Succession effects in presidential elections

What is the impact of ex-presidents on the electoral performance of their party's successor candidates for the office and how long after a president has left office are successor effects electorally significant? Mattei and Weisberg (1994) argue that successor effects are large primarily when the vice president runs for office immediately at the end of the term of the president under whom they served. Timeliness and the association between presidents and their vice presidents account for succession effects. This paper challenges the Mattei-Weisberg successor effects perspective, arguing that significant successor effects can be possible for non-vice presidential candidates and long after a president has left office. Using American National Election Study data, I add numerous successions to those Mattei and Weisberg investigated. Analysis finds that succession effects apply to non-vice presidential candidates. Further, some ex-presidents may influence voting decisions long after they left office. There is also a hint in these data that succession effects have climbed over time, because as polarization has increased, the linkage between presidents and their parties has tightened.     

Comparative presidencies: The inadequacy of the presidential, semi-presidential and parliamentary distinction

Abstract. The role of the president is presumed to vary amongst presidential, semi-presidential and parliamentary systems. However, there are a variety of subtypes within semi-presidential systems. Debate often hinges on the prime minister and government, and to whom they are more accountable. However, the accountability of prime ministers and governments to presidents can be rather 'fuzzy'. This article looks through the prism of the president rather than that of the government. After examining definitions of presidential, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems, several dispositional categories of political regimes will be established. Then presidential power will be assessed through a series of dichotomous measures, and for all electoral democracies with a president. Finally, the character of each category will be assessed. The concept of 'semi-presidentialism' is rejected in favour of more meaningful labels: presidential systems, parliamentary systems with presidential dominance, parliamentary systems with a presidential corrective and parliamentary systems with figurehead presidents.     

Congress and Administrative Policymaking: Identifying Congressional Veto Power

The ability of presidents to unilaterally shape administrative policymaking challenges a foundation of congressional power: Rarely can Congress statutorily veto administrative actions over presidential opposition. Consequently, Congress has turned to other means of influence, including the appropriations and oversight processes, although questions remain about the degree to which they have been effective. To investigate, I study a spatial model of administrative policymaking that assumes Congress can execute a legislative veto, as well as a baseline model in which congressional influence requires a coalition with the president. I compare the two models and develop empirical tests that exploit instances when their implications differ. Applying the tests to data on federal regulatory policymaking shows consistent evidence that Congress exerts veto power over administrative activity, even over those actions endorsed by the president. I conclude by discussing some broader implications, including the extent to which existing studies understate the constraints on presidential power.     

Getting Dirty-Minded: Implementing Presidential Policy Agendas Administratively

With polarization in Congress persistent, with staggering issues and international threats facing the nation, and with fiscal stress an enduring fact of life, presidents have for decades turned to the tools of the administrative presidency to advance and implement their policy agendas. As the Barack Obama administration completed its first six months in office amid great challenges and hopes, the president was no exception in counting on his appointees to wield the tools of the administrative presidency to advance his protean policy agenda for America. This essay offers 10 research-based lessons for new appointees charged with advancing presidential agendas administratively to ponder as they do so.     

Presidential prototypes

The American public expresses considerable consensus on those qualities of character and performance indispensable to a modern president. Contrary to expectations, however, such conceptions of an ideal president (or presidential prototypes) generally failed to provide standards by which actual presidential candidates were evaluated. Across five complementary tests, qualities that citizens thought important for an ideal president counted no more heavily in their evaluations of presidential hopefuls than did qualities thought less important—with one consistent and striking exception. Conceptions of an ideal president did set the standards by which the incumbent president was evaluated, and quite powerfully so. In the final section of the paper, we provide several interpretations of these results, suggest how public conceptions of an ideal president are acquired, and speculate about processes of presidential appraisal.     

The Elusive Search for Presidential Power

Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item‐response model to best measure executive‐order significance; and (3) comparing competing theoretical models to data for 1947–2002. Theoretically, we show that legislative preferences may impact unilateral actions differently than previously thought and indicate how parties may be influential. Empirically, a model where the president is responsive to the chamber's majority‐party median fits the data better than models assuming responsiveness to the chamber median or no presidential acquiescence. Unilateral action appears not tantamount to presidential power, as evidence implies that legislative parties, or the judicial actors enforcing their will, are key conditioning factors.     

Recommendations for an Effective 2008 Transition

In response to Martha Joynt Kumar's essay on maximizing presidential transitions while minimizing hazards, this essay presents additional practical recommendations, framed within the context of the upcoming presidential transition.     

Presidential coattails in Taiwan: An analysis of voter- and candidate-specific data

Considerable empirical evidence demonstrates presidential coattail effects in elections held in the US. Employing hybrid logit and mixed logit models that analyze data collected from voters and candidates in Taiwan, this study examines coattail effects in a non-American setting. The findings show that presidential coattails exert powerful influences on Taiwanese citizens' vote choices and take the form of conversion. Contrary to American experiences, the mediating role of incumbency is quite minimal. Presidential coattails thus provide the president with an important source of influence in the legislative body. The linkage between presidential and legislative politics through coattails can help the operation of Taiwan's democratic institutions. Future research on voting behavior needs to consider voter characteristics as well as candidate attributes.     

The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule

How can autocrats be restrained from rigging elections when they hold a huge military advantage over their opponents? This article suggests that even when opposition parties have no military capacity to win a revolt, opposition unity and a consequent threat of massive civil disobedience can compel autocrats to hold clean elections and leave office by triggering splits within the state apparatus and the defection of the armed forces. Opposition unity can be elite‐driven, when parties unite prior to elections to endorse a common presidential candidate, or voter‐driven, when elites stand divided at the polls and voters spontaneously rebel against fraud. Moreover, the article identifies some conditions under which autocrats will tie their hands willingly not to commit fraud by delegating power to an independent electoral commission. The article develops these ideas through a formal game and the discussion of various case studies.     

Make It Rain? Retrospection and the Attentive Electorate in the Context of Natural Disasters

Are election outcomes driven by events beyond the control of politicians? Democratic accountability requires that voters make reasonable evaluations of incumbents. Although natural disasters are beyond human control, the response to these events is the responsibility of elected officials. In a county‐level analysis of gubernatorial and presidential elections from 1970 to 2006, we examine the effects of weather events and governmental responses. We find that electorates punish presidents and governors for severe weather damage. However, we find that these effects are dwarfed by the response of attentive electorates to the actions of their officials. When the president rejects a request by the governor for federal assistance, the president is punished and the governor is rewarded at the polls. The electorate is able to separate random events from governmental responses and attribute actions based on the defined roles of these two politicians.     

The White House as a Black Box: Oral History and the Problem of Evidence in Presidential Studies

Scholars who study the American presidency usually have to rely on indirect evidence for understanding the internal operations of the 'black box' that is a contemporaneous White House. Most of the direct evidence about White House behavior becomes available only after a president has left office, when confidential communications are opened to the public by the presidential libraries. In recent years, however, such direct evidence has become increasingly inaccessible, because of changes in the record-keeping habits of senior executive branch officials and because of the politics of archival release. This article explores the nature and extent of these problems, and how elite oral history interviewing can compensate for them. It further examines the strengths and weaknesses of oral history as a means of learning about the usually hidden workings of the American presidency.     

Testing a Predictive Model of Voter Behavior on the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Utilizing a predictive model of voter behavior, this study identified the motivations behind a sample of voters who cast a ballot for George W. Bush and AI Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. The motivations of the voters were differentiated on the basis of the “value” they sought in a president. In other words, just as companies in the “commercial marketplace” have to create value to attract customers, so does a candidate in the “political marketplace” who is seeking to carve out a niche for himself that separates him from his competition. Pairwise discriminant analysis is used to identify the motivations behind the choice behavior of voters at both the candidate and party level. The results reveal the complimentary roles that the political party and each candidate's campaign organization played in their respective marketing strategies.     

Congressional responsiveness to presidential popularity: The electoral context

A number of recent studies have reported that the influence of the president's public approval rating on congressional support is not substantial. We hypothesize that this unexpected finding might be the result of the inappropriate application of an approval-driven model of legislative voting to the entire Congress. Specifically, we argue that members from certain kinds of electoral contexts—constituencies where the president's, or their own, electoral standing is in doubt—should be especially likely to vary their support for the president with changes in his approval rating. Although the patterns of presidential support scores between 1977 and 1991 do not confirm our specific hypotheses, they do suggest that the electoral context from which a legislator emerges does shape his or her responsiveness to changes in national presidential approval.     

Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism

This article develops a theory of presidential unilateralism in which both ideological divergence with Congress and legislative capacity influence the president's use of executive orders. We argue that when Congress is less capable of constraining the executive, the president will issue more executive orders during periods of divided government. Conversely, in periods of high legislative capacity, the president is less likely to issue executive orders when faced with an opposed Congress. Based on an examination of institutional changes, we identify years prior to the mid‐1940s as characterized by low congressional capacity and the subsequent period as characterized by high capacity. Testing the theory between 1905 and 2013, we find strong support for these predictions and demonstrate that legislative capacity conditions the role of ideological disagreement in shaping presidential action. Overall, this article deepens our current understanding of the dynamics of separation‐of‐powers politics and the limits of executive power.     

The June 2015 legislative election in Turkey

The Republic of Turkey held its first presidential election, which employed a universal suffrage based on popular vote, on 10 August 2014. Unlike most of the countries organizing separate ballots for electing the president and the MPs, Turkey did not hold both elections on the same day. Instead, the subsequent parliamentary election would be held ten months later, i.e. on 7 June 2015. The reason behind this is not only due to the differences of the term lengths between parliament and the President (which are four and five years respectively), but also the peculiarity in the inclusion of a “presidential element” (a president elected by popular vote) into a political regime which must still be seen as a parliamentary system. This oddness arose from the political crisis in 2007.     

Institutions and the stabilization of party systems in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe

Most explanations of party system stability focus on the strength of mass-elite linkages. We highlight the role of institutions, focusing on how electoral rules and elected institutions, especially the presidency, impact elites' incentives to coordinate on a stable set of parties or to form new parties, thus affecting electoral volatility. Using Central and Eastern European elections data, we find that directly elected presidents increase volatility and that presidential power magnifies this effect. Absent a directly elected president, high district magnitude is associated with increased volatility, but district magnitude dampens the impact of an elected president on volatility; hence, our findings underscore the interactive impact of institutions on party systems. We also find evidence that bicameralism and concurrence of presidential and parliamentary elections decrease electoral volatility. Our model not only explains persistently high electoral volatility in Eastern Europe, but the extreme stability of Western European party systems.     

Shattered expectations: Public responses to “out-of-character” presidential actions

Six alternative hypotheses about public responses to out-of-character presidential actions were tested in an experiment that manipulated both the president's preexisting policy position (a hawkish or a dovish stance in international affairs) and the nature of his action in an international crisis (hawkish versus dovish). In addition, subjects themselves were classified as hawks or doves. Approval of the president and of his response to the crisis was a complex function of the policy views of the subject and the consistency of the president's action with his past record. Doves supported presidents and actions that were compatible with their own dovish leanings but resented a dovish president who behaved hawkishly, generally confirming the view that similarity breeds attraction. By contrast, hawks were willing to tolerate dovish behavior if it was undertaken by a hawk, supporting the expectation that out-of-character actions are uniquely capable of disarming would-be opponents. For neither hawkish nor dovish presidents were these findings consistent with the waffling interpretation, which holds that inconsistency per se is downgraded. Compared to presidents whose actions were consistent with their previous beliefs, out-of-character presidents were preceived as more changeable, in both positive and negative senses; were believed to have disliked doing what they had done; and were judged to have been relatively uninfluenced by internal causes.     

The Strategic Importance of State-Level Factors in Presidential Elections

While political scientists usually rely on national models ofpresidential elections, the candidates and their campaign staffstend to focus on state-by-state strategies. This study testshypotheses that presidential candidates and their parties canincrease their support in specific states through the strategicselection of their national-party convention sites and theirvice-presidential running mates. This study also assesses thecommon assertion that candidates receive an electoral boostin states with incumbent governors from the same party. Utilizinga normed model of the presidential vote in the states that servesas a baseline for assessing the importance of these strategicfactors, the study finds that presidential and vice-presidentialcandidates receive an electoral advantage in their home statesand regions. Generally, parties do not derive significant electoralbenefits in states selected to host the national conventionor those in which they control the governorship. Important differencesare found over time and between the two political parties.     

“Therefore,Get Wisdom”: What Should the President Know,and How Can He Know It?

The literature on the U.S. presidency offers analysis of how the presidential advice and information support function has been performed. Some studies go further to suggest certain principles for designing the advice- and information-giving process involved in presidential decision making, along with organizational features to implement such principles. A well-established principle, based on comparative case studies, is that presidents should institutionalize distrust. Implementation of this principle usually involves channeling competing options, along with supporting information, to the Oval Office before a president becomes committed to a course of action or policy choice. In designing how the presidential support function is to operate, the advantages and disadvantages of the institutionalized distrust principle should be carefully examined, taking into account circumstantial conditions. This article examines this practical issue from the perspective of a historically oriented presidency scholar, writing during the transition to the Barack Obama administration.     

The Prime Minister's Office in France: A Changing Role in a Semi-presidential System

In France since 1958, it is possible to identify three different types of political leadership: pure presidential government, limited presidential government, and prime ministerial government. These three leadership types are the result of the semi-presidential nature of the Fifth Republic. Under each of the three different forms of leadership, the role of the prime minister's office has changed. Following a brief presentation of the functions of the two components of the prime minister's office, his cabinet and the General Secretariat of the Government, the changes which the office has undergone are identified. While the role of both of the components of the office varied according to the different types of political leadership, it is concluded that, because of its distinctive structure and functions, the role of prime minister's cabinet has been subject to the greatest amount of variation.