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.     

Presidential personnel innovation for Presidential appointees in Korea: toward an institutional Presidency

Most presidents may come to realise that a successful individual, gifted though he may be, cannot do everything himself. The president must be assisted by a capable staff and trusted advisors. They are key to policy effectiveness. Surprisingly, in Korea, the past record of presidential performances in these respects has been less than exemplary. Under the current incumbency President Roh (2003–2008), there is accordingly growing public expectation that improvements might take place in his nascent administration. Accordingly, this article assesses the personnel problems of Presidential appointees in the previous as well as the current administration. After a brief but critical examination of the personnel selection system, it considers the ongoing efforts to undertake reform and its innovative direction. In conclusion, it observes that whilst the personnel system for merit‐based civil servants is reasonably well established in the Korean government, the presidential personnel system for political appointments is seriously underdeveloped. The author accordingly suggests some improvements of the system for ‘spoils‐based’ appointees. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The 2000 American Presidential Election

Abstract

The 2000 Presidential election was one of the longest, most expensive and closest in American history. It was the Presidential election that exposed the flaws (or genius) of the electoral college system, demonstrated the imperfections of media dependency on exit polls and quick election calling, and showed how a third party candidate with just two percent of the popular vote could make the difference in the crucial state of Florida. Democrats lost states they should have won; Republicans lost every big city and most of their suburbs; and the Florida election came down to a five-to-four muddled decision by the Supreme Court. Americans collectively learned a great civics lesson: that even in a bitter, controversial contest, our candidates accept defeat graciously; the simple act of voting is not so simple; and that for all its shortcomings, the electoral college did work.     

Presidential and Congressional Vote-Share Equations

Three vote-share equations are estimated and analyzed in this article, one for presidential elections, one for on-term House elections, and one for midterm House elections. The sample period is 1916–2006. Considering the three equations together allows one to test whether the same economic variables affect each and to examine various serial correlation and coattail possibilities. The main conclusions are (1) there is strong evidence that the economy affects all three vote shares and in remarkably similar ways; (2) there is no evidence of any presidential coattail effects on the on-term House elections; (3) there is positive serial correlation in the House vote, which likely reflects a positive incumbency effect for elected representatives; and (4) the presidential vote share has a negative effect on the next midterm House vote share, which is likely explained by a balance argument.     

Presidential Coattails and Legislative Fragmentation

Considerable evidence suggests that legislative fragmentation can negatively affect the survival of democratic presidential regimes. While there is a vast literature examining the determinants of legislative fragmentation, one factor that has traditionally been overlooked is the impact of presidential elections. Do presidential elections increase or decrease legislative fragmentation? Does it matter if presidents are elected by plurality rule or by runoff? Using a new dataset that covers all democratic legislative and presidential elections between 1946 and 2000, I find that presidential coattails can reduce, increase, or have no effect on legislative fragmentation depending on the number of presidential candidates. I also find strong evidence that social heterogeneity increases the number of presidential candidates when runoff systems are employed. Taken together, these results suggest that the widespread adoption of runoffs by newly democratic presidential regimes will likely increase legislative fragmentation, thereby putting their democratic survival at increased risk.     

Political Learning from Presidential Debates

This paper focuses on an important aspect of presidential debates: the degree to which voters are able to glean candidate information from them. Using an open-ended measure of candidate information, the analysis tests hypotheses concerning the impact of debates on information acquisition among the mass public for all debates from 1976 to 1996. The findings indicate that people do learn from debates and that learning is affected by the context in which the information is encountered. Specifically, early debates generate more learning than do subsequent debates, and the public tends to learn more about candidates with whom they are relatively unfamiliar than about better-known candidates.     

Presidential Press Conferences over Time

Scholars have debated whether the president's public activities are a function of political and economic factors (presidency-centered variables) or individual presidents and their administration's tendencies (president-centered variables). This article examines one of the only quantitative studies that assesses the influence of these variables on presidential press conferences over time. I replicate this study (Hager and Sullivan 1994) and find the authors' conclusions to be misleading. I then present methodologically correct analyses that show—consistent with the qualitative evidence—that the behavior of individual presidents offers the best explanation of press conferences over time.     

Issue Convergence in Presidential Campaigns

This effort seeks to expand our understanding of the supply-side of the campaign process by investigating how candidate competition for agenda control affects occurrences of issue convergence (the discussion of the same issues by competing candidates) in campaigns for the presidency. More specifically, I integrate hypotheses suggested by extant literature into a framework that captures the factors that motivate presidential candidates selection of issues and the factors that affect their decisions to address issues also discussed by their opponents. These hypotheses are tested with duration analysis and data gathered from all available campaign advertisements produced by candidates competing in the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections. The results indicate that occurrences of issue convergences are quite frequent in presidential campaigns and that candidates decisions to address the same issues are affected by an issues saliency and partisan ownership, as well by changes in the campaign environment.     

Presidential Environmental Appointees in Comparative Perspective

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees' frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high-level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top-tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high-level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees' political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.