Terry Sullivan

Presidential Persuasive Advantage: Strategy, Compliance Gaining, and Sequencing

This paper evaluates three general approaches to understanding presidential persuasion: strategic advantages, compliance gaining, and sequencing. It generates empirical expectations from these three approaches and then tests those against a database of recorded presidential persuasive encounters. The empirical results support the general strategic approach derived from political science suggesting that presidential leadership and persuasion differ substantially from other forms of persuasion and leadership. The empirical results do not support the other approaches.

Congressional Bargaining in Presidential Time: Give and Take, Anticipation, and the Constitutional Rationalization of Dead Ducks

This article introduces a simple theory of bargaining between presidents and members of Congress. Although it employs the analytics common to the typical “sequenced” theories, its approach places more emphasis on give and take, on less reliable information about intentions, and on more complex strategic considerations. The formal results highlight a presidential tenure effect, which in turn suggests four empirical expectations. The article then uses a unique empirical opportunity and data to assess and eventually validate expectations suggesting, in turn, that declining presidential tenure has a substantial effect on confidential bargaining, making coalition formation more erratic and costly. The article concludes with a theoretically informed discussion of how growing congressional seniority led to imposing the 20th and 22nd constitutional amendments.

Already buried and sinking fast presidential nominees and inquiry

Nothing challenges a new president’s team more than its need to fill out the executive. The White House 2001 Project played a significant role in this aspect of the presidential transition. Its White House Interview Program provided useful information gleaned from the rarified ranks of White House personnel, and its Nomination Forms Online Program detailed for the first time the exact particulars of the inquiry process. Already well under way by the time the Bush team began planning in 1999, the White House 2001 Project provided the Bush staff with details about two of the five great transition challenges affecting personnel: scale and complexity. Scale would present the Bush team with an organizational challenge—how to cope with the numbers flooding in? Complexity presented them with a managerial problem—how could they govern the process, especially its burdensome and intrusive inquiry? This paper describes the Bush team’s response to these challenges. It outlines the plans they made; in particular, their response to managing inquiry. During the past year, managing inquiry has become the object of reform efforts: Several reforms of the inquiry process have surfaced, including two separate changes taken up by the White House and at least one attempt to modify statutes.

Source Material: Presidential Recordings as Presidential Data: Assessing LBJ's Presidential Persuasive Attempts

This paper evaluates the usefulness of one currently available set of presidential recordings, those of President Lyndon Johnson. It demonstrates that these recordings constitute a sample of the president’s phone conversations and a reasonable representation of his contacts with others. It demonstrates the use of these data in assessing presidential persuasion and activities. It also suggests how popular presentations of these data, through other published means, have distorted the picture of presidential activities. If presidents lead by persuasion, then how they communicate their ideas, with whom they speak, about what, and to what effect constitute the central evidence of leaders in action. Yet, because the modern presidency remains a closed institution, our theoretical and empirical analyses of these critical persuasive exchanges rest on very scant evidence. The advent of portable recording devices, particularly the common dictation machine, created an unparalleled opportunity for presidents to record their activities. And for those wishing to become “archival participants” in the