Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Elite Opinion, The Public Interest, and Inter-Branch Policy Differences

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project explains persistent policy differences between presidents and congresses, independent of party. The prevalent view is that the President represents "the public interest" and the Congress the "special interests." The investigator asserts that presidents are likelier than Members of Congress (MC's) to act upon their convictions, which will reflect any dominant view among elites, unless a dissenting lobby is bound to their party by the issue in question. Presidents are only constrained by lobbies linked to their parties by an issue, while MC's are sensitive to both the secondary demands of party-linked groups and those of no-party lobbies. The President is more apt to act on principle than is an MC (and hence Congress generally) since his actions are more influential and he is less vulnerable than the atomostic Congress to lobbies' tactics of "Divide and conquer" and targeting recalcitrants. Persistent interbranch differences emerge when unified elite opinion influences presidents of both parties but lobbies constrain Congress. Unlike extant work the student's theory explains how the same issue can be partisan in one era and marked by inter-branch conflict in another. It is also free from normative assumptions. The student will undertake two two-week trips to the Library of Congress (LOC) and these allow him to fully operationalize a key variable in his theory, elite opinion. By coding and tabulating the editorial positions of a sample of papers stratified by region and partisan tendency on three issues, trade, gun control and veterans programs from 1910-2000 he will be able to show the degree to which an issue is contested or consensual among elite opinion. This enables him to test his theory in a timely manner. The database assembled should prove useful to scholars pursuing other questions in this area of inquiry.