Unpopular President Research Articles

Populism and the military: symbiosis and tension in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

ABSTRACT Populist politicians surrounded by military allies are a frequent sight in countries that have experienced democratic backsliding. Populists sometimes seek protection in the military, who in turn leverage the relationship to advance their own interests. Despite the recent wave of populism, the burgeoning literature on it has not devoted due attention to analysing the populist-military relationship; its origins, outcomes, and tensions. This article analyses the Brazilian military’s re-appearance under President Jair Bolsonaro. Absent the usual institutional support bases on which Brazilian presidents rely, Bolsonaro has cultivated military support with resources and positions that allow officers expanded political power and privilege. An equilibrium held for the government’s first two years. Thereafter, growing reservations about propping up an increasingly unpopular president, especially by heeding orders that would threaten their professional integrity, put in question the future of the armed forces as a pillar of the Bolsonaro administration. At the same time, the military’s substantial expansion in government and state positions under Bolsonaro raises the specter of elevated military autonomy under future administrations. This would be problematic for popular sovereignty, a cornerstone of democracy, even if uniformed officers are not saber-rattling, mounting coups or occupying presidential office.

With 16 Months to go, Negative Partisanship Predicts the 2020 Presidential Election

American elections have become increasingly nationalized and highly predictable; with partisanship serving as an identity-based, dominant vote determinant for all but a small portion of Americans. Rather than a relatively fixed pool of voters rewarding or punishing the parties for their platforms or performance in office like elections of the past, the two party’s electoral fortunes rise and fall with the ebb and flow of turnout among key elements of their increasingly fixed coalitions; mobilized or demobilized by gaining or losing control of the presidency. Voters from the party out-of-power, galvanized to vote by negative partisanship, increase their turnout in subsequent elections, while turnout from the party in-power wanes due to complacency. The electoral performance of the opposition party is also improved by the predictable movement of pure Independent voters away from the party in power due the hyper-partisan and highly-charged negative political environment. The size of the “swing” of pure Independents is conditioned on economic conditions or on other “shocks” to the political system such as unpopular wars or unpopular incumbent presidents. The Negative Partisanship model predicted the Democrat's 40 seat House gain four months before Election Day in the 2018 Midterms. The 2020 forecast currently shows Democrats recapturing the White House with 278 Electoral College votes, including the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Leadership credibility and support for US foreign policy: Experimental evidence from Japan

Does an internationally unpopular president reduce support for US foreign policy? This article examines how President Trump’s endorsement influences foreign policy preferences abroad. A nationally-representative survey experiment is conducted on Japanese attitudes concerning the government’s response to the recent North Korean missile launches. It is found that leadership credibility has a significant impact on the public. Japanese citizens are less likely to support an aggressive response to North Korea when it is endorsed by President Trump. The effect of leadership credibility, however, may not be entirely distinct from general anti-American sentiments. These results indicate that, even in high politics related to national security, Trump’s lack of credibility abroad hinders allies’ ability to cooperate with the USA by eroding domestic support, but it is difficult to separate the Trump effect from broader attitudes toward the USA.

Africa's passive revolution: crisis in Malawi

Recent protest movements in sub‐Saharan Africa have generally failed to effect progressive transformations. Efforts to achieve social change have been frustrated by governing elites that continue to utilise their vacillating and unequal relationships with the external environment to sustain power. Although the leading figures may change, the dominant African class can re‐establish leadership through new alliances with domestic and international networks of capital. To understand such ‘change‐without‐change’, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on Antonio Gramsci's development of ‘passive revolution’. The comparative character of Gramscian analysis enables his philosophy of praxis to be translated into very different historical and geographical settings. With this in mind we draw together recent engagements with passive revolution from Geography, Politics and African Studies. In particular we develop Jean‐François Bayart's notion of extraversion, while considering it in relation to more recent philological engagements with Gramsci. Our empirical focus is the politics of transition in Malawi. In his second term in office, the autocratic and unpopular president, Bingu wa Mutharika, implemented economic policies that ran against neoliberal orthodoxy and suppressed protest during a period of crisis. Mutharika was replaced, following his death in 2012, by Joyce Banda, a previously marginalised vice‐president, who nurtured a re‐engagement with transnational capital. Working through the state, Banda led a transformation from on high and moved to impose new economically liberal policies, including a major currency devaluation, which reduced living standards for many. We draw our empirical material from Chancellor College, a major site of protest against Mutharika in 2011. Evidence from interviews with staff and students demonstrates how two episodes of revolution/restoration in Malawi, a country distant from the western historical experience, can be interpreted through Gramsci's socially differentiated understanding of politics.

Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention, for a Little While

Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divided government, however, popular presidents can direct congressional attention, at least for a little while. Unpopular presidents, by contrast, are irrelevant.

Party Responsiveness to the Collective Judgment of the Electorate

Studies on retrospective voting argue that voters under presidentialism tend to assign co-responsibility for the president’s performance to her party in congressional elections. However, it is not uncommon for presidential parties to distance themselves from an unpopular president or for opposition parties to cooperate with a popular president. In doing so, parties can signal to voters that they side with a popular (or against an unpopular) president. Yet little is known about whether this strategic behavior has electoral payoffs. This study proposes a popularity-response model, where parties’ electoral outcomes are a product of how they respond to public opinion on the president. I hypothesize that parties defecting from an unpopular president (or cooperating with a popular president) minimize electoral losses and obtain a further electoral boost. Analysis using an original dataset coding issue congruence between presidents and parties prior to 35 elections in 18 Latin American countries supports this claim.

Presidential Party Fundraising in Hopes of Not Having to Govern by Himself

AbstractThe extent to which presidents embrace the role of electoral leader of their party is important but relatively understudied. Each of the past three presidents devoted substantial time to the role of chief party fundraiser during his first 2 years in office, hoping to avoid having to govern by himself in the final 2 years of his first term. Key institutional and contextual factors drive these dynamics. Presidents are incentivized to spend time fundraising for their co-partisans because of the interaction of the high costs of campaigns and the contribution limits mandated by campaign finance laws in an era of intense partisan competition. While even unpopular presidents are in demand as fundraisers, popularity does relate to fundraising dynamics. An unpopular Bill Clinton aggressively embraced fundraising efforts behind closed doors in his first 2 years in office, supporting his fellow Democrats with a kind of hidden-hand leadership, while over 90% of George W. Bush’s fundraisers were open to the media in 2001 and 2002, as his popularity surged following 9/11. Popularity makes a difference in terms of where presidents raise money for their fellow party members as well. While Clinton and Barack Obama largely confined their efforts to states in which they had found electoral support, the more popular Bush headlined fundraisers for fellow Republicans in states across the political spectrum. Presidents’ efforts can win them more political allies in elected office, but also expose them to criticism and may make it more difficult for presidents to work across the aisle on questions of public policy.

A Functional Analysis of 2008 General Election Debates

This study employed content analysis based on Functional Theory to investigate the three general election debates featuring Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign. These debates were mostly positive (58% acclaims) with numerous attacks (35%) and some defenses or refutations of attacks (7%). There was no significant difference in the two candidates' use of acclaims and attach; however, Obama worked to link McCain with unpopular President Bush and a much higher percentage of Obama's discussion of past deeds were attacks (86%), compared with McCain (56%). The candidates stressed policy (70%) more than character (30%), with Democrat Barack Obama stressing policy more, and character less, than Republican John McCain. In this debate, both general goals and ideals were employed more often as the basis for acclaims than for attacks, consistent with previous research.

Prior Success, Asset or Poison?: Leadership Failure of Korea`s CEO President, Lee Myung-bak

Lee Myung-Bak`s CEO-style leadership made him an unpopular president. This article explores how his leadership style developed and was reinforced throughout his professional career. It examines his professional experiences, identifies key traits of his leadership, and analyzes how they were projected in his policy initiatives. Lee`s leadership traits, developed in the private sector, made his term as mayor of Seoul successful and helped him win the presidency. But these same successes undermined his presidency. Because they led him to cling to his leadership style without modification, he failed to cope with the different environment surrounding the presidency.

Insiders, Outsiders, and Voters in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

[I]f you believe it's time to challenge the Washington politics ... to restore a sense of mission to our politics and a sense of possibility to America ... I ask you to believe in yourself I ask you to believe again in the dream that we call America. --Barack Obama (1) In New Orleans, McCain said the word or a variation of it more than 30 times in his speech--a sign that he knows what voters are looking for. --Holly Bailey (2) We have all been told that the 2008 presidential election was historic--not merely a consequential election, but a monumental moment in American history. This may, in fact, prove to be true. But in many ways, the 2008 presidential election was both predictable and quite comparable to a handful of past races. Consider that the 2008 election featured an incumbent party seeking a consecutive presidential victory, but burdened by a costly war, a sagging economy, and an unpopular president. The elections of 1952 and 1968--both of which produced a change in party control of the White House--were surely relevant touchstones. Both Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon pounded the incumbent administrations for their incompetence and malfeasance during their election campaigns, while promising to bring needed change and outside-the-Beltway sensibilities to Washington. Like those candidates, Barack Obama had a huge advantage and a clear path to the goal line in 2008. John McCain, on the other hand, needed to convince voters that a COP victory in 2008 would not constitute a third term for President George W. Bush. Because of these circumstances, both presidential campaigns attempted to capture the mantel of reform. Their core strategic assumption was abundantly clear: a candidate who could tap into voters' frustration with the policies and politics of the last few years could expect a substantial electoral bonanza. The most obvious manifestation of this belief is that much of the rhetoric of the 2008 presidential campaign involved words such as change, reform, outsider, and maverick. But the truth is that we do not know very much about the electoral implications of being a candidate in the United States. There is almost no empirical research on whether voters consider outsider candidates as better than insider candidates, or whether this particular distinction is even relevant to their political calculus. More specifically, there has been no systematic study of how the notion of politics played out in the 2008 presidential election. This study takes aim at this gap. We proceed in a straightforward manner. Initially, we propose using insights and assumptions from spatial theory to consider the nature of competition in U.S. presidential elections. Second, we examine data from the National Election Study (NES) from 1992 to 2004 to determine the number and character of dimensions structuring voters' perceptions of presidential candidates in those years. Third, we apply the same approach with data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to consider the possibility of a reform--establishment dimension in the Obama-McCain contest. Fourth, we use postelection survey data from the University of Texas at Austin's Government Department polls to more precisely estimate (1) the distribution of voters along a reform-establishment dimension, (2) their perceptions of where the candidates and parties fell along this dimension, and (3) the impact of these perceptions on presidential vote choice. Fifth and finally, we speculate about the pervasiveness and components of reform sentiments in future U.S. elections and policy debates. The Dimensions of Political Competition In studying the potential role of reformist sentiment and candidates in 2008, we assume that voters and candidates are rational actors who attempt to maximize their utility when deciding for whom to vote. …

Context and Strategy in Presidential Campaigns: Incumbency and the Political Climate

We propose and examine a theory of how the context of the political climate and incumbency interact to affect candidate strategies and their impact on candidate evaluations and the vote in presidential elections. From this theory, we generate four hypotheses. Two concern the difference between elections in which the incumbent runs as opposed to open seat races with a successor in-party candidate. The other two hypotheses concern the difference in evaluations of incumbents and successor candidates in open seat elections. The results indicate that open seat elections are less reflective of the political climate than incumbent elections, that incumbents experience higher highs and lower lows than successor candidates, that evaluations of successor candidates tend to be more muted representations of evaluations of incumbents, and that the vote in open seat races depends more heavily on how voters judge the successor candidate rather than the incumbent leaving office. The contextual campaign made a substantial difference in 2008, allowing John McCain to distance himself from the unpopular President Bush and to do significantly better in evaluations and at the polls than the incumbent would have.

The Presidential Election of 2008*

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain each has severe problems. McCain must take his distance from the very unpopular President Bush while keeping the support of the core Republican voters, but suffers from lack of rapport with the Fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Catholics. In foreign policy, he is more devoted to US global hegemony (in a world which stubbornly refuses it) than the incumbent. Senator Obama knows that this is a dangerous illusion but thinks that it is unwise to say so. He supports Israel in exaggerated terms and repeats the fabrications of the war party about Iran. Obama has the difficulty of being part black and entirely intellectual, and he needs the votes of the working class men and women who are very reserved about him. McCain seeks low taxes and less government expenditure and intervention, but tens of millions of economically hard‐pressed citizens are ready to return to the ethos and practices of the New Deal. Obama promises to revive the regulatory and redistributive role of government to help them, but his reluctance to criticise the arms budget may makes him seem unrealistic. Obama's vision of the United States puts the achievement of the American Revolution in the future whereas McCain thinks of the nation as already perfected. In many respects, we have a classical conflict between left and right.

Premier Science University Ousts Unpopular President

SEOUL—An ambitious experiment to have an outsider reform South Korea's top science education institution has come to an ignominious end. Last week, trustees of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon voted not to renew the contract of its first non-Korean president, Robert B. Laughlin.

The Public Presidency, Personal Approval Ratings, and Policy Making

In this article, I argue that personal popularity is less essential to how a president's public activities affect policy making than commonly presumed, and provide two types of evidence for this argument. First, I show that unpopular as well as popular presidents can increase their prospects for legislative success by appealing to the public. Second, I demonstrate that on prominent issues, unpopular presidents are no more likely than popular ones to take positions favored by mass opinion. After relating these findings to a perspective of the public presidency that differs from the conventional wisdom, I discuss enduring questions concerning the topic.

Branches Behaving Badly: The Predictable and Often Desirable Consequences of the Separation of Powers

At the intersection of law and politics, Republicans have continually run red lights, committed hit-and-runs, and otherwise flouted constitutional norms. At least that is what Professor Peter Shane would have us believe. In his provocative paper, Professor Shane argues that over the past two decades Republicans (especially those in Congress) have repeatedly violated separation of powers norms in a manner that evinces contempt for pluralism and the Constitution's separation of powers. Professor Shane essentially makes three points. First, separation of powers norms are increasingly fragile and have been violated as they never have been before, and that their wobbly state is bad for the nation. Second, Republicans are the norm-breakers. Third, they are normbreakers for reasons congenital to the modem Republican Party, a narrow party that is homogeneous, white, dominated by the right-wing, and thus hostile to the Constitution's separation of powers. I disagree with each of these claims. To begin with, we ought not to lament changing interbranch norms. Given the predictable interbranch friction in a system of separated powers, interbranch norms inevitably will change over time. The inescapable creation and destruction of interbranch norms is not a process to be feared or despised. What matters is not merely whether some institution has broken a norm, but whether the norm supposedly violated is one worth preserving. For instance, if there were a norm of rubberstamping treaties, few ought to shed tears if the Senate began to examine treaties more carefully. Hence, the mere fact that interbranch norms might have changed recently is not reason for anyone to fret or panic. Assuming that interbranch norms have been changing lately, it is not obvious that the Republicans deserve all the credit (or blame). In the past, congressional Democrats have taken many of the actions that Professor Shane protests (such as stalling judicial nominees or presenting presidents with all-or-nothing appropriation bills). Nonetheless, they escape his censure because they took these actions while opposing supposedly unpopular presidents. Yet a norm's application cannot depend upon something as mercurial and uncertain as popularity. We will be able to say very little that is sensible and consequential about norms and their violation if we also have to check the Gallup polls of the era. Indeed, it seems unlikely that an interbranch norm exists at all if it does not apply when one or more branches are unpopular and therefore weak. Rather, it would seem that meaningful norms exist only if they apply generally, regardless of whether the application of the norm would cater to public opinion. If Professor Shane truly cherishes these norms, he should direct at least some of his indignation at Democrats in Congress. Finally, contrary to what Professor Shane seems to argue, the Grand Old Party, for all its faults, has no beef with deliberative legitimacy. Nor is it opposed to democracy, accountability, or checks and balances.To be sure, it is opposed to the Democratic Party, and it may have had a hand in undermining some of the interbranch norms Professor Shane prizes. However, these facts do not mean that the Republicans are to be feared and loathed anymore than the Democratic Party should be feared and loathed for its opposition to the Republicans and its active participation in undermining the norms at issue. This is not to say that one cannot fault the Republicans for their politics and their policies. But to go further and claim that they are systematically hostile to the Constitution's checks and balances, or are somehow antidemocratic, as Professor Shane repeatedly claims, requires much more by way of evidence. Professor Shane simply has not made the case that the Republican Party is the party of angry, white, anti-separation of powers, antidemocratic, anti-deliberative, males.

The Price of Experience: The Constitution After September 11, 2001

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, will change how we read the Constitution, and they will diminish the value of the elegant abstraction of a famous court decision like Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. That new perspective will change far more than national security and separation of powers. Our understanding of the religion clauses, of the role of governors, of ethnic discrimination, and of what constitutes a compelling governmental interest are likely to change or may have already changed. The opinions of the Supreme Court are not the only sources of wisdom about reading the Constitution. Empiricism rests upon experience. In contrast, innocence is a priori reasoning untested by empiricism. Measured by the standard of wisdom bought with experience, the abstract erudition of Supreme Court decisions, including Youngstown, is unimpressive. For the thousands murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the orations in Youngstown about the separation of powers rang hollow: These victims lost not only liberty, but life. The carnage of September 11th will transform a new generation of Americans as much as Pearl Harbor transformed an earlier one.September 11th was an intense, common experience that informed us about the balance between individual liberty and collective security. To believe in the existence of evil is no longer to be regarded as superstitious, antiquarian, or fanatical. September 11th reminds us that the text of the Constitution is replete with references to war, because the same Framers who devised the separation of powers and later wrote the Bill of Rights also saw the need to be vigilant in a dangerous world. It is an exaggeration to say that everything is different now. The words of the Constitution have not changed since September 11th. It has always been the case that the first duty that Article II, section 2 imposes on the President is to be Commander-in-Chief. What has changed, through experience, is our collective understanding of why the government's highest obligation under the Constitution is to defend its citizens.With the collective experience of September 11th, we can now see, after years of self-indulgence masquerading as virtue, that liberty and security are more than abstractions to be manipulated in elegantly written Supreme Court opinions. A world of danger cannot be dismissed with pretty words. Youngstown is a poorly reasoned decision on both takings and separation-of-powers grounds. Was President Truman's seizure of the steel mills a legislative act, or was it a military act taken pursuant to his powers as Commander-in-Chief, in the defense of the free world in America's first open conflict of World War III? Justice Black's opinion for the Court so thoroughly denigrates the latter possibility that it runs the risk of overstating the case about the boundaries of presidential power in matters that genuinely do threaten national security, let alone matters that jeopardize the security of the entire free world. Read in this way, Youngstown is a power grab by the Court and Congress.Youngstown has an unstated premise that the threat to liberty from foreign aggression is less than the threat to liberty when the President claims expansive powers to defend the nation from such aggression. September 11th was an awakening, an epiphany, to the empirical fact - not the abstract notion - that America had underestimated the danger of deadly aggression on its soil. The collective experience of witnessing thousands of American civilians slaughtered on American soil by foreign terrorists on September 11, 2001, is far more important to reading the Constitution today than is a case that has been portrayed as the backlash to the legally clumsy attempt, by a famously unpopular President, to invoke national security as the justification for seizing steel mills during a labor dispute in 1952, an election year in which control of the White House subsequently shifted from one party to the other. So what guidance could we expect to glean from Youngstown after September 11, 2001, if President Bush were temporarily to conscript private property in the name of winning the war on terrorism? Not much, most likely. A modern replay of Youngstown during the war on terrorism would likely have a different result. September 11th is the page of history to Youngstown's volume of logic.

The Strange Deaths of President Harding

Available for the first time in paperback, The Strange Deaths of President challenges readers to reexamine Warren G. Harding's rightful place in American history. For nearly half a century, the twenty-ninth president of the United States has consistently finished last in polls ranking the presidents. After Harding's untimely death in 1923, a variety of attacks and unsubstantiated claims left the public with a tainted impression of him. In this meticulously researched scrutiny of the mystery surrounding Harding's death, Robert H. Ferrell, distinguished presidential historian, examines the claims against this unpopular president and uses new material to counter those accusations.At the time of Harding's death there was talk of his similarity, personally if not politically, to Abraham Lincoln. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes described Harding as one of nature's noblemen, truehearted and generous. But soon after Harding's death, his reputation began to spiral downward. Rumors circulated of the president's death by poison, either by his own hand or by that of his wife; allegations of an illegitimate daughter were made; and question were raised concerning the extent of Harding's knowledge of the Teapot Dome scandal and of irregularities in the Veterans' Bureau, as well as his tolerance of a corrupt attorney general who was an Ohio political fixer. Journalists and historians of the time added to his tarnished reputation by using sources that were easily available but not factually accurate.In The Strange Deaths of President Harding, Ferrell lays out the facts behind these allegations for the reader to ponder. Making the most of the recently opened papers of assistant White House physician Dr. Joel T. Boone, Ferrell shows that for years Harding suffered from high blood pressure, was under a great deal of stress, and overexerted himself; it was a heart attack that caused his death, not poison. There was no proof of an illegitimate child. And Harding did not know much about the scandals intensifying in the White House at the time of his death. In fact, these events were not as scandalous as they have since been made to seem.In this meticulously researched and eminently readable scrutiny of the mystery surrounding Harding's death, as well as the deathblows dealt his reputation by journalists, Ferrell asks for a reexamination of Harding's place in American history.

Admiral Didier Ratsiraka and the Malagasy Socialist Revolution

The people of Madagascar found themselves increasingly immersed in a veritable socio-economic and political quagmire from 1975 until 1993, with their highly unpopular President, Admiral Didier Ratsiraka, was removed from office. Many of those who had played such an important rôle in easing him into power in 1975 by being activists in Zatovo Western Andevo Madagasikara (Zwam), a coalition of angry students, intellectuals, peasants, as well as disaffected middle and upper class elements, were again on hand in 1993, but this time to jeer and curse him after the results of the presidential elections had been announced to a largely enthusiastic public. However, the apparently fickle temperament of Malagasy voters had been demonstrated before and, ironically, some members of the same disparate groups had cheered just as enthusiastically when President Philibert Tsiranana, the leader of the pro-French Parti social démocratique (PSD), had been forced to step down in 1972 in the face of their urban-led revolutionary movement centred in the capital, Tananarive (later renamed Antananarivo), only months after winning the presidential elections with over 99 per cent of the votes.

The Perils of Presidentialism

:Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan all have presidential systems, and in recent years have experienced many of the ills attributed to presidentialism by critics like Juan Linz, such as weak legitimacy, rigid terms, deadlock with the legislature, and efforts to impeach unpopular presidents. This article concludes that while Asian presidentialism manifests some of the problems of other presidential systems, it is not an institution in crisis as each country has used its democratic institutions, and particularly constitutional courts, to resolve these problems. Indeed, presidential systems better reflect underlying structural shifts in politics and are more likely to promote rapid political change than parliamentary ones.

What Moves Public Opinion?

Democratic theory must pay attention to what influences public opinion. In this study the content of network television news is shown to account for a high proportion of aggregate changes (from one survey to another) in U.S. citizens' policy preferences. Different news sources have different effects. News commentators (perhaps reflecting elite or national consensus or media biases) have a very strong positive impact, as do experts. Popular presidents tend to have positive effects, while unpopular presidents do not. In contrast, special interest groups tend to have a negative impact.