Contemporary Presidency Research Articles

The Contemporary Presidency: Which presidents win more or less than expected in Congress? A Biden update

AbstractThis article updates estimates of which presidents won more or fewer votes than should be expected through President Biden's first two years in office. Multiple regression models estimating the effects of contextual variables (party, public approval, and party polarization plus interactions) establish a common baseline. Errors reveal which presidents won more or less than should be expected. Party polarization conditions relationships between party control and presidential success, but effects differ across chambers. As polarization increases in the House, majority presidents win more votes and minority presidents win fewer. The effects are less obvious in the Senate. Majority presidents win more than do minority presidents regardless of polarization. But polarization has led to a de facto 60‐vote Senate, as the minority party uses the supermajority required to invoke cloture to block confirmation of presidential appointments. Conclusions discuss limitations of roll‐call vote measures of presidential success.

Analysis of Academic Accomplishments and Demographics for Elected Presidents of National Orthopedic Surgery Organizations in the United States.

This study analyzed the academic accomplishments and demographics of elected presidents of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), American Orthopaedic Association (AOA), and American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (ABOS). Curriculum vitae and internet-based resources were reviewed to collect demographics, training characteristics, bibliometrics, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding of contemporary presidents (1990-2020). Eighty presidents were included. Most presidents were men (97%), and 4% of presidents were non-White (3% Black and 1% Hispanic). Few had an additional graduate degree (4% MBA, 3% MS, 1% MPH, 1% PhD). Ten orthopedic surgery residency programs trained 47% of these presidents. Most had fellowship training (59%), and the top three were hand surgery (11%), pediatric orthopedics (11%), and adult reconstruction (10%). Twenty-nine presidents (36%) participated in a traveling fellowship. The mean age at appointment was 58±5 years, which was 27 years since residency graduation. The mean h-index was 36±23, resulting from 150±126 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Orthopedic surgery presidents had more peer-reviewed manuscripts (150±126) than chairs (73±81) and program directors (27±32) (P<.001). AOA presidents had the highest mean h-index (42±21) compared with AAOS (38±27) and ABOS (25±16) presidents (P=.035). Nineteen presidents had NIH funding (24%). More presidents had NIH funding in the AOA (39%) and AAOS (25%) than the ABOS (0%) (P=.007). Orthopedic surgery presidents possess high levels of scholarly output. AOA presidents had the highest h-index values and prevalence of NIH funding. Females and racial minorities remain underrepresented at the highest levels of leadership. [Orthopedics. 2024;47(1):e45-e51.].

Public Opinion and Presidents’ Unilateral Policy Agendas

AbstractUnilateral power is an important source of policy change for contemporary presidents. In contrast with scholarship that examines the institutional constraints on presidents’ exercise of unilateral authority, I consider presidents’ unilateral behavior in a framework of political accountability. I argue that presidents have incentives to incorporate the public's policy priorities in their unilateral agendas. I examine this account using panel data on executive orders and public opinion across issue areas from 1954 to 2018. Across a variety of model specifications and estimation strategies, I find evidence that patterns of executive action reflect the public's policy priorities. Presidents issue greater numbers of unilateral directives on issues that gain public salience, particularly on issues that are more familiar to the public and when issuing more policy‐significant directives. These findings suggest that accountability mechanisms structure how presidents exercise unilateral power and have normative implications for considering presidential unilateralism in a separation‐of‐powers system.

Obama’s Party? An Examination of Whether a Reluctant Party Leader Transformed the Democratic Party in his Favor

Abstract We examine Barack Obama’s influence over the Democratic Party as an ex-president from three vantage points: his popularity among partisans, his control over party nominations, and his rhetorical influence over party platform stances. The findings are somewhat mixed. Compared with other contemporary presidents, Obama is far more popular among co-partisan voters. However, he has had only modest influence in presidential nominations, and, unlike other modern presidents, a waning influence on party platform stances. The findings are suggestive not only about Obama’s own interests but also about institutional constraints of modern presidents.

The Contemporary Presidency: “Was the “Deep State” Out to Get President Trump? Evidence from Campaign Contributions from F.B.I. Personnel”

AbstractWas the “deep state” truly “out to get” President Donald Trump during his presidency? This article addresses this question by examining the federal campaign contributing behavior of the deepest of allegedly “deep state” actors—employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.). Our findings, showing that F.B.I. employees contributed vanishingly low sums of money during the Trump years and that those who did make contributions tended to support President Trump, suggest that the F.B.I. was not out to destroy the president.

Contemporary Presidency: Going Public in an Era of Social Media: Tweets, Corrections, and Public Opinion

AbstractPresidents invariably use the bully pulpit to push a political agenda, but whether this leads to political success in advancing that agenda has long been the subject of debate. The increased reliance on social media has renewed that debate, particularly in light of new policies that flag or remove objectionable presidential content. This research conducts a survey experiment that evaluates the effect of presidential tweets on support for executive policies, including proposed unilateral action, and studies the effect of social media corrections of those tweets. We find little evidence that social media appeals move public opinion overall, although they do increase support among Republicans. Corrections generally worked as intended among Democrats but backfired among Republicans, canceling each other out in the aggregate. The findings offer important insights into the efficacy of going public on social media and of corrections to such claims in an era of stark partisan polarization.

The Contemporary Presidency: The “Nuclear Option” Has Fizzled, Again: Here's Why and What to Do about It

AbstractSenate majorities of both parties have altered the rules of debate to speed up deliberations on presidential nominees, particularly on judicial nominations. These deployments of the Senate's “nuclear option,” however, have had no demonstrable effect with respect to judicial nominations. We suggest the evidence highlights the role of “opportunism” rather that partisan obstruction in delaying nominations. We also document how thwarting opportunism by removing substantive legislation in favor of exclusively considering judgeships early in an administration's tenure can speed up deliberations. We recommend seven specific reforms along these lines to improve the appointments process.

Going Social: A Comparative Analysis of Presidents' Official and Social Media Messages

AbstractThis article explores how structural changes to the media environment, such as the development of social media, might enhance or impede presidents' public leadership efforts. We argue that characteristics of Twitter as a medium provide presidents with incentives to exploit these new opportunities and alter the content of presidential rhetoric. To test this claim about presidential rhetoric, we use text analysis tools to compare the readability, sentiment, and content of contemporary presidents' messages from press conferences and exchanges with reporters to tweets from the Barack Obama and Donald Trump presidencies. Our findings suggest that social media is being used by presidents in their public leadership efforts and that the medium of communication has a significant influence on the content of communication.

Contemporary Presidency The Office of the Chief of Staff in the Trump White House, 2017–2019

AbstractFocusing on White House chiefs of staff and the Office of the Chief of Staff during the first three years of the Donald Trump administration, we examine the office and its occupants in the context of past scholarship on White House structuring and staffing. We discuss four major roles performed by chiefs of staff and their deputies (administrator, advisor, guardian, proxy), exploring their participation in management and in policy processes. We also look at the larger chief of staff's office, noting continuities with, and changes from, previous presidencies. Probing the roles, activities, and performance of President Donald Trump's first three chiefs of staff underscores both the significance of individual presidents in governing and the apparent constraints on their doing so.

Contemporary Presidency: Presidents Meet Reporters: Is Donald Trump an Outlier among Recent Presidents?

AbstractIs President Donald Trump an outlier among presidents in the ways in which he meets with the press? Using comparative data for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump, this article looks at how similar and different Trump is compared to his recent predecessors. While at one time presidents answered reporters' queries in presidential press conferences, today presidents have more opportunities to meet the press. All six presidents studied used three basic forums: press conferences, informal question‐and‐answer sessions, and interviews. They did so in ways consistent with their presidential goals and in settings in which they felt comfortable. In their first 32 months, all recent presidents employed strategies similar to ones that brought each to the presidency and then most found additional resources for communicating with the public. Except for President Trump, Presidents Reagan through Obama did so with relatively stable White House leadership teams and coordinated communications organizational structures. In this way as well as in significant others, the five previous presidents had more in common with one another than they did with President Trump.

Contemporary Presidency: Which Presidents Are Uncommonly Successful in Congress? A Trump Update

AbstractThis article updates previous research that seeks to identify which presidents won more or fewer roll‐call votes than should be expected through Trump's first two years in office. Multiple regression models estimating the effects of key contextual variables known to influence roll‐call voting in Congress (party control, public approval, and party polarization plus interactions) establish a common baseline of predicted success. The errors reveal which presidents won more or less than should be expected given the political context. Consistent with earlier studies using different model specifications analyzing earlier periods and presidents, this updated analysis is unable to reject the null hypothesis that the errors are random, and we observe no more unusual outliers than would be expected to occur by chance. Trump's high success rates in the 115th Congress are about what should be expected with cohesive Republican majorities in both chambers.

The Contemporary Presidency: How Presidents Utilize Their Emergency Powers

What explains how presidents utilize their emergency powers? In the recent political battle with Congress over the U.S.–Mexico border, President Donald Trump announced his willingness to invoke his emergency powers to construct the controversial wall if Congress continued to oppose his decisions. While his action was met with strong, mostly partisan responses, the declaration of national emergencies to fulfill policy objectives is not unique to the Trump administration. Building on the unilateral presidency literature, we report the results of a pilot project on how the political environment impacts the use of national emergencies in U.S. foreign policy. Results add to our understanding of a current political debate and to a broader comprehension of presidential emergency powers.

The Contemporary Presidency Energy or Chaos? Turnover at the Top of President Trump’s White House

The group of approximately two dozen White House staff titled “assistant to the president” form a president’s core leadership team, making turnover at this level particularly important for the stability and direction of the presidential decision‐making process. Among the assistants to the president group, President Donald Trump’s White House had the highest turnover of top‐ranked staff experienced by any recent president. At 20 months, two‐thirds of assistants appointed by President Trump in his first year in office left or announced their imminent departure. That level of turnover led to leadership changes in the dozen White House offices that are key to the processing of presidential decisions; to the policies a chief executive develops, initiates, and implements; and to those units charged with managing a president’s relationships with those outside of the administration. Without a team working together, it is difficult for a president’s staff to coordinate its plans and work as well as develop and articulate commonly shared presidential priorities and goals.

The Contemporary Presidency“It Went Off the Rails”: Trump’s Presidential Transition and the National Security System

Transitions to the presidency matter, especially concerning national security. What transpired for Donald J. Trump pales in comparison to the relatively smooth transition between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. As one source later noted, the Trump transition “went off the rails” after the election. This was especially so in the case of national security planning, which historically has not been affected as much by problematic presidential transitions. This article will explore what transpired during Trump’s transition to the presidency and its impact on the national security system.

The Contemporary Presidency: Digital Resources to Support Quantitative Scholarship in Presidential Studies

With the increase in digitized content available, new presidential research avails itself to more quantitative analysis. More digitized resources from government agencies and private and university repositories allow presidential scholars access to a broader universe of content. Data for analysis include digitized documents, oral histories, and data sets. Presidential scholars and researchers have the option to collaborate with programmers, computer scientists, and graduate students to become acquainted with current repositories and experiment with new technologies such as text mining and the R programming language.

The Contemporary Presidency: A Lasting Legacy? Presidents, National Monuments, and the Antiquities Act

The Antiquities Act became law in 1906 at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt. The law allows presidents to declare national monuments, and thus preserve public land, without congressional approval. While the use of the Act has varied over time, in recent Democratic administrations this legislation has become a major component of environmental policy making. This study examines the use of the Antiquities Act by presidents in order to understand this Act as a policy device and what its development says about environmental policy in modern times. The article also discusses recent efforts to redefine this presidential power.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Trump Transition, Early Presidency, and National Security Organization

President Trump's establishment of his national security system proved highly problematic compared to those of his recent predecessors. Problems arose in its initial organization, especially the designation of his chief political strategist as a participant at its highest levels, later rescinded. Further difficulties developed with the resignation of his National Security Council advisor, after only 24 days on the job. The news media quickly pounced. They portrayed a presidency in disarray and a national security process as dysfunctional. It was a major blow to this new administration, even though it was unwilling to acknowledge it publicly. In his first solo press conference on February 16, 2017, Trump stated, “This administration is running like a fine‐tuned machine.” Not quite. This article explores their early organizational difficulties in national security policy making.

The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society

Julian E. Zelizer has established himself as one of the most prominent public interpreters of American political history. In this new book he addresses Americans' appetite for “great man” history with a corrective to the broad public understanding of the nature of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society—and to the public's expectations of contemporary presidents and their ability to bring about significant political change. Writing into a mass market dominated by Robert Caro's and Robert Dallek's multivolume biographies of Johnson, the thrust of Zelizer's book is that without denying Johnson's understanding of the machinery of Congress and his extraordinary ability to manipulate individuals and procedures to advance his goals, none of that would have mattered without two critical but short-lived conditions: the mass mobilization and moral clarity of the civil rights movement, peaking in 1964, and the bumper crop of Democratic liberals (and cowed conservatives) in Congress in the wake of Johnson's rout of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Both of these factors made possible advances that had stymied Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and even LBJ. Absent these conditions, no amount of “the Treatment”—LBJ's physical and political coaxing and intimidation of his allies and enemies—would have moved the needle on legislation such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With pressure from the streets, from churches, and from polls showing voters horrified by televised violence in the South; with the assiduous lobbying of organized labor and of Clarence Mitchell and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights; and with a growing number of congressional liberals, LBJ and his allies were able to overcome the procedural hurdles that had kept civil rights and other progressive legislation bottled up in Congress. That condition did not last; while the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Medicare and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed in that window, it closed, for the most part, after white backlash against urban unrest reinvigorated the conservative coalition after 1966, and after the Vietnam War eroded Johnson's ability to push for broad domestic programs.

The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data

We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same period, we find additional orders not in the APP archives. This produces a comprehensive estimate of the total number of published presidential orders from 1977 to 2012. We further apply our strategy to presidential signing statements from 1985 to 2008 and estimate that around 10% can be considered to include presidential orders.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Obama Administrative Presidency: Some Late‐Term Patterns

President Obama's iteration of the administrative presidency, as his term ended, used both extant tools and stressed new ones. This essay centers on three themes: (1) the array of managerial directives used, as a caution against simply counting executive orders to measure Obama's administrative efforts; (2) the central role of statutory interpretation to find power in extant law to justify presidential preferences in areas such as health care, environmental protection, and immigration, with mixed results in the courtroom and thus on the ground; and (3) the aggressive—and far less challenged—use of that same tool in foreign policy and the war powers. In each area the Obama administrative presidency will bequeath useful precedent to his successors.