Daniel E Ponder

Presidential Leverage

Presidents, Approval, and the American State

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Daniel E. Ponder is L. E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Dezember 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 155mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9781503602830
• ISBN-10: 1503602834
• Artikelnr.: 47775904

Autorenporträt

Daniel E. Ponder is L. E. Meador Professor of Political Science and Director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship at Drury University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Introduction: Locating Presidents in the American Political System
chapter abstract
This chapter provides a very broad overview of the concept of presidential
leverage and the American state, as well as an overview of the rest of the
book. It begins with a vignette on President Obama and the run-up to the
2012 election, defines leverage, and provides other extended examples of
the concepts in action. The second example focuses on President Clinton,
especially in the aftermath of the 1994 congressional midterms, and
illustrates how Clinton's political resurrection stemmed in part from a
decline in public trust in government generally and an increase in his
approval ratings. These vignettes illustrate the various components of the
IPL and introduce the reader to the conceptual thinking behind leverage and
the construction of the index.
2Presidents, Approval and Trust: Toward a Concept of Presidential Leverage
chapter abstract
This brief chapter discusses presidential approval and public trust in
government more generally and how thinking of presidential approval in the
context of trust in government can give scholars a different perspective on
a president's place (that is, leverage) in the system. It reveals that
thinking of presidential approval in this way uncovers issues that are
missed by simply examining approval in isolation.
3The Quest for Presidential Leverage: The Presidency and the American State
chapter abstract
This chapter employs the concept of the "American state." For most people
the president is the personification of the American state, though he has
relatively few leverage points outside of a few constitutional provisions
to help him. Though the Constitution establishes Congress as the most
powerful branch, an institutional inversion has taken place that has
effectively reversed the constitutional scheme and has led to increased
expectations on the presidency without an appreciable increase in governing
authority for the president. The argument is that presidents seeking
leverage points in the American state, which is characterized by a public
that is largely antileadership and skeptical of efforts to forge policy
direction, can build capacity and seek autonomy to help cope with
expectations heaped on them. The theme of this chapter-how public leverage
signals when presidents can or should act autonomously and/or build
capacity-is woven throughout much of the book.
4Measuring Presidential Leverage
chapter abstract
This chapter explains the measurement methodology and traces trends in the
index of presidential leverage (IPL). It provides a broad, panoramic view
as well as president-by-president explanations of approval, trust, and the
IPL for Presidents Kennedy to Obama. The analysis breaks down the IPL a
number of ways, including but not limited to pre- and
post-Vietnam/Watergate eras. The chapter explains measurement decisions,
including estimation techniques such as the employment of James Stimson's
WCALC algorithm to construct the approval and trust measures.
5Presidential Leverage and the Creation of Public Policy
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the macropolitics of policy output and its relation
to presidential leverage and examines three types of macropolitical policy
activity: presidential legacy, unilateral policy making, and agenda size.
These include the size of the president's agenda, encompassing all
proposals (1961-2004), and high salience policy (operationalized in two
ways via the State of the Union speeches from 1961-2012), and draw on two
different data sets. Specifically, the IPL is systematically related to the
success of landmark legislation that originated in the White House (as
opposed to Congress) and calculated from the list composed by David Mayhew.
Executive orders are also significantly related to the IPL, as are requests
in the State of the Union. Presidential leverage is a significant
improvement over using raw approval scores in the statistical analyses in
both legacy and unilateral models and is approximately as strong as
approval in the agenda size model.
6A Refuge of Low-Leveraged Presidents: Politicized Capacity and Policy
Centralization
chapter abstract
This chapter explores capacity and autonomy. It builds on the author's
previous book, Good Advice: Information and Policy Making in the White
House, to empirically examine the role of leverage in building capacity
(measured as employees in the Executive Office of the President) and
centralizing policy making in the White House. For centralization, a robust
relationship between leverage and centralization is thoroughly explored and
explained. Specifically, the analysis shows that weaker, less
advantageously situated presidents (as identified by the IPL) are more
likely to centralize policy making in the White House than those with
higher degrees of public leverage. Using time series error correction
models and controlling for a variety of institutional and economic factors,
another analysis finds a limited but statistically significant relationship
between leverage and political capacity in the politicized staff in the
Executive Office of the President.
7Conclusion: The Place of the President's "Place" in American Politics
chapter abstract
This chapter concludes by reviewing the major findings of the book. It
systematically lays out the reach of the theory while also including a
discussion of the book's limitations (for example, leverage seems to have
little to do with the degree of congressional concurrence with the
president's program or with the content of the policy agenda). It briefly
reviews where presidential leverage outperforms measuring approval in
isolation. Finally, it offers final thoughts of the nature of the
presidency in the American state and how leverage can offer scholars a
supplementary, alternative way to examine the context within which
presidents take action. It also outlines prospect theory as a tool for
future research that combines leverage with decision analysis. It brings
the analysis up to date with a set of observations in light of the 2016
presidential election.