The topic of presidential success in Congress is central to the study of American politics. Yet existing research does not sufficiently assess the president's success at shaping the substance of legislation. To help remedy this deficiency, the authors measure the degree of presidential success on 191 important statutes from 1965 to 2000 and find that presidents typically accept significant concessions to ensure passage of legislation. Using factor and regression analyses, the authors demonstrate that several factors—including the presence of unified government, the president's approval ratings, and the point in a president's tenure—affect the extent to which the president receives what he wants concerning legislative content.
The president’s ability to influence the national policy agenda is an important component of presidential power. Although some maintain that presidents are favorably situated to set agendas, others demonstrate that the president’s agenda-setting skills vary considerably by policy area. What is more, scholars have yet to examine the impact presidents have had focusing attention on the economy, an issue of vital importance to their political success. Extending previous research on presidential agenda setting that did not address economic policy (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998), we test the impact that the president’s public statements on the economy have on media and congressional attention to the economy. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR), we demonstrate that although presidents have some influence over the economic agenda, presidents are primarily responsive to media coverage of the economy.
Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience‐ complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley’s salience‐complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley’s contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy’s salience.
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