Bryan W. Marshall

Revisiting the Two Presidencies The Strategic Use of Executive Orders

Recent scholarly attention has considerably advanced our understanding of executive orders. We argue that executive orders represent a valuable opportunity to assess the relevance of the two presidencies and the distinction between foreign and domestic policies. The over-time analysis (1953-1997) demonstrates significant differences in the effects for most of the variables explaining executive orders depending on the issue area. For example, we find that the president’s share of congressional party seats significantly affects executive orders on domestic policy, but no such effects are found on foreign policy. This result, as well as many others in the analysis, illustrates that factors shaping the executive’s ability to influence policy in Congress differ substantially in their effects on domestic as compared to foreign policy executive orders. We infer from our analysis that the two-presidencies distinction remains a useful one, at least for understanding executive orders.

Assessing Presidential Power Signing Statements and Veto Threats as Coordinated Strategies

Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executives unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the presidents bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The analysis suggests that signing statements, although underappreciated, may potentially be a valuable presidential tool in the veto bargaining process. The analysis also shows that veto threats are a key factor explaining the presidents use of the constitutional signing statement. We infer that veto threats and signing statements are linked together as part of a larger coordinated strategy to exert presidential power in the legislative realm.

Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House

Abstract Four competing explanations have emerged regarding restrictive rules in Congress. Informational theory claims that rules reduce information costs and facilitate committee specialization. The distributional perspective suggests that rules enforce legislative bargains and help members achieve gains-from-trade. Another claim is that rules increase the Rules Committees independent influence over policy. Lastly, partisan theory asserts that rules are used to increase the majority partys influence over policy. Abstract This analysis tests these claims during the 97th, 98th, 104th, and 105th Congresses. The findings demonstrate that theoretical constructs developed in earlier analyses of special rules are not robust over time and across legislative contexts. The results refute majoritarian assertions that rules are used as informational devices. Similarly, little evidence supports the claim that Rules Committee preferences independently affect rule assignment. Instead, a partisan principal-agent framework emerges as the most useful construct to explain procedural choice in the postreform House.

Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force A Selection Model of Crisis Decision-Making

Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerability through either avoidance or exploitation. The behavior of US adversaries is thought to critically affect the president’s opportunities to use force. Conventional and strategic accounts of the linkage between domestic political vulnerability and the use of force provide contradictory expectations. To assess these theories we identify hypotheses related to four dependent and selection variables corresponding to dispute initiation and reciprocation involving the US. These hypotheses are tested with a two-stage Heckman Probit model to account for selection effects due to strategic interaction. The results are most supportive of orthodox diversionary theory. Our findings challenge the other perspectives evaluated—the strategic conflict avoidance (SCA) perspective, Howell and Pevehouse’s party cover approach, and Schultz’s signaling model.

Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress

The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress’s decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional behavior, but also because it shapes presidential decisions to take positions. Moreover, we explain that legislative success during the honeymoon period is driven by presidential position taking. Our findings highlight the role of a president’s strategic decisions for theories explaining congressionalexecutive relations. The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned an executive who would be limited in legislative affairs. Since the founders’ time, Congress and the president have sought to redefine their respective legislative roles (Wayne 2002), clashing over judgeships, budgets, war, and nearly all other matters of public policy. Presidential power is, more often times than not, a zero-sum struggle for policymaking influence fueled by both interinstitutional and partisan considerations. Scholars have made significant strides in explaining the conditions that have an effect on changes in the relative influence of these institutions on public policy. Still, the role and effects of strategic behavior on congressional-executive relations constitute a critically important yet relatively unexplored topic in the literature (Andres and Griffin 2002; Lindsay and Steger 1993). To date, most empirical studies have assessed the effects of executive power on outcome measures, such as congressional support scores or presidential success as defined by rollcall votes. The scholarly focus of “who wins” on such outcome measures can be quite misleading, not only because these measures tend to capture only one stage of congressional-executive bargaining,

So You Want Tenure? Factors Affecting Tenure Decisions in Political Science Departments

This article investigates the variables that affect the award of tenure in political science departments in the United States. We examined two dependent variables: (1) whether a department has denied tenure in the past five years, and (2) whether a positive departmental tenure recommendation has been reversed by higher college or university authorities during the same period of time. Five clusters of independent variables were evaluated: (1) college/university and departmental characteristics, (2) the procedures employed to evaluate tenure cases, (3) the instruments used to assess teaching, (4) service expectations, and (5) research and publication standards. We found that the most important factors affecting departmental decisions to deny tenure were whether teaching and substantive publications were treated as equally valuable qualifications, the number of articles a candidate published, and the candidates level of commitment to advising. Interestingly, reversal decisions by higher authorities were not strongly affected by any of the variables in the analysis.

Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism

Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senates role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first term of George W. Bush (2001— 2005). Our evidence confirms that even recent studies showing greater Senate influence on treaty-making significantly underestimate the upper chambers role in defining US commitments abroad. Rather than killing treaties with a formal floor vote, the Senate exerts influence at the committee stage by refusing to act on controversial agreements negotiated by presidential administrations. President Bush has responded to such congressional oversight by establishing more international commitments through executive agreements rather than treaties, particularly when it comes to issues of security.

Fighting Fire With Water: Partisan Procedural Strategies and the Senate Appropriations Committee

While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within the Appropriations Committee itself. Table motions have become an increasingly partisan device used by the majority party to inhibit minority amending challenges. Indeed, table motions have clearly become the preferred strategy to defend appropriations legislation from attacks on the floor. In spite of the partisan conflict within the Appropriations Committee, we continue to find that committee members retain considerable institutional advantages in relation to nonmembers in affecting funding decisions on the Senate floor.

Keepers of the Covenant or Platonic Guardians? Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court

How do the justices of the Supreme Court make their decisions? How does the Supreme Court of the United States make its decisions? The answer to these questions may not be the same. In studying judicial decision making, there has been a disconnection between individual and institutional levels of analysis. Lifetime tenure insulates individual justices and permits them to act on their substantive preferences. At the same time, the Court lacks the “sword and purse” and must rely on the other branches to fund or implement its directives. This study develops an integrative model to explain Supreme Court decision making. Using constitutional civil liberties and civil rights cases in the 1953 to 2000 period, conditions favorable to the attitudinal model, we find that institutional decision making is a function of attitudinal, strategic, and legal factors.

See Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin Run? Party, Ideology, and the Influence of Female Role Models on Young Women:

Previous research suggests that women’s descriptive representation may have a role-model effect on young women, encouraging them to greater levels of political participation. Using data from the Monitoring the Future Survey and the National Survey of Political and Civic Engagement of Young People, we examine whether highly visible female role models like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin, and viable female candidates for governor and senator had a role-model effect on young women. At the national level, we find some evidence of a role-model effect resulting from the election of Speaker Pelosi and the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, but the effects are largely concentrated among young women who are Democratic and liberal. We find little evidence that Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential run had a role-model effect on young women, regardless of party or ideology. Our state-level analysis of viable female gubernatorial and senatorial candidates finds that role-model effects on young women and men are mediated in different ways by ideology and, to a lesser extent, party.