Presidents' Legislative Preferences

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Presidents' Legislative Preferences General Abstract In most parliamentary democracies, executives (i.e. prime ministers) can formally submit legislation to parliament, which then generally passes without being amended. The Constitution, however, does not allow the president to introduce legislation directly to Congress. Presidents do, however, use public appeals and private communications to request new legislation from Congress. Unlike their parliamentary executive counterparts, presidents must frequently work to change or to prevent the enactment of unattractive legislation. Most of what the public and scholars learn about presidents' legislative efforts come from their public statements. Presidents' public appeals, however, constitute only a part of their dealings with Congress on legislative business. Presidents engage in a myriad of other, less visible activities to advance their legislative goals. Many are informal, private, and unrecorded, while others enlist more formal mechanisms of communication that generate paper and electronic records. This research exploits the recent acquisition of records for two such formal communication mechanisms obtained from the files of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First, OMB logs administration request for legislation to individual members and committees and tracks the legislative history of these proposals. Second, OMB drafts and distributes presidents' Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) to congressional leaders. SAPs are formal statements in which presidents and their agents endorse, oppose and/or sometimes threaten to veto pieces of pending legislation. The researcher has compiled a complete set of the records for SAPs from 1985 to the present, and from 1979 to 2007 for the OMB logs. For the first time, students of presidential-congressional relations have detailed information on these key direct efforts to influence legislation on the part of the president. Technical Abstract This project will investigate to what extent presidential requests serve to set Congress' agenda. The work aims to identify both structural and personal conditions that help explain the observed variation in presidential effectiveness. In doing so, the research will provide better metrics of the ideological content of presidents' legislative preferences vis-à-vis Congress, and how this ideological positioning influences their capacity to lead their co-partisans in Congress. In other words, the project investigates whether legislators respond to signals from the president, and if so, do these signals affect the content of the agenda Congress pursues. This work will provide insight into these fundamental questions related to the US separation of powers systems and how it affects both presidents and legislators during periods of unified and divided party control of government. To evaluate these points, the investigator will compile and analyze a data base consisting of presidents' legislative initiatives and positions on pending floor votes comprised of two specific pieces of information compiled by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): 1) logs of administration requests for legislation sent to individual members, and 2) Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs). The PI will compile a data set of OMB logs from 1979 to 2007 and of SAPs from 1985 to the present. These new data offer superior information for testing these and other under-explored questions related to presidential influence and executive-legislative relations.