George W. Bush attracted heavy fire for his frequent use of signing statements to disregard or reinterpret provisions of law he deemed unconstitutional infringements on executive power. A 2006 American Bar Association task force recommended that the president instead communicate constitutionality concerns to Congress prior to bill passage and that he veto bills when those concerns were not sufficiently remedied. I trace the development of presidential justification for signing statements and compares their content to that of formal communications occurring earlier in the legislative process: Statements of Administration Policy. While presidents sometimes give advance notice of their concerns in an attempt at bargaining, they also frequently blindside Congress with signing statements targeting provisions that generated no prior comment or complaint. I suggest that presidents may use both documents to assert substantial power over the interpretation of laws and that both deserve close scrutiny.

College students politically participate through traditional mechanisms at lower rates than their elders. Yet, members of this group may participate by other means, like friending candidates and joining political groups through social networking websites. We argue that these online activities serve as a meaningful form of civic engagement by broadening who participates and encouraging other forms of participation. Using a survey of randomly chosen undergraduates at a large Midwestern university, we discover that important distinctions exist between those who friend or join these online social networks and those who participate in more traditional off-line political activities. While interest in politics is a precursor to off-line engagement, it does not predict friending or joining an online social network that is political in nature. However, friending candidates or joining such networks appears to mobilize college students to engage in other forms of political participation.

Presidents' audiences have been shrinking over time. Prior research suggests that the rise of cable television is to blame. We investigate whether this shrinkage is occurring disproportionately among those the president most needs to persuade—disapprovers of his performance. Analyzing both A. C. Nielsen's audience ratings and self‐reports of speech watching from 32 postspeech surveys, we find that as the share of households subscribing to cable has grown, the statistical relationship between the president's approval rating and the percentage watching his televised speeches has strengthened commensurately for each group of party identifiers. Consequently, as presidential approval ratings have polarized during the past two decades, so too has the partisan composition of presidents' audiences, a phenomenon unknown during the broadcast era. Modern presidents thus find themselves increasingly preaching to their party choir and losing the capacity to influence public opinion more broadly.

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