Agenda Setting from the Oval Office: An Experimental Examination of Presidential Influence over the Public Agenda

Villalobos, José D.; Şirin, Çiğdem V.

doi:10.1093/ijpor/edr017

Cited by 26 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…They found support for the priming hypotheses in both the experiment and survey. Since Druckman and Holmes (), more presidency research using experiments has been published, although, compared to other subfields, the number is still relatively small (Braman ; Christenson and Kriner forthcoming; Cohen ; Kriner and Reeves ; Reeves and Rogowski ; Rottinghaus and Tedin ; Sirin and Villalobos ; Streb et al ; Tedin, Rottinghaus, and Rodgers ; Villalobos and Sirin )…”

Section: The State Of Experimental Research In Presidency Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are several recurrent themes in this research. First, much of it looks at the ability of presidents to influence public opinion (e.g., Cohen ; Rottinghaus and Tedin ; Sirin and Villalobos ; Tedin, Rottinghaus, and Rodgers ; Villalobos and Sirin ), drawing on the interest of the earlier round of experimental research on the presidency. But another set of studies has turned its attention to public support for presidential unilateral behavior (Braman ; Kriner and Christenson ; Reeves and Rogowski ).…”

Section: The State Of Experimental Research In Presidency Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not all of these differences matter to all important presidency questions. For instance, despite these differences, there is good reason to think that college students react to emotional stimuli, like presidential use of fear‐inducing rhetoric, similarly to other adults (Villalobos and Sirin ). But even the other characteristics listed—education, partisanship, knowledge—are more about heterogeneity effects within the population than about differences between college students and other adults, a point that I turn to below.…”

Section: Issues In Using Experiments To Study the Presidencymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Promise of Experiments for Studying the Presidency

Cohen¹

2017

Pres Stud Q

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Presidency scholars, like political scientists in general, have increasingly used experiments in their research. This article argues that, to differentiate itself from other experimental political science, presidency scholars should bring to bear their knowledge of the institution when using experiments and focus on issues of governance. Doing so, however, raises a host of issues and complications in designing experiments to study presidential governance. This article discusses some of these concerns and offers suggestions to improve and stimulate experimental research on the presidency.

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Section: The State Of Experimental Research In Presidency Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The State Of Experimental Research In Presidency Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Issues In Using Experiments To Study the Presidencymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Promise of Experiments for Studying the Presidency

Cohen¹

2017

Pres Stud Q

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“…The direct impact of presidential rhetoric on public issue attention was examined in a unique project conducted in an experimental setting by Villalobos and Sirin (2012). Participants in their project directly exposed to a presidential speech on a specific issue were more likely to assign a greater level of importance to that issue, but presidential rhetoric still did not necessarily lead to support for actual policy action.…”

Section: Presidential Interactions With the Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Participants in their project directly exposed to a presidential speech on a specific issue were more likely to assign a greater level of importance to that issue, but presidential rhetoric still did not necessarily lead to support for actual policy action. While Wood (2009a, 117) does recommend the usage of experimental designs in helping to develop a greater understanding of how agenda setting processes work, the experiment of Villalobos and Sirin (2012) is still constrained in that it does not account for the role of the media in communications between the president and the public. In addition, the ability to see how persistent the effects of presidential agenda setting attempts are on public attention levels is confined in the period of time employed in the experimental setting.…”

Section: Presidential Interactions With the Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Presidential Agenda-Setting Capacity: Dynamic Comparisons of Presidential, Mass Media, and Public Attention to Economic Issues

Olds

2013

Congress & the Presidency

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Research on presidential agenda setting has rarely attempted to simultaneously assess the ability of the president to influence the policy agendas of the mass media and the public. This is primarily due to the lack of time-refined measures of public issue attention.With advances in technology, information about Internet search engine behavior can provide an indication of the level of interest the public has over time about specific issues. Using Google Trends weekly data about public search interest levels, this project contrasts dynamic attention to several economic issues: unemployment, recession, and inflation. The vector autoregression analyses performed suggest the president does not have the capacity to directly guide public attention, nor does the president have the capacity to indirectly guide public attention through the media. There is some indication that the president can indirectly guide public attention by influencing actual economic conditions, and that the president is responsive to attention from the mass media and the public. The moving-average representation analyses indicate that an increase in presidential attention has the potential to produce a small contemporaneous increase in either mass media or public attention to some economic issues. The duration of these positive shifts in mass media or public attention are all very brief, indicating the president has a limited capacity through either direct or indirect leadership to sustain the attention other actors in the political system place on the specific issues studied. Strong evidence in all three of the issue areas studied supports that mass media attention and public attention are closely related.

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Loyal Allies or Stubborn Establishment?

Böller

2023

Polit Vierteljahresschr

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To what extent was U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s populist foreign policy agenda supported by the Republican Party (GOP) in Congress? A bourgeoning literature on Congress and U.S. foreign policy has identified increasing partisan disagreement on international issues. Trump’s “America First” policy may have further incited division and ideological controversies. At the same time, the 45th U.S. president’s foreign and security policies were, to a large degree, at odds with traditional GOP policy positions. To understand executive–legislative relations on foreign and security policy during the Trump administration, and in particular the role of the GOP, this paper first investigates voting records in Congress during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The analysis reveals that the reaction to Trump’s “America First” doctrine was not uniform and that parts of the GOP asserted themselves against the president. To explain the sources of this variance, the article focuses on two policy areas with varied GOP positioning: arms control (pro Trump) and foreign aid (contra Trump). In sum, the analysis reveals that some Republicans with traditionalist views (the so-called GOP establishment) opposed some of Trump’s anti-internationalist policies, in particular those that contradicted long-standing GOP preferences regarding vital U.S. security interests. At the same time, Republicans supported Trump on issues where the GOP could continue its policy preference, on arms control in particular.

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Agenda Setting from the Oval Office: An Experimental Examination of Presidential Influence over the Public Agenda

Cited by 26 publications

References 26 publications

The Promise of Experiments for Studying the Presidency

The Promise of Experiments for Studying the Presidency

Assessing Presidential Agenda-Setting Capacity: Dynamic Comparisons of Presidential, Mass Media, and Public Attention to Economic Issues

Loyal Allies or Stubborn Establishment?

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