Presidential Use Research Articles

Political reconfiguration in the social space: data analysis and future perspective.

This paper aims to explore the complex and sometimes controversial relationship between social media and politics. The correlation between these two areas of research has always been less linear than a simplistic narrative might suggest, mainly because of the involvement of different scientific disciplines, such as sociology, political science, communication, social psychology and computer science. The decision to explore this topic is motivated by the persistent relevance of social media platforms in the current era. This growing centrality is also due to the accelerated digitization process that occurred during the pandemic phase in the digital ecosystem. In particular, the pandemic has contributed to a significant evolution of the concept of social networks. The methodology used is based on secondary data, and the work seeks to highlight the expansion of digital space resulting from the shift from a simple place of interaction to a digital space that reconfigured the mobilization and political action of Campania's governor Vincenzo De Luca. In conclusion, the study reveals important findings on the president's use of social media. For example, active citizen engagement strategies through direct interaction, timely information sharing, and mobilization of online resources are evident. Therefore, it becomes necessary to ask and understand whether the potential of new social technologies is being used to cultivate critical and massive citizen participation in democratic processes or whether it is being distorted for the sole purpose of increasing or consolidating consent.

Immigrants, deviants, and drug users: A rhetorical analysis of President Trump's fear‐driven tweets during the 2019 government shutdown

AbstractSocial media platforms are widely used by numerous political officials to quickly disseminate information and/or obtain influence. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on analyzinghowthe dissemination of contentious messages is propagated using these e‐platforms. The purpose of this study is to examine President Donald J. Trump's political rhetoric about immigration policies during the 2018–2019 government shutdown. In doing so, we qualitatively coded 1411 of Trump's tweets from October 1, 2018, to February 5, 2019, for the presence of fear‐consistent appraisals and applied quantitative content analysis techniques to analyze the coded tweets. This study highlights the President's use of fear‐inducing rhetoric to garner political support and negatively target vulnerable groups by questioning America's ability to cope with immigration. Moreover, the results highlight the responsibility of policymakers in discussing vulnerable populations.

Waiving Goodbye to Congressional Constraints: Presidents and Subnational Policy Making

Presidents often find themselves frustrated by the legislative process and in need of an alternative policy‐making route. While most scholarship on the presidency focuses on unilateral action as the preferred alternative, I propose that subnational policy making can be an equally viable option. Specifically, evidence suggests that presidents have used a waiver strategy to pursue their agendas at the subnational level. I develop and test a proposition about the conditions under which presidents use waivers with an original data set of approved Section 1115 waivers in welfare and Medicaid from 1986 through 2012. I find that presidents approve waivers contingent not only on their ideological distance from Congress, as we might expect, but also on the share of the nation's governors in the president's party. While the president can use a waiver strategy to circumvent Congress, the division of authority in the federal system constrains the president's use of this strategy, as participation from governors is critical for success.

The Contextual Determinants of Support for Unilateral Action

Recent scholarship shows relatively low public approval for the president's use of unilateral powers, yet public attitudes are often susceptible to framing effects. We conduct a series of survey experiments to explore attitudes toward unilateral power while varying a range of contextual features, including the identity of the president, the unilateral tool used, the justification for the action, and the policy pursued. We find little evidence that context affects attitudes toward unilateral powers except in circumstances that invoke explicitly political factors. Our findings have important implications for understanding how public opinion responds to presidential power.

The Law: A Constitutionalist's Defense of Prerogative: Taft's Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers

Traditional discussions of presidential prerogative power have grouped scholars into “Jeffersonian” and “Hamiltonian” camps, both of which seek to justify the broad‐ranging use of executive power in an emergency while also admitting that the prerogative power is technically illegal or extralegal. This article explores William Howard Taft's Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, which lays out a theory of Article II that permits the president to employ expansive executive means to attain limited constitutional ends. By both legalizing and limiting the president's use of prerogative, Taft's understanding of the Constitution and prerogative may contribute to the scholarly debate on executive power.

Influence and the Administrative Process: Lobbying the U.S. President's Office of Management and Budget

All administrative processes contain points of entry for politics, and the U.S. president's use of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review government regulations is no exception. Specifically, OMB review can open up a pathway for interest groups to lobby for policy change. We theorize that interest group lobbying can be influential during OMB review, especially when there is consensus across groups. We use a selection model to test our argument with more than 1,500 regulations written by federal agencies that were subjected to OMB review. We find that lobbying is associated with change during OMB review. We also demonstrate that, when only business groups lobby, we are more likely to see rule change; however, the same is not true for public interest groups. We supplement these results with illustrative examples suggesting that interest groups can, at times, use OMB review to influence the content of legally binding government regulations.

Legislative Capacity and Executive Unilateralism

This article develops a theory of presidential unilateralism in which both ideological divergence with Congress and legislative capacity influence the president's use of executive orders. We argue that when Congress is less capable of constraining the executive, the president will issue more executive orders during periods of divided government. Conversely, in periods of high legislative capacity, the president is less likely to issue executive orders when faced with an opposed Congress. Based on an examination of institutional changes, we identify years prior to the mid‐1940s as characterized by low congressional capacity and the subsequent period as characterized by high capacity. Testing the theory between 1905 and 2013, we find strong support for these predictions and demonstrate that legislative capacity conditions the role of ideological disagreement in shaping presidential action. Overall, this article deepens our current understanding of the dynamics of separation‐of‐powers politics and the limits of executive power.

Assessing Congressional Responses to Growing Presidential Powers: The Case of Recess Appointments

In 2007, the U.S. Senate moved into permanent session to stop President George W. Bush from making recess appointments. This article examines this episode. We argue that Congress is only able to effectively check presidential unilateral powers when the president's use of such powers creates high political costs for a sufficient number of members such that congressional collective action is possible. Using case studies and multivariate analysis, we show that Bush used recess appointments far more than his predecessors, creating high political costs for Senate Democrats and driving them to find an innovative way to check the power of the president.

Race in the War on Drugs: The Social Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric

One of the president's main leadership tools for influencing the direction of U.S. legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president's use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact on state arrest rates for African Americans than for whites, even when controlling for alternative explanations. These findings suggest that presidential rhetoric is filtered through social constructions of public policy problems when public officials act on them.

Race in the War on Drugs: The Social Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric

One of the president's main leadership tools for influencing the direction of American legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president's use of the bully pulpit to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different target populations in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact on state arrest rates for African Americans than for whites, even when controlling for alternative explanations. These findings suggest that presidential rhetoric is filtered through social constructions of public policy problems when public officials act upon them.

Assessing Presidential Power

Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executive's unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the president's bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The analysis suggests that signing statements, although underappreciated, may potentially be a valuable presidential tool in the veto bargaining process. The analysis also shows that veto threats are a key factor explaining the president's use of the constitutional signing statement. We infer that veto threats and signing statements are linked together as part of a larger coordinated strategy to exert presidential power in the legislative realm.

The Contemporary Presidency Executive Privilege and the U.S. Attorneys Firings

Political observers have debated whether George W. Bush's exercises of secrecy have shielded him from accountability for many of his administration's actions. In particular, the president's use of executive privilege to conceal information about the U.S. attorneys firings set off a firestorm of protest, especially among members of Congress who sought documents and testimony from White House aides. This essay describes and analyzes the president's use of executive privilege in this latest dispute between the political branches. It examines President Bush's actions in the context of his various uses of executive privilege during two terms in office. The essay assesses means by which controversies over executive privilege can be managed by the political branches without resorting to intervention by the courts.

Shipman and the Anaesthetist

In Professor Harmer's interesting editorial speculating on the likely fall-out from the various Shipman enquiries [1] he does not mention what seems to me to be a highly likely (and welcome) change, namely restricting the current freedom for any doctor to write a private prescription for almost any drug for any person. Murderous doctors are, one hopes, rare but they would be even rarer if they were not able to obtain lethal doses of lethal drugs. One may also mention that there is one sentence which I am sure does not accurately express his beliefs: ‘If one has a criticism, from personal involvement in several cases, it would be that the emphasis has been on the protection of patients rather than the publicly perceived role of protecting the doctor’. This does not sit easily with a very recent quote in several publications (including BMA News[2]) from the Secretary of State (John Reid) as follows: ‘We want to put an end to the idea that the GMC is a representative body for doctors. It is not. Its primary role must be to protect patients’. I presume the President's use of ‘publicly perceived’ refers to the ignorant perceptions of the average member of the public rather than those of the well informed. Even so, to describe the GMC's emphasis on protecting patients as a ‘criticism’ implies that the GMC should not be doing this. As the GMC strap-line is ‘Protecting patients, guiding doctors’ this would be an unfortunate opinion to be left on the record, even though one can infer that it was not intended. I should like to thank Professor Vickers for his comments upon my recent editorial. His first point is well taken and recommendations pertaining to the availability of dangerous drugs were mentioned within the editorial as part of the contents of the fourth Shipman Report. The extension of the principle to include restrictions on ‘the current freedom for any doctor to write a private prescription for almost any drug for any person’ may become a reality. Whilst this would be a restriction on prescribing rights, will it greatly hinder anaesthetists in performing their clinical duties? As to the second point, on reflection, I can see that the wording of the sentence is likely to be interpreted as criticism of the GMC for protecting patients. That was certainly not my intention, and the change of the word ‘criticism’ to ‘observation’ would better describe my thoughts. The reason for my ‘observation’ pertains to three cases before the GMC Professional Conduct Committee over the past few years at which I have been a witness. In all three cases, the underlying accusation pertained to a single isolated incident involving a doctor who up to then had an unblemished medical career. The incidents were different for each doctor but the worse that could be said was that each made a mistake or error of judgement. A major investigation and hearing, in one instance lasting 2 weeks, was brought on the strength of a single clinical error, at worst. None of these doctors could, in my humble opinion, be considered an on-going risk to the public. The point that I had hoped to make was that, from my experience, rather than the GMC being a ‘representative body for doctors’ with a desire to protect them, it is a body determined to protect the public, even to the extent of investigating a solitary misdemeanour or error of judgement. That doesn't sound like a body out to protect doctors as implied by Dame Judith Smith and Dr John Reid. I hope this has put the record straight and I apologise for any misunderstanding caused by my inappropriate wording in the editorial.

Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs

One consequence of the president's use of rhetoric to shape the public agenda, the media, and congressional attention is less recognized: Presidential rhetoric shapes the priorities of the administrative agents over whom he seeks managerial control. We present statistical tests of the managerial power of presidential policy signals in the case of the United States Attorneys' implementation of the federal “War on Drugs.” We find that presidential policy signals shifted the composition of the Attorneys' caseload, although not to the exclusion of other pertinent local, national, and internal factors. Yet, the consequences of presidential rhetoric for executive governance remain real and substantial.

Constitutional Law. Congressional Standing. D. C. Circuit Holds That Members of Congress May Not Challenge the President's Use of Troops in Kosovo. Campbell v. Clinton, 203 F.3d 19 (D. C. Cir. 2000)

Constitutional Law. Congressional Standing. D. C. Circuit Holds That Members of Congress May Not Challenge the President's Use of Troops in Kosovo. Campbell v. Clinton, 203 F.3d 19 (D. C. Cir. 2000)

Picking federal judges: lower court selection from Roosevelt through Reagan

A president's least-noticed important legacy is his appointment of judges to the lower federal bench. How are these judges chosen? What happens behind the scenes? How important are senators, party organizations, the American Bar Association, and others in the selection process? In this landmark book, a leading authority on lower federal court judicial selections tells the riveting story of how nine presidents over a period of fifty-six years have chosen federal judges. Sheldon Goldman has interviewed participants, and he has mined published and unpublished government documents and archives, along with memos, letters, and other documents in the papers of every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan, to bring to life the judicial selection process. His book is filled with richly drawn and dramatic accounts of each president's use of judicial appointments to further policy, partisan, and personal agendas. Goldman analyzes political and social changes that have occurred over the years and the impact of those changes on the profile of those selected for the bench. His statistical portraits of the backgrounds of each administration's appointees point up the changing face of the federal judiciary. The author also documents the responses of each presidential administration to calls for gender and race diversification of the bench. Casting bright light on the little-known details of judicial selection politics, Picking Federal Judges is sure to become the definitive book on this subject.

Public responses to the presidential use of military force: A panel analysis

How do citizens respond to dramatic uses of military force? While we know a great deal about the conditions that driveaggregate changes in presidential popularity in response to a president's use of military force, we know surprisingly little about howindividuals respond to such events. What types of individuals operating under what types of conditions are more likely to support such actions? And to what extent does approval of the use of force affect subsequent changes, not only in presidential popularity, but also in more general foreign policy attitudes? We use panel survey data collected before and after the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 to investigate the individual-level dynamics of opinion change in response to this dramatic event. Because our study neatly brackets the Libyan air strikes, we are able to examine in some detail the antecedents and consequences of individuals' reactions to a president's use of military force. We find that watching President Reagan's dramatic televised speech had an unmistakable impact in moving respondents to support the bombing. We also find that support for the Libyan air strikes appeared to precipitate greater approval for a range of more “hard-line” military responses toward terrorism, thus creating opportunities for similar-or even broader—presidential initiatives in the future. Finally, because the bombing was the only significant event occurring between the waves of the panel, our quasi-experimental design ties approval of the bombing clearly to an upsurge in presidential approval. Implications for various perspectives on presidential leadership of public opinion in foreign affairs are discussed.

The Influence of Domestic and International Politics on the President's Use of Force

Ostrom and Job (1986) found that domestic, political factors are more influential on the president's decision to use military force than characteristics of the international environment. These results pose a serious challenge to realists' assumptions regarding the motives of states and the separability of domestic and foreign policy. This article reexamines Ostrom and Job's arguments and introduces a new indicator, a measure of the severity of ongoing international crises, to provide a better assessment of the relative effect of the international environment on presidential decision making. This severity index is significantly associated with the use of force by the United States from 1949 through 1976, and proves to be more influential than the international indicators used by Ostrom and Job. Nevertheless, domestic political factors remain most consequential in the president's decision to use force short of war.

The Freedom of Information Act and Political Science Research

What is the logic of an information law which:• makes available a State Department Memorandum rationalizing the President's use of troops overseas without congressional consent, but has thus far failed to make available World War II documents concerning allegedly repatriated Russian soldiers,• which makes available a Federal Trade Commission staff study on auto warranties but leaves numerous other advisory studies difficult to locate and their status unclear,• breaks loose a key Federal Reserve Board vote but has thus far left the votes and minutes of other multi-member agencies difficult to locate?The answer is that the logic is not in the law itself, but in the kind of pressure put upon the bureaucracy to follow it. The Freedom of Information Act which became effective July 4, 1967 is not self enforcing. It depends upon the initiative and energy of those who want government information, giving them a tool with which to prod an unwilling bureaucracy. To date, this prodding has come principally from the press and interested business organizations; meaning that the information made available has been oriented toward the single news story, often an expose, or the isolated regulatory decision. This is certainly a valuable use of the Act but the pressure of interested citizens is not sufficient to force the government to make available the scope of information and indexing needed for scholarly research.The organized scholarly community, while traditionally supporting the principle of free access to government information, has made no systematic effort to either assess the newly available information or to pry loose information presently withheld.