Updating Presidential Leverage: Comparing Measures of Leverage from Kennedy to Trump

Abstract

This article seeks to accomplish two things. First, I update the Index of Presidential Leverage (IPL) published in Presidential Leverage (Ponder 2018), which analyzed presidential action from Kennedy to the end of Obama’s first term. This article brings the analysis through the end of the Trump administration and replicates the book’s analysis of executive orders to determine if that measure still exhibits explanatory capacity. Second, I consider two alternative measures of presidential leverage that tap the same idea of the IPL, which is presidential approval in an institutional context (namely, public approval of Congress and public trust in Congress). The article employs these alternative measures in a preliminary attempt to determine the efficacy of the concept of presidential leverage across different measures. I find that the concept of presidential leverage operationalized in these various ways is not only robust, but as was the case in the original analysis, outperforms analyses using raw presidential approval in isolation. Thus, the concept of presidential leverage is shown to be applicable across various measurement strategies. The robustness of the presidential leverage measure is important because it undergirds the idea that presidential approval in context, rather than simply as a stand-alone indicator, provides nuance and explanatory power to the study of presidential action that may be missed otherwise.