Determinants of presidents’ legislative support in the House, 1949–1995

Abstract

This paper has several purposes. First, it illustrates the changing nature of research on presidential–congressional relations. In general, scholarship has moved away from viewing the president as the dominant actor in the relationship, toward one of congressional influence, and ultimately toward emphasizing more equal power sharing between the two institutions. Second, we discuss our use of the most widely used measures of such relationships, presidents’ legislative support and success and our rationale for choosing the former. Third, we introduce three broad environments of presidential–congressional relations in order to explain such support from what we call a multiple perspectives approach. We find that variables from each of the three environments are important in explaining presidential support in the House. Fourth, we control for policy areas using the two presidencies typology and observe significant differences in support by domestic and foreign policy. Our multivariate two stage least squares (2SLS) analysis explains considerable variance in support across all three models. Finally, we explicate how our approach improves our understanding of this important presidential–congressional interaction.