Jeffrey S. Peake

The Legislative Impact of Divided Government

Theory: The best test of the impact of divided government on legislative gridlock is to examine seriously considered, potentially important legislation that failed to pass under conditions of divided and unified government. To do so requires separate analyses of legislation the president opposes and supports. Hypotheses: Divided government will be associated with the president opposing more legislation and with more legislation the president opposes failing to pass. It will not be associated with the president supporting less legislation or with more legislation the president supports failing to pass. Important legislation is more likely to fail to pass under divided government. Methods: We used regression analysis of the failure of legislation to pass and the relative success of legislation over the 1947-92 period. Results: Presidents oppose significant legislation more often under divided government, and much more important legislation fails to pass under divided government than under unified government. Furthermore, the odds of important legislation failing to pass are considerably greater under divided government. However, there seems to be no relationship between divided government and the amount of significant legislation the administration supports or that passes.

The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting

Theoretical and empirical work on public policy agenda setting has ignored foreign policy. We develop a theory of foreign policy agenda setting and test the implications using time-series vector autoregression and Box-Tiao (1975) impact assessment methods. We theorize an economy of attention to foreign policy issues driven by issue inertia, events external to U.S. domestic institutions, as well as systemic attention to particular issues. We also theorize that the economy of attention is affected by a law of scarcity and the rise and fall of events in competing issue areas. Using measures of presidential and media attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict, we show that presidential and media attentions respond to issue inertia and exogenous events in both primary and competing issue areas. Media attention also affects presidential attention, but the president does not affect issue attention by the media.

Presidential Agenda Setting in Foreign Policy

The traditional model of agenda setting places the Presidency as the primary agenda setter in American politics, particularly in foreign policy. Recent challenges to the traditional model argue that the Presidents foreign policy agenda is inherently responsive to media coverage and international events (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998). These studies rely on examinations of a restricted set of highly salient and vitally important foreign policy issues and find limited presidential influence on the foreign policy agenda. I extend the previous analyses of foreign policy agenda setting by examining foreign policy issues that are less salient and arguably less vital to American national security interests. The extended analysis suggests that Presidents have greater influence on the agendas of the media and Congress than recent research suggests. When systemic attention to an issue is generally light and the President makes the issue a policy priority, presidential success in setting the agenda increases.

Presidents and the Economic Agenda

The president’s ability to influence the national policy agenda is an important component of presidential power. Although some maintain that presidents are favorably situated to set agendas, others demonstrate that the president’s agenda-setting skills vary considerably by policy area. What is more, scholars have yet to examine the impact presidents have had focusing attention on the economy, an issue of vital importance to their political success. Extending previous research on presidential agenda setting that did not address economic policy (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998), we test the impact that the president’s public statements on the economy have on media and congressional attention to the economy. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR), we demonstrate that although presidents have some influence over the economic agenda, presidents are primarily responsive to media coverage of the economy.

The Agenda-Setting Impact of Major Presidential TV Addresses

The ability to set the national agenda is an important power of the modern presidency. Policy-specific, nationally televised speeches provide presidents with the best rhetorical opportunity to set the national agenda; however, research on presidential agenda setting has not systematically explored their effects. Although the conventional understanding of presidential agenda setting suggests that presidents should be able to focus media attention through televised addresses, research paints a mixed picture of the presidents ability to do so. We answer the following questions: Are televised presidential speeches effective in increasing news coverage of presidential priorities? And what explains the likelihood that a national address will significantly increase media attention? We find that 35% of the presidents national addresses across four policy areas increase media attention in the shortterm, with only 10% of the speeches in our sample increasing media attention beyond the month of the speech. We also find that the likelihood that a national address will increase media attention hinges on previous media attention, public concern, and, to a lesser extent, the presidents approval ratings.

Presidents and Front-page News: How America's Newspapers Cover the Bush Administration

Presidency and political communication scholars have given scant attention to how local news media cover the presidency. The author offers a comparative study of coverage of the Bush presidency on the front pages of 100 American newspapers during a five-month period in 2006. Sociological and economic theories predict slanted coverage of national politics by Americas newspapers, despite journalistic professional norms to the contrary.The analyses suggest there is a slant to the coverage of President Bush that is partly explained by the political leanings of the newspaper and its audience. Newspapers that endorsed Bushs reelection in 2004 tended to write more favorable headlines, and newspapers in states where Democrats are strong politically tended to write less favorable headlines.

The Dynamics of Diversion: The Domestic Implications of Presidential Use of Force

Several studies report evidence of diversionary behavior by presidents, while others dispute findings that suggest domestic politics are part of the use of force decision calculus. We argue that previous studies of U.S. force short of war have failed to articulate what diversion actually means. We approach this important debate from a perspective that brings to bear presidential agenda-setting theory. Rather than treating the use of force solely as a dependent variable, we assess whether the use of force diverts attention by modeling the percent of the American public identifying the economy as the nations most important problem. We also include presidential approval in the model. We treat the public opinion measures as endogenous variables that may or may not affect the decision to use force. We employ Vector Autoregression (VAR) methods to evaluate the causal direction of force and public opinion while controlling for the state of the economy and war. VAR is a multiple-lagged time-series approach that allows us to test a variety of hypotheses derived from diversionary and agenda-setting theory. Our results indicate that uses of force by the president have a notable agenda-setting effect, shifting public attention away from the economy. The shift in attention also causes a long-term effect on the presidents public-approval rating.

Testing the Saturday Night Live Hypothesis: Fairness and Bias in Newspaper Coverage of Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign

Studies of press coverage afforded women running for public office indicate that historically, women tend to garner less coverage overall and that the coverage they do receive tends to focus disproportionately on their appearance, personality, and family status at the expense of their qualifications and issue positions. This study examines newspaper coverage of U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clintons campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Notably, Clinton did not allege that she was receiving too little coverage or coverage that focused disproportionately on her clothing or appearance. Rather, she charged that she was being treated negatively relative to her chief rival, U.S. Senator Barack Obama. More than 6,000 articles from 25 leading newspapers from across the country were content-coded from Labor Day through Super Tuesday in order to assess Clintons coverage on two dimensions: traditional and tonal. On a range of traditional indicators of bias, such as coverage amount and mentions of candidate appearance, Clintons coverage clearly broke established patterns typically afforded women presidential candidates. However, the tone of Clintons coverage was decidedly negative relative to her male competitors. Normative implications of this mixed bag of fairness and bias are discussed.

When the President Comes to Town Examining Local Newspaper Coverage of Domestic Presidential Travel

Domestic travel has become a common practice for modern presidents. Many claim local media cover these presidential trips more extensively and positively than the national media, yet no one has examined the validity of this assumption. We begin this examination with a study of local and national newspaper coverage of President George W. Bush’s 2001 domestic travel. Our findings confirm that the local press covers presidential domestic trips both more comprehensively and favorably than the national press. We also analyze variations in local newspaper coverage of presidential visits, finding that the most important factor influencing both the amount and tone of such coverage is the level of presidential support within a community. Other factors discovered to affect either the amount or tone of local coverage include the availability of adversarial sources, whether a newspaper has a Democratic editorial bent, and whether a visit occurred after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Presidential Influence Over the Systemic Agenda

One of the most widely accepted sources of presidential power is agenda setting. Being able to affect the medias agenda on key issues–influencing the systemic agenda and expanding the scope of conflict–has enormous consequences for the presidents ability to govern effectively. Yet the literature to date has not conclusively determined the extent to which presidents consistently set agendas, especially over the media, because it has not explicitly considered variation in agenda setting influence by policy type. For these reasons, we test whether presidential public statements have increased the medias attention to three policy areas. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis, we demonstrate that presidents have some influence over the systemic agenda, at least in the short term, with policy type being an important predictor of presidential influence. Understanding when and why presidents may or may not be successful agenda setters is crucial to explaining the varying legislative impacts of presidential speech making.