Brandice Canes-Wrone

Leadership and Pandering: A Theory of Executive Policymaking

We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We ...nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters’ interests may or may not pander to voters by choosing it; under certain conditions, the executive can actually increase his probability of reelection by choosing an unpopular policy that is in the public interest. However, we also show that an executive will sometimes face electoral incentives to enact a policy that is both unpopular and contrary to voters’ interests. We illustrate our model with examples involving President Abraham Lincoln, California Governor Earl Warren, and President Gerald Ford. ¤For helpful comments we thank Steve Ansolabehere, David Austen-Smith, Dan Carpenter, Cary Covington, Patricia Conley, Daniel Diermeier, Tim Fedderson, Fred Greenstein, Keith Krehbiel, Dan Kryder, Jim Snyder, Craig Volden, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, NYU Law School, Princeton, Stanford, and SUNY Stony Brook. yAssistant Professor of Political Science, MIT. zAssistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University. xCorresponding author. Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston IL 60208-1006. Email: k-shotts@nwu.edu. Phone: (847) 491-2628. Fax: (847) 491-8985. “There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the Executive to a prevailing current...as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted...When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests.” Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 71

Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis

An enduring and controversial debate centers on whether there exist “two presidencies,” that is, whether presidents exercise fundamentally greater influence over foreign than domestic affairs. This paper makes two contributions to understanding this issue and, by extension, presidential power more generally. First, we distill an institutional logic that both supports the two presidencies thesis and implies that Congress has incentives to delegate foreign policy powers to the president. Accordingly, the logic suggests that empirical analysis should incorporate these incentives. Our second contribution, then, is to test for the existence of two presidencies in a domain that Congress cannot delegate, budgetary appropriations, and a domain that explicitly incorporates delegation, agency creation. Consistent with expectations, we find presidents exercise considerably greater influence over foreign policy.

Partisan Labels and Democratic Accountability: An Analysis of State Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

Various literatures indicate that partisan labels increase the accountability of elected officials. Correspondingly, advocates of nonpartisan elections claim that this procedure helps liberate officials from political influence. These arguments have been prominent in recent debates regarding the selection of judges in U.S. state courts. We suggest, conversely, that on salient issues nonpartisan elections encourage popular judicial decisions, particularly given recent developments in judicial campaigns. To test this hypothesis, we assemble a dataset that revolves around state supreme courts’ decisions on abortion cases between 1980 and 2006. The analysis—which controls for a variety of factors and uses gubernatorial decisions as a comparative tool—provides strong support for the hypothesis.

Electoral Business Cycles in OECD Countries

Studies of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have generally failed to detect real economic expansions in preelection periods, casting doubt on the existence of opportunistic political business cycles. We develop a theory that predicts that a substantial portion of the economy experiences a real decline in the preelection period if the election is associated with sufficient policy uncertainty. In particular, policy uncertainty induces private actors to postpone investments with high costs of reversal. The resulting declines, which are called reverse electoral business cycles, require sufficient levels of polarization between major parties and electoral competitiveness. To test these predictions, we examine quarterly data on private fixed investment in ten OECD countries between 1975 and 2006. The results show that reverse electoral business cycles exist and as expected, depend on electoral competitiveness and partisan polarization. Moreover, simply by removing private fixed investment from gross domestic product, we uncover evidence of opportunistic cycles.

Bureaucratic Decisions and the Composition of the Lower Courts

I delineate necessary conditions for the ideological composition of the federal courts to influence bureaucratic decisions independently of lawsuits and test for the relationship with data on the implementation of wetlands policy. Examining 18,331 decisions by the Army Corps of Engineers over whether to issue a permit for the development of wetlands between 1988 and 1996, I analyze whether these decisions were influenced by the composition of the appellate and district courts. The results indicate that judicial ideology significantly affects bureaucratic decision making. Specifically, a standard deviation increase in the liberalism of the lower courts decreases the probability that the Corps will grant a permit by 14%, which is comparable to the effects of long-recognized determinants of administrative behavior.

Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions

Most U.S. state supreme court justices face elections or reappointment by elected officials, and research suggests that judicial campaigns have come to resemble those for other offices. We develop predictions on how selection systems should affect judicial decisions and test these predictions on an extensive dataset of death penalty decisions by state courts of last resort. Specifically, the data include over 12,000 decisions on over 2000 capital punishment cases decided between 1980 and 2006 in systems with partisan, nonpartisan, or retention elections or with reappointment. As predicted, the findings suggest that judges face the greatest pressure to uphold capital sentences in systems with nonpartisan ballots. Also as predicted, judges respond similarly to public opinion in systems with partisan elections or reappointment. Finally, the results indicate that the plebiscitary influences on judicial behavior emerge only after interest groups began achieving success at targeting justices for their decisions.

Elections, Uncertainty and Irreversible Investment

This article argues that the policy uncertainty generated by elections encourages private actors to delay investments that entail high costs of reversal, creating pre-election declines in the associated sectors. Moreover, this incentive depends on the competitiveness of the race and the policy differences between the major parties/candidates. These arguments are tested using new survey and housing market data from the United States. The survey analysis assesses whether respondents’ perceptions of presidential candidates’ policy differences increased the likelihood that they would delay certain purchases and actions. The housing market analysis examines whether elections are associated with a pre-election decline in economic activity, and whether any such decline depends on electoral competitiveness. The results support the predictions and cannot be explained by existing theories.

The Obama Presidency, Public Position-Taking, and Mass Opinion

This article examines the degree to which President Obamas public positions are congruent with mass opinion, and compares his position-taking behavior with that of recent administrations. We consider the impact of congressional agenda setting and the electoral cycle on the degree of congruence between Obamas positions and public opinion. Additionally, we investigate whether positions that were only marginally popular early in the term have retained support. The findings indicate that Obamas presidency resembles other recent administrations in terms of policy congruence. First, blame-game politics between the president and opposition party have significantly reduced policy congruence. Second, for recurring issues, electoral proximity appears to be correlated with higher congruence. Finally, as in other recent administrations, the overall level of responsiveness is not significantly greater than one would expect by chance.

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower-Salience Issues: Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, and Decisions on Lower-Salience Issues

Scholarship finds that in states with judicial elections, public opinion affects judges’ decisions on hot-button campaign issues such as the death penalty or marijuana legalization. Yet the literature leaves open the question of how public opinion affects judicial decisions on less salient issues, which not only dominate the dockets of state supreme courts but also encompass areas of major legal and policy significance. We consider one such issue that infrequently emerges in judicial campaigns, environmental law. Specifically, we collect an original dataset of over 5000 judicial votes on nearly 1,000 cases heard in 40 state supreme courts from 1990-2014. We find that for the dataset as a whole, there is not a significant effect of public opinion on judicial decisions in any of the major judicial selection systems. However, in the few states in which environmental issues have been the subject of campaign attack ads, we find evidence of such a relationship during the years following the ads. These results contribute to a growing literature that suggests elections can reduce judicial independence from public opinion.