President's Ability Research Articles

Presidential Campaign Authority in The General Election Law

The President's Authority to Campaign during the General Election has recently become an interesting topic of discourse among the public. Some people think that the President should not campaign to maintain the neutrality of elections, the President's dignity, and so on. However, on the other hand, the public thinks that it is okay for the President to campaign because basically it is not the norm in the laws and regulations that has been violated. Therefore, this research aims to examine the President's authority to campaign in Law Number 7 of 2017 concerning General Elections. This research is a qualitative research with a normative approach that uses legislative regulations as the main focus to elaborate and explain comprehensively the authority of the President's campaign in the General Election Law. The data used in this research is secondary data that researchers obtained from statutory regulations, scientific journals, books, credible websites, and a number of other sources that are commonly used in every research. These data were analyzed using grammatical and teleological legal interpretation methods. The result in this articel show 1. There are two different opinions, namely those who agree with the president's campaign with the argument of maintaining ELECTION neutrality, potentially causing abuse of power, and maintaining presidential ethics. But on the other hand, they think it's okay because no rules have been violated. 2. Article 281 paragraph 1 of Law Number 7 of 2017 concerning General Elections regulates the President's ability to campaign as long as he does not use state facilities and takes leave. However, this article was interpreted differently by Bivitri Susanti because it relates to the President who will nominate again and the President must be registered in the campaign team. Apart from that, Zainal Arifin Mukhtar also has the same opinion that the President's campaign could cause legal complications and could potentially lead to the practice of nepotism. 3. The researcher does not agree with the two constitutional experts because there is an inconsistency in Bivitri Susanti's argument that initially the president was not allowed to campaign by interpreting market 281 paragraph 1 as relating to the incumbent President, but in the next sentence it seems to allow it by requiring the President to be included in the campaign team. Regarding Zainal Arifin Mukhtar's opinion, researchers consider that campaigning and nepotism are two very different things. Can campaigning is something that has not happened and is stated in the laws and regulations, whereas nepotism is something that has already happened and needs to be proven first and it does not necessarily mean that the President campaigning is nepotism. The researcher adheres firmly to the principles of Nullum Delictum, Nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali" and the fiqh rule "Al-Ashlu Fil Muamalah Ibahah Hatta Yadulla Daliil 'Ala Tahrimiha". The researcher believes that article 281 paragraph 1 has provided a comprehensive explanation regarding these abilities and the limits of the President. if you want to campaign.

The Presidents and the Constitution, Vol. One: From the Founding Fathers to the Progressive Era ed. by Ken Gormley

Reviewed by: The Presidents and the Constitution, Vol. One: From the Founding Fathers to the Progressive Era ed. by Ken Gormley Robert E. Ross (bio) Keywords U.S. Constitution, Executive power, Separation of powers, Constitutional politics The Presidents and the Constitution, Vol. One: From the Founding Fathers to the Progressive Era. Edited by Ken Gormley. (New York: New York University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. Cloth $22.00.) The president maintains a unique place in the American constitutional order. Unlike Congress, the nature and scope of executive powers are not determined by constitutional powers "herein" granted. The scarcity of constitutional text detailing the duties and powers of the president has resulted in strenuous efforts to reconcile ambiguities surrounding the exercise of executive power with a constitutional system containing a written constitution. Moreover, what constitutional text there is does little to clarify or settle the limits of executive power. A prime example of this controversy is the removal power. While Article II establishes the president's ability, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint certain officials, the Constitution is silent on the power to remove these officers. Under what conditions can a president remove an appointed official, and does he need the Senate's advice and consent to do so? How these constitutional controversies get settled is a matter for politics, where presidents are not isolated actors. The Presidents and the Constitution, edited by Ken Gormley, ambitiously tries to navigate, and detail the uneasy relationship between the president and the Constitution by paying particular attention to historical context and development rather than focusing on a specific topic of presidential power or Supreme Court cases involving executive action. Given the sheer amount of historical material, this first volume covers the first twenty-six presidents, with the promise of a second volume to complete the historical analysis. Given the extensive list of contributors to the volume, great editorial effort was made to capture an "ongoing narrative" that highlights "constitutional issues that confronted the president, helped to shape the president's time in office, or gave birth to a piece of constitutional precedent during the president's tenure" (11). This broad sweep of presidential history emphasizes the importance of politics for an executive's constitutional authority. The Constitution is not [End Page 504] self-enforcing. In the arena of unsettled constitution meaning, the document requires interpretation and application. This creates a political battle over constitutional meaning, as ambitious executives (and their allies) seek constitutional legitimacy and presidential opponents insist on constitutional restraint. More importantly, political actors must acquiesce to these constitutional interpretations for any attempt to enlarge or restrain executive power to be successful. Rightfully so, this volume highlights the complicated relationship between the three branches of government, being "bound together inextricably in this saga" (10). The meaning of the Constitution comes to life by appreciating the historical development of an ever-evolving conflict between the president, Congress, and the Court. However, not all presidents are created equal, and the political conditions within and between presidencies are often in flux. While presidents come to office with ambition to shape the presidency and constitutional regime, they must also recognize the importance of maintaining political coalitions and function within the accepted constitutional and ideological commitments of a given political regime. The amount of "energy," to use a Hamiltonian term, that can be brought to the executive is closely connected to the strength of existing political values and constitutional attachments. Even if a president wants to enact change, if the other branches of government and the electorate are strongly attached to the status quo, the president's capacity for change is confined within boundaries of these accepted political and constitutional values. However, there is expanded opportunity for the president to shape the political and constitutional landscape if his election coincides with demand for change to the prevailing values and constitutional attachments. This view of executive powers being exercised within the context of larger political change (or lack thereof) lends itself well to a historical analysis of the presidency, and The Presidents and the Constitution explicitly and implicitly brings to light this political interaction between the president, other branches of government, and the electorate. For example...

Insecure Presidents: The Construction of Legitimacy in Imperfect Elections

This paper illustrates how presidents who lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College establish legitimacy. Using 5 cases (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016), I show how presidents in different eras tried to establish themselves as legitimate despite elements of electoral insecurity. Using historical newspapers and primary documents, I find that construction of legitimacy has evolved over time and depends on both the circumstances of the election and the president's ability to acknowledge and confront their own insecurity.

President's Legislative Programs in the United States as a Non-monopoly and Non-commanding Power

The president's programs are not monopoly and excluding, rather competitive and open to the members of congress; not commanding and abiding by, rather persuading and being persuaded; not comprehensively dominating the whole process of the Congress, rather only leading the legislative process of the Congress. The president 's programs exit in the State of the Union Address mostly. The reasons include the Constitution of the United States, the president itself and the congress itself ext.. The president's programs are based on separation, checks & balance, are different from rights-reflecting legislative plans of England and China's autonomous legislative plans. China's autonomous legislative plans include three categories mandatory plans that must be completed when conditions are ripe, guiding plans that are ready to be completed as far as possible and researching plans that continue to be studied and considered according to circumstances. The president should struggle for his (or her) legislative programs to pass and is constraint of objective, subjective and externally environmental factors. Whether the president can successfully start the legislative programs of the Congress and whether each legislative project can pass through the legislative process of the Congress can be judged objectively by the president's public opinion support rate and party support rate, and subjectively by the president's subjective efforts, negotiation ability and persuasion ability, as well as the external environment when the president competes with the Congress, such as war or peace, economic situation, etc.

President and Congress in Paraguay: legislative success in foreign and domestic policy

ABSTRACT The president's ability to legislate is a central element in studies of presidential regimes. A debate persists about the existence of ‘two presidencies’, that is, whether presidential legislative proposals are more successful in Congress when the subject is foreign policy compared to domestic politics. The article makes an empirical contribution in confirming the thesis of the two presidents in a case whose legislative powers of the president are the lowest in the region: Paraguay. Statistical analysis also reveals the importance of political and economic variables in the propensity to approve matters in the Paraguayan legislature, such as presidential popularity, unemployment and the effective number of parties. While the National Congress constrains the legislative production of the Paraguayan president in domestic issues, the president's foreign policy receives high support from legislators. The different characteristics of foreign policy stimulate congressional delegation of the matter to the president.

Presidential hegemony and democratic backsliding in Latin America, 1925–2016

ABSTRACTDoes the executive's institutional hegemony represent a risk to the survival of democracy? By hegemony, we refer to the president's ability to control other institutions, particularly the legislature and judiciary. To answer this question, we develop two indices of presidential hegemony and analyze the duration of democratic regimes in 18 Latin American countries between 1925 and 2016. The results show that executive hegemony is a major driver of democratic instability. This finding is robust to non-linear effects and to potential endogeneity in the relationship between presidential power and democratic backsliding. Our findings challenge traditional concerns about executive-legislative deadlock, and have significant implications for the nascent literature on democratic backsliding, which highlights executive aggrandizement as a risk factor.

Secret but Constrained: The Impact of Elite Opposition on Covert Operations

AbstractRecent international relations scholarship has argued that political elites constrain the use of military force by democracies. Despite the persuasiveness of this research, scholars have largely ignored elite dynamics’ ability to constrain the initiation of covert operations. This omission is consequential because scholars of US foreign policy often assume that covert operations serve as a substitute for the overt use of force; secrecy allows leaders to limit information to congressional elites and thus weaken their oversight capabilities. Do elite political dynamics constrain presidents’ ability to act secretly or do they affect the overt use of force only? I argue that elite political constraints—particularly opposition from Congress—extend to the president's ability to initiate covert operations. By examining the trade-off between US military force and CIA-initiated covert operations during the Cold War, I find the likelihood that covert operations are initiated decreases significantly during periods of divided government and that there is no distinguishable trade-off between covert operations and overt military force. The results suggest that constraints on covert operations became more uniform across unified and divided government following congressional oversight reforms in 1975 that reduced the information asymmetry between the majority and minority party. These findings have important ramifications for the nascent literature on back-door bargaining and covert signalling. Because democratic leaders frequently face domestic political costs even when acting in secret, covert operations should allow leaders to credibly convey their resolve.

Executive capacity to control legislatures and presidential choice of cabinet ministers in East Asian democracies

How do presidents in new democracies choose cabinet ministers to accomplish their policy goals? Contrary to existing studies explaining the partisan composition of the cabinet with institutional characteristics, such as formal authority, we argue that the broader political context surrounding the president's ability to control the legislature can affect cabinet partisanship. By analyzing original data on cabinet formation in all presidential systems in East Asia since democratization, we find that when presidents are more likely to be dominant in executive–legislative relations, they have less concern about legislative support and more leeway to focus on policy performance by appointing nonpartisan cabinet members. This analysis suggests that understanding cabinet partisanship requires a view of cabinet appointments as a trade‐off between securing legislative support and managing policy performance, and the scope of this compromise depends on the strength of the president vis‐à‐vis the legislature.

U.S. Presidents and Stock Market Performance: The Good, the Bad and the Useless

We present an econometric framework that estimate conjoined ‘fixed effect’ components to analyze the presidential puzzle, by separating party policy impact on the stock market from each president ability. Our methodology enable us to examine what drives the higher excess return under Democratic presidencies, whether it is Democratic policy or Democratic presidents’ abilities or both. Our results indicate that both parties policies have overall negative impact on the stock market, while Democratic policy is slightly more negative; Democratic presidents have greater ability than Republican counterparts. Furthermore, president ability impacts the stock market more than party policy, and both parties have fewer impact on large deciles. We then classify president based on their abilities and find that presidents LBJ/Clinton, Nixon and Carter/Eisenhower are the “Good”, the “Bad” and the “Useless” presidents, respectively. We believe these findings add new insight to the current debate of what party has a better policy, and suggest a small government would be an optimal political economy system. Collectively, our results show that we ought to separate between president’s party affiliation (policy) and the president’s ability when we study how politics influences financial markets.

When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy: Policy Availability and the Role of Congress

There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of choices (or tools) presidents have for demonstrating political leadership. Policy availability anticipates that presidential incentives to use the Constitution's Article II authority across foreign policy operations will vary depending on the president's relationship with Congress. This analysis provides insight into claims made by policy availability arguments regarding the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to initiate military interventions. The findings point to important differences in the effects of Congress on presidential decisions for low‐risk versus high‐risk military missions. We find that the president's ability to legislate decreases the likelihood of humanitarian interventions. In addition, we find that as the president's relationship with Congress becomes more legislatively productive, presidents seem significantly more drawn toward high‐ risk military interventions. We infer from these findings that policy availability represents a powerful motivation in the president's calculation to engage in foreign policy interventions.

Globalized Green Lanternism

American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president's ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and more plausible causal relationship—that the power of the U.S. president is shaped by the underlying secular determinant of world economic growth. I go on to examine how we might expect U.S. power and interests in building up a multilateral trading order could largely wither away under conditions of enduring weak economic growth, which some economists have argued is in fact the most plausible long-run growth path for the world economy.

Identifying the Critical Members of the House of Representatives

This article combines the historical record of presidential-congressional relations with previous scholarly findings to develop a model that identifies the members of Congress whose support is critical to the president's ability to build enacting coalitions. It then analyzes the relationship between President Obama and the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress as a case study that demonstrates the model's utility. Conventional wisdom and political pundits suggest that presidents working in divided government will have impossible difficulty working with Congress, but history suggests otherwise. The president's ability to successfully build enacting coalitions during divided government requires him to perform two rather disparate tasks. First, the president must minimize the amount of presidential party members who cross party lines to vote against the president's position. Second, the president must entice at least some opposition party members to cross party lines and support the president's position. Using data from 1981 to 2015, I find that representatives’ behavior on presidential support votes are related to constituency-level presidential strength, electoral vulnerability, ideological moderation, and ideological extremity. I use these results to identify the critical members of the 113th Congress. When a majority of these critical members supported President Obama's positions his legislative efforts were successful. When a majority of these members opposed the president's positions, the House Republican majority defeated the president.

Presidential approval in Taiwan: An analysis of survey data in the Ma Ying-jeou presidency

Presidential popularity is the “causal agent” of presidential effectiveness. High approval ratings mean more power and greater ability to govern. Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou enjoyed high approval ratings when he was elected in 2008, but his popularity declined rapidly soon after, to about 14%. How do Taiwan citizens evaluate their presidents? What factors help to explain the Ma's declining popularity during his presidency? Consistent with conventional wisdom, this study finds that the country's overall economic conditions play a vital role in the popularity of Taiwan's president. Closely following is citizens' evaluation of the president's ability in managing cross-Strait relationship, national defense, and diplomacy. Ma's staffing of key cabinet positions has also had an effect on his popularity, which is unusual in the study of presidential approval. The personal integrity of the president, a trait that Ma has emphasized strongly, has not had a positive effect on his declining popularity in Taiwan.

Competency Costs in Foreign Affairs: Presidential Performance in International Conflicts and Domestic Legislative Success, 1953-2001

Numerous prominent theories have relied on the concept of �audience costs� as a central causal mechanism in their arguments about international conflict, but scholars have had greater difficulty in demonstrating the efficacy and even the existence of such costs outside the bounds of game theory and the political psychology laboratory. We suggest that the audience costs argument focuses too narrowly on the likelihood that leaders will be removed from office by domestic constituencies for failing to make good on threats. Instead, we argue that scholars should ground these arguments on Alastair Smith's (1998) broader concept of �competency costs.� Our analysis of presidential legislative success from 1953 to 2001 demonstrates the existence of foreign policy competency costs by showing that public disapproval of presidential handling of militarized interstate disputes has a significant and substantial negative impact on the president's ability to move legislation on domestic issues through Congress.

CAN THE PRESIDENT REALLY AFFECT ECONOMIC GROWTH? PRESIDENTIAL EFFORT AND THE POLITICAL BUSINESS CYCLE

Presidential elections are often seen as referendums on the health of the economy; however, little evidence exists on the president's ability to influence gross domestic product (GDP). This study examines the effect of the incentive to be reelected and the resulting increase in presidential effort on GDP growth. Growth is found to rise in reelection years for first‐term presidents after 1932 and to fall in election years before 1932, when reelection was uncommon, and for second‐term presidents generally. This effect is largest for high‐quality presidents—who probably have the highest return to effort—and is spread across multiple sectors of the economy. (JEL D78, D72, E32, J24)

College and University President Pay and Future Performance

SYNOPSISJust as with executive compensation in the corporate environment, the pay of university presidents has come under scrutiny. In this study, we examine the link between the level of abnormal compensation for university presidents in the current period and the subsequent performance of the university. We find that private schools awarding “excess” compensation (relative to schools with similar characteristics) improve their reputation and resources to a greater extent in the next two years than private schools not awarding “excess” compensation. Our results suggest that some portion of what appears to be excess pay in private schools is related to differences in the president's ability to deliver performance changes that would be valued by the university's stakeholders. Specifically, we find that private schools reward improvements in academic quality, but do not reward improvements in the academic environment such as reductions in class size. Conversely, what appears to be excess compensation in public schools is not related to performance metrics that are commonly used by the business press to rank universities, suggesting that performance metrics differ significantly between private and public schools.

Presidential and Media Leadership of Public Opinion on Iraq

Much research disputes the president's ability to lead public opinion and shows media to have influenced public opinion concerning the war in Iraq. We argue that although news tone is likely to have affected public support for the war, presidential rhetoric could be influential for two reasons. First, heightened presidential attention to the war increases the public's accessibility to the president's perspective on the war. Second, a survey question that cues the respondent to consider the president explicitly in their evaluation of the Iraq war is likely to encourage responsiveness to presidential rhetoric. To assess these arguments, we simultaneously examine the impact that presidential tone and media tone have on public support for the war in Iraq by analyzing an original dataset of presidential speeches, news coverage, and public support for the war and the president's handling of it from 2002 to 2008. Our findings reveal that although media tone drives public support for the war in Iraq, presidential tone influences the public's view of President Bush's handling of it.

Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States (review)

Reviewed by: Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States Dean J. Kotlowski, Professor of History (bio) Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States (Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albrisa, & Martha F.Davis eds., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 411 pages, ISBN 9780812220797. The United States government has waltzed its way through and around the issue of human rights in a "three-part dance of ambivalence, rejection, and embrace."1 That is the thesis of this collection of essays, and it is remarkably consistent, coherent, and convincing. During World War II, the government in Washington championed a holistic vision that promised protection for social and economic rights as well as political and civil rights. But such advocacy, enunciated in the Atlantic Charter (1941), President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address (1941), and FDR's espousal of an "Economic Bill of Rights" (1944), became a casualty of the early postwar era, when the Soviet Union was keen to castigate the injustices—principally racial—that afflicted American life. Moreover, many Americans, influenced in part by the Cold War, narrowly defined human rights as involving an individual's right to expression, association, and political participation. They were reluctant to tackle issues relating to class for fear of being labeled un-patriotic. In this setting, the US government for decades delayed ratifying international conventions to safeguard social and economic (as well as political) rights. Following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new day seemed to dawn as the United States Senate approved the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Interestingly, the events of 11 September 2001 and subsequent practices of the administration of George W. Bush with respect to alien deportations, rendition, rough interrogation, and torture served to galvanize human rights activists. One result has been a wider, richer, and more varied movement to protect the dignity of all people. But as the contributors to this volume also suggest, much work remains to be done. As a historian, I was most interested in the first part of Bringing Human Rights Home, in which Paul Gordon Lauren, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Carol Anderson, and Hope Lewis trace the history of America's encounter with human rights. They illustrate that the US government's engagement with this issue has been a recent phenomenon, centered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The story they tell is neither one of linear progress nor of sin and redemption but of advocacy followed by avoidance. After World War II, the idealism of the Four Freedoms crashed against hard, political realities. In a nod to Jim Crow, US diplomat John Foster Dulles amended the charter of the United Nations (UN) so as to deny that organization's authority over "matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the State concerned."2 Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill were pleased that the UN would have no say—or sway—over their system of racial segregation. In 1953, Dulles, then Secretary of State, went further when he abandoned efforts to seek ratification of the Convention on Civil [End Page 1218] and Political Rights and the Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in exchange for Senate votes to kill the so-called Bricker Amendment, a measure to restrict the president's ability to secure ratification of treaties. Perhaps the most paradoxical of these policymakers was Eleanor Roosevelt. As a US delegate to the UN under President Harry S. Truman, she helped draft the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. And, yet, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked the UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate the conditions of African Americans, the former First Lady opposed their appeal and briefly resigned from the NAACP's board of directors. Eleanor Roosevelt, like many Americans, also proved uneasy with the redistributive implications of protecting social and political rights; at one point, she denied that countries were obligated "to assure the enjoyment of these rights by direct government action."3 Such a bifurcated perspective, from a purported friend of...

The Wartime President: Insights, Lessons, and Opportunities for Continued Investigation

In The Wartime President, which the University of Chicago Press will publish in 2013, we scrutinize the impacts of war on the president's ability to advance a policy agenda at home. Empirically, we provide evidence that during major wars of the last century, policy outcomes and congressional voting patterns more closely reflect presidential preferences over both foreign and domestic issues. Theoretically, we identify a particular mechanism through which wars have the potential to alter negotiations between Congress and the president—namely, by increasing the salience of national considerations, over which presidents have clear informational advantages, and diminishing the parochial considerations that inform deliberations within Congress. In this article, we summarize some of our main empirical findings, offer a nontechnical description of our formal theory, and suggest avenues for continued research on war and the American presidency.

The Role of the President in Guiding the University: Learners, Lawyers and Legislators

The university president sets the tone for the entire academic institution. The emphasis given to each portion of the university's mission, teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and community engagement, is detected quickly in the activities and attitudes of faculty, staff and students. Rhetoric, personal commitment, and individual dedication to the mission, communicated by the president, are central to the morale and success of the institution. In this regard, it becomes important for the president to prepare for such a role by understanding, to some extent through personal and professional experience, the major components of the institution being served. Direct experience in teaching, research, scholarship, and creative work, and engagement with the several stakeholders that support the university may contribute to the president's ability to manage and lead through the multitude of challenges that face universities and colleges today. These challenges include working with legislators for appropriations, if the institution is state supported; working with governing boards to assure policy compliance and productive working relationships with institutions within a university/college system; dealing with a plethora of local, state and federal legal issues; and defending the institution through legal avenues when necessary. In addition to understanding the many moving parts of a large institution, the president must continue to be mentored by individuals who share common goals and the desire to advance the standing of the university. Furthermore, these mentors may no longer be in the higher education sector, depending upon the specific challenges facing the university. Determination of a successful presidency will be measured against outcomes that include development of faculty and staff, facilities that serve the contemporary mission of the institution, and an advanced learning experience that prepares students for success in a global environment.