebook posts for tone (positive or negative), we find that while competitive races encourage both candidates to issue more negative posts, candidates in less competitive races embrace attack messages with more or less frequency depending on whether they trail or lead their opponent. We find that social media negativity is much more likely to be a desperation strategy employed by underdog candidates in less competitive races. We also run separate models examining the factors that drive policy and personal attacks. While underdog candidates are more likely to engage in issue attacks, candidates in competitive races are significantly more likely to use Facebook to make personal attacks.Keywords Elections Á Campaigns Á Negativity Á Social Media Our data and the replication code for each our models, as well as our online appendix, can be found online at the following
Objective
We examine how Latino constituencies—their percentage of the population and their percentage of voters—influence the propensity of states to pass restrictive immigration policy, testing two competing theories.
Method
Using state‐level data from 2009 through 2012, we examine the influence of Latino constituency size and Latino electoral strength on the number of restrictive immigration laws enacted by U.S. state legislatures.
Results
We find that states with larger Latino populations pass more restrictive laws, but greater Latino electoral strength leads states to pass fewer restrictive policies. This relationship is interactive such that increases in Latino turnout act to mitigate the positive effect of Latino population size on restrictive policies. Finally, we show that the positive effect of Latino mobilization is indirect, meditated by their electoral influence on the partisan and ethnic composition of state legislatures.
Conclusions
Our findings emphasize the importance of voting for minority substantive representation.
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