Institutional Foundations of the President’s Issue Agenda

Abstract

In this study, we focus on an unresolved problem in our understanding of the construction of the presidential issue agenda: how to reconcile the president’s responsiveness to public opinion with his institutionalized electoral cycle. We argue that the president’s responsiveness is contingent: that the president allocates agenda space to discretionary issues when the strength of public opinion is high and the electoral cycle dictates responsiveness. We provide evidence for this claim by simultaneously addressing the potential influence of other relevant political actors, intra-administration considerations, and objective phenomena in the case of the president’s attention to crime issues over the second half of the twentieth century. Our statistical models show that while the president also responds to cues from other political actors, executive attention to public opinion depends on the president’s electoral circumstances. At the same time, because crime is a discretionary issue, we also find that presidents adjust their agenda to address competing domestic priorities.