Passing the President's Program: Public Opinion and Presidential Influence in Congress

Abstract

Correlations between legislative support scores and presidential popularity do not accurately reflect the relationship between opinion and presidential influence in Congress. Presidents make strategic choices to expend their to obtain congressional approval of programmatic initiatives. Previous studies have ignored such choices as well as other features of the strategic environment which tend to lower the apparent legislative success rates of popular presidents. A model of presidential and congressional behavior is proposed, and it is estimated that a 1 percent increase in a president's support level increases the president's legislative approval rate by approximately 1 percent (holding program size fixed). Elections, it has long been recognized, do not provide U.S. presidents with clear policy mandates. In part this is because the voice of the electorate is often ambiguous. Elections are a good indicator of voters' general state of mind whether they are pleased or displeased by the overall course of government policy-but they give legislators little specific guidance on how existing programs should be changed or what new programs are needed. Presidents will read into their electoral majorities what they like, but Congress is under no obligation to take the same interpretation. The president's legislative program represents one interpretation of what the demands; the congressional response to it represents another. Political scientists have traditionally shown a healthy skepticism toward the claims of congressmen that they merely give the what it wants, but this impulse does exist and is reinforced by certain institutional arrangements - most notably, but not exclusively, elections. In this paper we will try to determine how and to what extent the fate of the president's legislative program rests on opinion. We argue that previous studies have understated the extent to which congressional support of presidential policy initiatives depends on the president's standing, but have also neglected some of the perils inherent in a presidential leadership style that rests on the president's personal popularity. Much of the argument is familiar. Twenty years ago Richard Neustadt (1955) identified public prestige as a source of presidential influence in Congress. While Neustadt (1980) has pointed out that support for a president operates mostly in the background as a conditioner, not the determinant of what