William G. Howell

The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the presidents party represent them.

Unilateral Action and Presidential Power: A Theory

In this article, the authors explore a basis for presidential power that has gone largely unappreciated to this point but that has become so pivotal to presidential leadership that it virtually defines what is distinctively modern about the modern presidency. This is the presidents formal capacity to act unilaterally and thus to make law on his own. The purpose of the article is to outline a theory of this aspect of presidential power. The authors argue that the presidents powers of unilateral action are a force in American politics precisely because they are not specified in the Constitution. They derive their strength and resilience from the ambiguity of the contract. The authors also argue that presidents have incentives to push this ambiguity relentlessly to expand their own powers—and that, for reasons rooted in the nature of their institutions, neither Congress nor the courts are likely to stop them.

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.

Presidents, Congress, and the Use of Force

Scholars have long debated the relative influence of domestic and international factors on the presidential use of force. On one matter, however, consensus reigns: the U.S. Congress is presumed irrelevant. This presumption, we demonstrate, does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Using a variety of measures and models, we show a clear connection between the partisan composition of Congress and the quarterly frequency of major uses of force between 1945 and 2000; we do not find any congressional influence, however, on minor uses of force. We recommend that the quantitative use-of-force literature in international relations begin to take seriously theories of domestic political institutions, partisanship, and interbranch relations that have been developed within American politics.We thank the Center for American Political Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for financial support; and Doug Kriner, Matthew Scherbarth, and Kevin Warnke for research assistance. David Canon, Matt Dickinson, Ben Fordham, David Lewis, and Alastair Smith provided helpful feedback. We also benefited from seminars at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Harvard University, Ohio State University, and Emory University. Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback. Standard disclaimers apply.

Agencies by Presidential Design

Scholars have largely ignored one of the most important ways in which presidents influence the administrative state in the modern era, that is, by creating administrative agencies through executive action. Because they can act unilaterally, presidents alter the kinds of administrative agencies that are created and the control they wield over the federal bureaucracy. We analyze the 425 agencies established between 1946 and 1995 and find that agencies created by administrative action are significantly less insulated from presidential control than are agencies created through legislation. We also find that the ease of congressional legislative action is a significant predictor of the number of agencies created by executive action. We conclude that the very institutional factors that make it harder for Congress to legislate provide presidents new opportunities to create administrative agencies on their own, and to design them in ways that maximize executive control.

Efficiency, Bias, and Classification Schemes A Response to Alan B. Krueger and Pei Zhu

When estimating voucher impacts on test scores in the New York City randomized field trial (RFT) for African Americans (defined either by mother’s ethnicity, parental caretaker, mother and father’s ethnicity, or mother or father’s ethnicity), results remain significantly positive, even when models include students for whom no baseline test scores are available. These results obtain as long as one estimates impacts precisely by controlling for baseline test scores for those students who have them. Positive impacts fall below conventional levels of significance only when analysts needlessly drop baseline test score information or add numerous covariates that neither singly nor together enhance the precision of the estimates. When results differ for those with and without baseline scores, analysts should give greater weight to those for whom one has stronger evidence that the RFT has not been contaminated. Due to space limitations imposed by the editors, this article replies to the original Krueger and Zhu (KZ) article but not to their rejoinder. Our reply to the rejoinder may be found at www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/. There, we discuss the trivial nature of the differences between findings reported below and those in KZ’s replication, our offer to check the replication effort to see how differences could have arisen, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) definition of “Black (non-Hispanic),” and other issues raised in their rejoinder.

Uses of Theory in Randomized Field Trials: Lessons from School Voucher Research on Disaggregation, Missing Data, and the Generalization of Findings

By design, randomized field trials (RFTs) avoid many of the problems that plague observational studies, foremost among them being the introduction of selection biases. In practice, however, RFTs regularly confront other difficulties, such as chance differences between treatment and control groups and attrition from the study. To address these issues, baseline data on the variable of primary interest are essential. Theory also aids the analytic process, identifying ways in which data should be disaggregated and determining the generalizability of the findings uncovered. Theory and testing are not neatly divided enterprises. Theory informs the initial design whereas empirical findings from RFTs motivate analysts to update and occasionally abandon their theoretical priors.

The hemophagocytic syndrome: titrating continuous hemofiltration to the degree of lactic acidosis.

In 3 cases of severe multiple organ failure due to hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) in children, the authors demonstrate the utility of continuous hemofiltration in attenuating the consequences of excess cytokine activity, with therapy titrated to the degree of lactic acidosis. HLH was diagnosed in 3 encephalopathic children with multiple organ failure, elevated ferritin (49,396–237,582 pmol/L; or 21,983–105,733 ng/mL), elevated serum triglyceride, and depressed cell lines. One had a known malignancy, one had EBV-associated lymphoproliferative disease, and one was previously healthy. Continuous hemofiltration was initiated, with the ultrafiltrate production rate and countercurrent dialysate flow titrated to metabolic acidosis as reflected by the serum lactate (maximum 3.5 mmol/L or 31.6 mg/dL). Hemofiltration was titrated upward until lactic acidosis resolved, through clearance of lactate or interruption of excess cytokine-driven activity; maximum prescription was 2000 mL/h ultrafiltrate production plus 2500 mL/h dialysate flow. Stability was achieved with hemofiltration, then substantial resolution occurred with treatment according to the HLH-94 protocol (dexamethasone, cyclosporin, VP-16, intrathecal methotrexate). One child succumbed to candidiasis. Another made a full recovery. A third succumbed to his primary malignancy. HLH should be suspected in unexplained or unresolving multiple organ failure. Titration of hemofiltration based on measurable parameters of cellular metabolism (e.g., lactate, base deficit) may stabilize the child with metabolic acidosis long enough to allow proper diagnosis and institution of definitive therapy. Hemofiltration is not a panacea but rather a stabilizing mechanism, with poorly understood effects on interstitial water and solute flux, that facilitates recovery over weeks, not days.

Distributive Politics and Legislator Ideology

This article examines the relationship between legislative centrism (or conversely, extremism) and the distribution of federal outlays. A substantial body of theoretical work suggests that legislators closer to the chamber median are more attractive and willing candidates to engage in vote buying and hence should receive a disproportionate share of distributive benefits. We investigate this prediction empirically with panel data covering 27 years of federal outlays, using a research design that exploits elections in other districts to identify changes in the relative ideological position of individual legislators. We find a 7% decrease in outlays associated with a one standard-deviation increase in a member’s ideological distance from the median voter. We find the effect of exogenous increases in legislative extremism on outlays to be robust across a wide variety of specifications, and we take special care to distinguish this effect from those induced by potentially confounding covariates, most notably majority party status.

Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. By William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

more familiar ground. One may not be convinced that the novel theory advanced fully explains all the variation, but it is a compelling account. For my own taste, the risks and benefits of judicial extraterritoriality could have been exploredmore. But these are quibbles, andminor ones at that. As awhole, the book is a thoughtful, insightful, and welcome entry in a growing and important area. AUSTEN PARRISH Indiana University Maurer School of Law