Contemporary scholarship has focused much attention on presidents' routine exploitation of signing statements since the 1980s to disallow provisions of bills passed by Congress. Much less is known about earlier post–World War II presidents' use of signing statements and what precedents they may have set for their successors. This study takes a sharp focus on the 934 signing statements issued from 1945 to 1980, from Presidents Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter. The analysis classifies these signing statements by policy area and by the type of comments the president made. The results accentuate how the resurgent Congress in the 1970s—including budget reform and challenges to presidential latitude in foreign policy through legislative vetoes—compelled Presidents Gerald Ford and Carter to increasingly use signing statements to nullify legislative provisos. The analysis emphasizes how cycles of congressional change affected earlier presidents' use of signing statements, laying a foundation for their successors' more broad manipulation of this rhetorical instrument to aggrandize executive prerogative.
This article explores the relative impact of constituency, political ideology, and labor strength on support for presidential fast-track trade authority in 1991 and 1997. Multivariate logistic regression analysis of legislators' positions shows that constituency factors have increased in importance while political ideology explains less of the variation in support for fast-track over time. The stronger constituency basis of legislators' positions reflects both the impact of NAFTA on Democrats' stances toward free trade and the growing divide among Republicans on trade issues. Future presidential bids for fast-track authority must center on specific trade agreements and will require grassroots support to surmount congressional opposition.A continuing debate in the study of legislative behavior concerns the degree to which constituency factors explain congressional roll-call voting across policy areas. This debate is taking on added importance and complexity with the end of the Cold War and the growth of global economic interdependence. Studies of roll-call voting have tended to distinguish between domestic and foreign policy issues to argue that the President will have more latitude and sustained influence on foreign affairs-and that ideology, partisanship, and constituency factors will come strongly to the fore in domestic policy (
In this article, we argue that not all social connections contribute to social capital as most people have conceived it. People with strong ethnic identifications and who associate primarily with people of their own kind either will withdraw from civic participation or will belong only to organizations made up of their own nationality. People with looser ties to their in-group are more likely to take an active role in the larger society. We show the importance of acculturation on broader dimensions of civic engagement by analyzing a Los Angeles Times survey of ethnic Chinese in Southern California in 1997.
This analysis fills an important lacuna in comparative legislative studies by testing the veto players theory against a newly constructed data set of significant domestic policy legislation passed in the Republic of Ireland between 1949 and 2000. Distinguishing between single-party majority, coalition, and minority governments, the analysis places into sharp relief the ways in which the unique context of Irish political parties and institutional dynamics conflict with the basic tenets of the veto players framework. The results underscore the contextual constraints on applicability of the theory.
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