Presidential Leverage and the Politics of Policy ... - Wiley Online Library

Presidential Leverage and the Politics of Policy Formulation DANIEL E. PONDER Drury University

This article applies a concept of “presidential leverage” to the inner workings of the White House, specifically decisions regarding the location of policy formulation. The guiding question addresses how a president’s leverage in the political system influences decisions regarding policy making. Findings support the propositions that (1) leverage has a systematic impact on presidential policy formation, (2) divided government has little or no impact on policy making location, and (3) presidents who are ideologically compatible with Congress are less likely to centralize. I conclude with some general thoughts on the current state of presidential leverage.

When Terry Moe (1985) threw “The Politicized Presidency,” into the alleged backwater of presidency studies, its splash was immediate. Moe argued that the gap between public expectations heaped on the office of the presidency and the inability of individual presidents to meet those expectations (see also Lowi 1985; Huntington 1981) were linked to important developments in the institutional presidency, namely, the tendency for presidents to centralize policy making in the White House so as to more closely control policy content and to politicize the executive branch by placing presidential loyalists deep into the bureaucracy to influence implementation of those policies. Moe focused attention on institutional dynamics in the presidency, arguing that presidents react to the gap between public expectations and their capacity to meet those expectations by taking measures to control policy making and implementation. Many scholars soon evaluated various components of Moe’s framework (e.g., Lewis 2008; Ponder 2000; Rudalevige 2002; Rudalevige and Lewis 2005). At the same time, many scholars looked deeply into the public presidency (Edwards 1983; Kernell 2007).

Daniel E. Ponder is a professor of political science at Drury University. He specializes in American politics and institutions, and he is the author of Good Advice: Information and Policy Making in the White House. AUTHOR’S NOTE: My deepest thanks to Andy Rudalevige for access to his data and for continued support of this project. I also thank Julia Azari, Lara Brown, Matt Eshbaugh-Soha, Doug Lemke, and Jakana Thomas, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, for timely and insightful comments, questions, and challenges. Michael Means provided excellent research assistance. Presidential Studies Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June) © 2012 Center for the Study of the Presidency

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Few, however, explicitly linked these two areas of research.1 Not even Moe stepped in to bridge the gap, though his argument explicitly implicates both the public component (expectations gap) as well as the institutional (centralization and politicization). Recently, Jeffrey Cohen (2009) suggested linking the worlds of public and institutional parts of the presidency as a way to move scholarship forward. I take up Cohen’s challenge and focus on the institutional dynamic of the presidency in context of the president’s leverage afforded him by the public. In this article I link policy centralization to a concept of the public presidency I call “presidential leverage,” developed in a series of papers (e.g., Ponder 1996, 2005). Webster’s New World Dictionary (1982) defines leverage as “increased means of accomplishing some purpose” (812), and another as the “power to get things done,” such as exerting power over people with an advantage that is not openly referred to (Microsoft Encarta Dictionary 1982). I apply these definitions to resources presidents derive from their public standing, and I discuss them in more detail below. Here, by way of introduction, presidential leverage reflects the public’s assessment of the president relative to trust in government and systematizes a state of affairs wherein presidents can derive influence over American politics. This state of affairs reflects the part of the definition that holds leverage is “not referred to openly,” as would be the case with presidential approval or constitutional prerogatives (Microsoft Encarta Dictionary 1982). The index of presidential leverage that I develop below signals when conditions are ripe for presidents to act, but it is decidedly not the same or even as obvious as when a president has high approval.2 The working thesis is that presidential leverage plays a significant role in influencing location of public policy making and that the linkage of this determination is a strategic short-term good for presidents. I argue that as presidential leverage increases, presidents will centralize less because their status in the public mind provides a “warrant” (Skowronek 1993) to reach outside the White House to comfortably take advantage of the policy expertise in the bureaucracy without losing control of that content.3 For theoretical reasons developed below, these presidents are less likely to centralize, more likely to procure innovative and complex policies, and perhaps more likely to enjoy congressional success (though I do not directly test this final assertion). Additionally, I show that presidents are largely free from their party’s internal moorings (though Democrats are more likely to centralize than are Republicans), and instead respond more acutely to public cues of their place in the American system and the resultant authority that conditions their strategic choices. The article proceeds as follows. The next section develops the concept of presidential leverage. Next, I establish the mechanism linking the public presidency with the 1. See Villalobos and Vaughn (2009) for a recent exception. 2. For example, in 1991 when President George H. W. Bush enjoyed very high leverage (see below), he did not actively pursue an active agenda, either in terms of increased proposals, nor more “important” legislation (Ponder n.d.). Indeed, in January 1991, when Bush was near the peak of his popularity (and leverage), his chief of staff, John Sununu, was asked how much remained on Bush’s domestic agenda and replied simply, “Not that much” (Corrigan 2008, 72). This signal of inactivity may have led in part to the President’s electoral defeat less than two years later. Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for making this suggestion. 3. I develop this mechanism and the linkage of the public and institutional presidencies below.

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propensity of presidents to centralize policy making or delegate to the bureaucracy (Ponder 2000; Rudalevige 2002; Rudalevige and Lewis 2005). From this framework, I derive testable hypotheses. I then briefly describe the data and methods necessary to test the hypotheses and then present the findings. The final section concludes and offers thoughts on the Obama administration as an out-of-sample example.

The Public Context: The Concept of Presidential Leverage The concept of presidential leverage considers presidents in context of public attitudes toward the American political system writ large. Perhaps no modern president understands this better than President Bill Clinton, who remarked that 1994 was one of the worst years of his life (Clinton 2004), culminating in the loss of Democratic control of Congress and the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich and the “Republican Revolution.” Clinton’s approval ratings fell from a reasonably healthy 54% in January to just 39% in September and was marked by the president’s inability to pass much of his own program through a Democratic Congress. Nearly a half year after the election, April 18, 1995, a questioner asked the president if his voice would be hard to hear with so much attention heaped on the Republicans. In what must be considered a low point in his presidency, Clinton responded with a plaintive wail, protesting “The president is relevant. The Constitution gives me relevance” (Harris 2005, 178).4 Ironically, Clinton’s political fortunes began to turn around immediately thereafter. Clinton, looking and sounding presidential, reassured a stunned, scared, and grieving nation, after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He also benefited from two government shutdowns when the public blamed both on the congressional Republicans. And with that, the president’s political resurrection had begun. While in 1994 Clinton lacked political leverage (while many in his party abandoned him), he not only reclaimed it in 1995 and 1996, but the public’s verdict conditioned his resurgence. Presidents do have constitutional prerogatives such as the threat and employment of the veto power (which certainly helped Clinton in the fight over the budget and subsequent government shutdown), but they are not the only things (see Neustadt 1960; Howell 2003). Approval by itself is something presidents can seek, but the context in which they act relative to other institutions is telling. In this simple example, Clinton’s approval was down dramatically in the space of a year, public confidence in the presidency declined 5% from 1993 levels, while confidence in Congress (never high) was up in 1994 and 1995, but declined slightly into 1996 (Ragsdale 1998, 250-51). But where public trust in government was down steadily in 1995 and 1996, Clinton’s stock grew both personally (approval) and institutionally (confidence in the 4. Clinton refers to the press conference in his memoir, but does not reference his “relevance” quote. He does point out that he agreed with some parts of the contract, that there were some points of potential compromise, and that he could use the veto if no agreement could be reached (see Clinton 2004, 650).


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presidency). Thus, in terms of the president’s place in the context of a larger picture of American politics, President Clinton’s leverage increased beginning later in 1995, and in 1996 he was easily reelected.5 This example illustrates a number of dynamics that together make up presidential leverage. Naturally, presidential approval plays an important role. Presidents have come to believe that public opinion and approval is vital for their success (e.g., Brace and Hinckley 1992). Timing of policy proposals, speech making, travel schedules, and so forth, are often linked to presidential approval. While presidents do try to use public approval, recent research has shown that public approval has at best a mixed effect on areas of vital importance to presidents such as policy success in Congress (Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards 1989, 2003; Fett 1994; Peterson 1990; Sullivan 1990). Approval as it is normally measured takes account of the president bereft of context, independent of competing institutions. Stimson (2004) shows that presidential approval tracks well with a number of different macro indicators, such as the public’s perception of the economy. Still, there are times that presidential approval outpaces or lags behind similar readings of competing institutions, particularly Congress. In such circumstances, presidents can gain strategic advantage, or “leverage,” over their competitor institutions in both the political and policy realms.6 Because it measures the individual president’s standing with the public, approval serves as the numerator in the measurement of presidential leverage. Political trust is the denominator. As Elaine C. Kamarck has it, “the evolving American state is being powerfully shaped by negative attitudes towards government among Americans” (2009, 1). In a separated system (Jones 1994), trust provides the context for political action. Hetherington (2005) argues that trust is not simply a matter of public attitude toward government but has real policy implications. For example, political trust drives support for policies that target underprivileged sectors of society (e.g., the poor), and if trust is lacking, the political will to address issues, such as race, health care reform, and spending, is similarly lacking.7 Levels of political trust have varied over time. Most agree that trust was reasonably high through the mid-1960s but fell afterward during Vietnam and Watergate. While some argue that trust waxes and wanes with factors such as the economy and events (e.g., Stimson 2004), others find trust remains persistently low, though subject to a fair amount of variation (Kamarck 2009; Keele 2007; Nye, Zelikow, and King 1997). Even if trust stays low, presidential leverage reflects the notion that presidents can find themselves at low or high points relative to that level of trust, placing them in context of American politics and institutions, and thus conditions the types of policies and constituencies that can be targeted (Hetherington 2005). Indeed, the separation of powers system often challenges the president more than individual members of Congress, who respond to the 5. I draw on the measure of trust in government from Keele (2003). I trace these developments and describe the empirical and quantitative properties of leverage below. 6. For example, Diane Heith argues that presidents use public opinion, even beyond simple approval or popularity, as a “strategic and purposeful tool, not simply as a barometer of the public environment” (Heith 2000, 381-82). 7. See Hetherington (2005, esp. chaps. 5, 6, and 7).

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parochial interests of their constituencies (Ponder and Moon 2005). Thus, political trust is an appropriate contextual denominator because, rather than measuring leverage as a “horse race” between institutions, such as Congress or the presidency, that would reflect which one is up and which is down, trust allows for the contextualization of the presidency in the larger political system and the policies that are possible within that system at a given time. Therefore, the concept of presidential leverage measures the president’s “place” in the political system. Unlike approval, for which presidents invest great amounts of time and effort to acquire, leverage measures a “feeling” or a situation, placing the individual president squarely within the political system. I discuss below what this means politically, but here note that presidential leverage also reflects the degree to which the public distinguishes between the president, the presidency, and the government as a whole, affording a glimpse at a president’s public place in this relationship. Interestingly, the president as an individual is almost always held in greater esteem than is the institution of the presidency. For example, Ponder (2005) demonstrates that between 1966 and 1994, presidential approval and public confidence in the presidency moved in the same direction, but approval almost always outpaced confidence. Additionally, there was no correlation between presidential approval and public confidence in the presidency (91). Extending that analysis to 1996, the outer boundary of the present study, I find only a slight correlation between presidential approval and confidence in the presidency and only if I stretch statistical significance levels to .10 (zero-order r = .29; p = .07, one-tailed). Similarly, I find no significant relationship between confidence in the presidency and political trust (r = . 16, p = .20, one-tailed).8 This implies that the public views the president separate from the presidency as an institution, even if the institution is simply another part of a government to be distrusted, while the individual occupant of the Oval Office is to be evaluated on his own. Presidents can use leverage strategically so as to maximize their power potential. The notion of the president’s public standing to attitudes toward government as a whole derives in part from Stephen Skowronek’s observation that “Presidents stand preeminent in American politics when government has been most thoroughly discredited, and when political resistance to presidency is weakest, presidents tend to remake the government wholesale” (1993, 37). Indeed, at one level, presidential leverage can be conceived of as having a familial resemblance to Skowronek’s “warrant” for power, by which he means a kind of license or authority to put political power into action (1993, esp. chaps. 2 and 3). Skowronek argues that these warrants are contingent on the political time in which presidents’ serve. Leverage is similar in that it systematically measures or quantifies this contingency and identifies when a president truly does “stand preeminent” in American politics. This state of affairs obtains when leverage is high. When government action (or inaction) has left the public wanting, distrustful, and/or skeptical of political action, presidents may enjoy leverage over competing institutions and thus feel emboldened to 8. I ran these correlations only out to the outer bound of this study, which is 1996. In other diagnostics, when I reran the analysis up through 2000, even the magnitude of the insignificant correlation disappeared entirely (r = -.02) and significance dropped dramatically (p = .93). All diagnostics are available from the author.


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increase the variety of their public policy proposals, perhaps realizing increased policy success in the legislative arena. Presidential leverage conveys how presidents (via the imperfect measure of presidential approval) fare in the presence of public attitudes in the other institutions of government, with specific reference to trust in government. When the public lacks trust in other institutions and the president is able to rise above those institutions, he builds distance between himself and the beleaguered institutions of government; on the downside, he may sense he has more of a warrant for action than is actually the case (see Schlesinger 1973; Skowronek 1993).9 Similar too is Charles O. Jones’s consideration of “leeway.” Jones sees leeway as “essentially an exercise in capitalizing on the conspicuous features of separationism . . . encouraged in post-World War II politics by the frequency of split party government” (2000, 6). Leeway is similar to Skowronek’s warrants in that they both imply that presidents can use structural and institutional contexts to forge their own paths, perhaps working outside the boundaries of what might be acceptable or predictable. Leverage focuses on the public dimension of presidential action, and presidents with considerable leverage can further veer “off course” and take advantage of the “feeling,” however temporary, that they are “first among equals” with the leverage to set the course of American politics.10 Leverage, broadly conceived, derives from and builds upon these insights into presidential authority. I conceive it not as antagonistic to “warrants” or “leeway,” but rather as part of a cumulative process that helps explain presidential action where presidents can assert, however intuitively, leverage over the course of American politics and public policy. One caveat should be noted and made clear. I do not conceive of leverage as “better” or a stronger predictor than simple presidential approval as traditionally conceived and measured. Rather, I conceptualize leverage as a more nuanced view of the president within the American political system. While my concept of presidential leverage does have a more substantial predictive capacity than presidential approval,11 I make no claim that this will always be the case, or that scholars should abandon the study of approval. The purpose of this article and the larger study from which it derives is to explore the contours and nuance of contextualizing approval this way, where it helps us understand the presidency, and where its limitations lie, both empirically and theoretically. Having outlined broad strokes of presidential leverage, I turn now to the simple schematic diagram in Figure 1, which illustrates the dynamic of leverage. As noted, leverage is measured as the ratio of a president’s approval to the public’s level of trust in government as a whole, and expressed as 9. I will return to this briefly in the conclusion, and consider the current state of American politics. I expand upon this in the larger project from which this article derives. 10. I explore this in considerable detail in a book manuscript I am preparing on the subject of presidential leverage. In that manuscript, I explore the causes and consequences of leverage for variance in agenda setting, administrative or unitary action, macropolicy outcomes, and interinstitutional relationships. These fall well outside the parameters of this study, which offers a perspective on micropolitics, namely, where individual policy proposals are made. 11. In a replication of the probit analysis presented below, I tested presidential approval by itself as a diagnostic to determine relative predictive capacity. In those runs, the probit coefficients were miniscule (-.013) and were not significant at the .05, two-tailed significance level.

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Negative 0

“Draw”

Presidential Leverage in Excess of Competing Institutions

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FIGURE 1. A Schematic Depiction of Presidential Leverage.

IPL =

President’s Approval t Public Trust in Government

So measured, leverage yields a series of coefficients, one specific to each president in a given time period such as a month, quarter, or year. The index has a domain of 0 to positive infinity. The higher the coefficient, the more the president stands “paramount” in the American political system, and thus the more leverage he enjoys. Lower values of the coefficient mean less leverage. For example, if the index of presidential leverage falls below 1.0 (IPL < 1.0), then the president is in a range of “negative leverage,” where the public exhibits a higher degree of trust in government than it approves of the president. As the value of the coefficient approaches 1.0 (IPL ª 1), the position of the president is roughly equivalent to competing institutions; he has no real leverage, nor is he particularly disadvantaged or in the domain of negative leverage. I label this area at about 1.0 a “draw.” Finally, if leverage climbs above 1.0 (IPL > 1.0), the president enjoys positive leverage wherein the public places him above and perhaps distinct from the level of trust it places in the government writ large. The higher the value of the coefficient, the more leverage he has, and the more government has been laid bare, to paraphrase Skowronek, and the more the president stands preeminent.

Tracking Presidential Leverage through Time How does the concept of leverage map onto what we know about the environment of presidential activity? Data for the dependent variable are available only through 1996, but leverage can be tracked through time into the present day.12 Figure 2 tracks the coefficient of presidential leverage over time. As discussed above, the coefficient reflects the ratio of presidential approval to public trust in government13 ranging in time from the last part of Dwight Eisenhower’s administration through the first of Bill Clinton’s two terms. While there are similarities between approval and trust (see Stimson 2004), the two series do not map perfectly on one another, with only about 25% of the variance in trust explained by approval (zero-order correlation is .50, p = .001). Figure 2 shows that while public trust in government was extremely high in the early part of the series, 12. In Ponder (n.d.), I bring the data set for presidential leverage forward in time, though the fact that trust and confidence related questions do not exist before 1958 limits the scope of the theory to presidents since that time. 13. The approval series is the traditional Gallup poll question on presidential approval; the trust series is adapted from Keele (2003); and the leverage series is the ratio of approval to trust. More detail is provided below.


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1.80

Presidential Leverage

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0.40 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

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FIGURE 2. Presidential Leverage, 1958-96.

so were annual levels of presidential approval. When measured as a ratio, presidents such as Eisenhower and Kennedy did not register extremely high on the leverage scale because public trust in government was similarly high, giving presidents no special standing from which to claim outstanding warrants for action. Indeed, one of the main strengths of presidential leverage is that it is conceptualized as a relative measure, meaning that high approval ratings are neither necessary nor sufficient for high leverage. The measure clearly has face validity. Not surprisingly, the lowest leverage value registers in the last year of Nixon’s presidency, the tumultuous final throes of the Watergate crisis. The index’s first peak appears in 1977, likely explained by the fact that Carter was the first truly post-Watergate president. By this time, the presidency had been somewhat scaled back by Congress with the passage of the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act and the War Powers Resolution, the latter of which passed over Nixon’s veto. Still, government trust was at one of its lowest points in the time series, with a score of 42.78, almost one standard deviation below the series mean of nearly 50. Carter’s average approval that year was just over 62%, producing a leverage index of 1.45. Thus, when placed in context, the observation that Carter registered the second highest leverage score is not terribly surprising, especially as the coefficient declines throughout the rest of his term, reflecting continuing public dissatisfaction with his presidency, high oil and gas prices, stagflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis. The index finds its second (and highest) peak in 1991, the year of George H. W. Bush’s triumph in the Gulf War. In that year, government trust was even lower than in

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Carter’s first year, scoring 41.78, but Bush’s average approval (having hit 89% at its zenith in April of that year) was 73.25%, yielding a score of 1.75, the highest in the series, a rating not approached by any other president. The index fluctuates throughout the Reagan years, dips as expected during the Iran-Contra affair, and again at the very beginning of the Bush administration. It rebounds in 1991 during the Gulf War, but plummets soon afterward making possible Bill Clinton’s ascension to the presidency. While the index does vary somewhat, it generally increases over time. By way of comparison, presidential approval (not shown here in isolation) does not show any monotonic trend, varies about an equilibrium point, and ebbs and flows according to regular patterns, generally high in an administration’s early months, then decreasing, exhibiting both peaks and troughs (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). Leverage, on the other hand, generally increases, with the major exception being the precipitous Watergate decline. The increase over time is due not simply to presidential approval, but to the decreasing levels of public trust in government in general (likely reflected by declining trust in Congress in particular). Thus, presidents are in some respects the only (or perhaps the best) game in town for the public, at least as far as the elected branches are concerned. The measure captures some of what Skowronek and others have elaborated, namely, the public’s perception of the relationship between the president and his institutional counterparts. By utilizing presidential popularity, it captures essential features of the interaction between the public and the president; by utilizing an average of trust measures, it considers global institutional assessments, be they crude or sophisticated.14 This ratio thus captures one (though certainly not the only) element of the individual president in relation to the entirety of government institutions, especially the institutional context and the public.

Linking the Institutional and Public Presidencies In a recent symposium on the state of presidency research, Jeff Cohen (2009) suggests one possible way for presidency studies to progress is to link two of the great developments in the modern presidency: the rise of the public presidency, the institutional presidency, comprising the White House staff and the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Presidents seek to increase their influence over both by maximizing the responsiveness of their own “presidential branch” (Hart 1995) to their policy and political preferences. Politicization and centralization are the cornerstones of a strategy to increase presidential influence over the bureaucracy and the scope of policy making in the White House (Moe 1985; Rudalevige 2002). Politicization plants presidential loyalists 14. Presidential approval and its functional components has been the subject of a deep, rich, and voluminous literature. I will not attempt here to provide a comprehensive set of citations, but see Kernell (1978), Ostrom and Simon (1985), and Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch (1995) for attempts to model the dynamic properties of presidential approval. See Gronke and Newman (2009) for an overview of the factors that shape public evaluations of the president.


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deep into the bureaucracy via the appointments power. Doing so, in theory, ensures that presidential policy will be responsive to his preferences.15 Similarly, presidents will sometimes centralize policy making in the White House so that policy proposals reflect the preferences of the president. Keeping policy making close presumably allows presidents and their staff to control policy content without having that content “tainted” by Congress, groups, agencies, or departments outside the walls of 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Therefore, politicization and centralization are responses to presidential incentives proffered by developments in the larger political system, not least the decline of political parties (e.g., Moe 1985; Weko 1995). Not all policies are centralized, of course. Presidential and staff time are at a premium, and they are hardly immune from “bounded rationality” (Simon 1957). This theory observes that humans are limited by both time and cognitive capacity, and therefore must usually forego the opportunity to systematically determine the “best” possible alternative, and instead “satisfice,” finding the first alternative that will work for immediate purposes. In Good Advice, Ponder (2000) developed a framework for analyzing and categorizing the use of the White House staff according to the incentives, interest, and use of the presidents.16 The analysis begins with an understanding of presidential preferences and incentives, holding that presidential preferences are conditioned by the incentives of the political system. Presidents have “pure preferences,” which are what they would implement if they were “dictator,” and “realistic preferences,” which are what they will pursue, the timing with which they will pursue them, and the location of policy construction based on the prevailing political winds, which together form the incentive structure wherein presidents operate. These incentives, like “realistic” preferences, are variable, can change over time, and are at least partly influenced by circumstances outside the White House. The incentives include, inter alia, the congressional context, party politics, interest group pressures, and public opinion. Linking the public and institutional presidencies via presidential leverage derives from the logic of presidential incentives to centralize or decentralize policy processes. Presidents are faced with a decision to centralize, mix, or decentralize policy, and Ponder (2000) argues that while presidential staff play an important part in all of these processes, the nature of staff involvement shifts depending on factors individual to each president (agenda priority, for example) or contextual considerations (political environment, complexity of the policy issue, and the like).17 In seeking influence over policy, presidents tend to pursue politicization and centralization as substitutes (Rudalevige and Lewis 2005). In a study of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1989 and 2004, Villalobos and Vaughn (2009) show that high approval increased the likelihood of politicization, arguing that presidents have more “leeway” when their approval is high.

15. Lewis (2008) shows that doing so is not always in the president’s best interest. He finds an inverse relationship between the number of political appointees in an agency and the performance quality of that agency. 16. The following relies heavily on Ponder (2000, 31-38). Readers are referred there for a full accounting of the theoretical justifications and empirical analysis. 17. See also Rudalevige (2002).

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Building on these insights, I argue that higher leverage presidents are more likely to decentralize, and lower leveraged (weaker) presidents will centralize more. Stronger presidents are given more leeway ( Jones 2000) and act on their perceived warrants for action (Skowronek 1993). The mechanism driving the policy location decision derives from the overlap of public opinion and leeway. Consider the case of the “weak” or lower-leveraged presidents. These presidents may protect what they want with the hope of passing an agenda. They centralize to protect their policy proposals from potentially hostile adversaries in American politics. As Ponder notes, “political concerns become so intractable that the technical substance of policy is used as a bargaining tool between the political and policy dimensions” (2000, 8). Of course, not all presidents who centralize are politically weak; indeed there is some variation in propensity to centralize within, as well as across, presidencies. Presidents who centralize sacrifice policy expertise in order to control the political definition of policy, but, as Rudalevige (2002) demonstrates, control often dissipates, as centralized policies are less likely to pass in Congress. Still, congressional success cannot always be equated with political success.18 Nonetheless, lowerleverage presidents may need to centralize more so as to protect their agenda items from other political imperatives, such as Congress, political opponents, or even their own partisans, when brand-name politics is at stake. Stronger presidents have the luxury of relying on the bureaucracy, taking advantage of information gains from trade.19 The primary good offered to presidents by executive agents is expertise. Indeed, bureaucratic expertise provides presidents with a substantive advantage in influencing the congressional agenda throughout his term, particularly on issues that are technical and somewhat less salient than others (Larocca 2006, esp. chap. 4). Thus, presidents have access to a sort of responsive expertise, and buttress that policy faithfulness with an increased likelihood of prevailing in the legislative process (Rudalevige 2002). Bureaucratic expertise can work to the president’s advantage in a number of ways, but only if the president can assert political control over policy content for both competing institutions and to score political points with the public (Ponder 2000). Thus, it is at this point that the public dimension overlaps with policy construction. Examples gleaned from the literature on presidential policy and public activities illustrate the point. For instance, Eshbaugh-Soha (2006) argues that presidential speeches are in part efficient signals to bureaucrats and other agents as to the president’s objectives. I contribute to this literature by arguing that high leverage presidents by definition have more credibility with the public, and this enables them to control the definition of issues. Thus, they are able to expend some leverage to employ staff resources as a powerful

18. Ponder (2000) argues that in the Carter administration, the youth employment initiative was a success, even though it did not pass in Congress, for it remained true to the president’s stated goals and preferences. The creation of the Department of Education, while it passed in Congress, was classified as a policy failure because the end product had been almost entirely stripped of what the president wanted. 19. See Krehbiel (1991) for an overview of the concept as applied to American political institutions, in this case, Congress. See Ponder (2000) for an application to the presidency.


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monitor, leaving much of the policy content to bureaucratic agents under the watchful eye of the president’s policy staff (Ponder 2000).20 Presidential priorities are likely to be more centralized (Rudalevige 2002). For high-leverage presidents, this may reflect an incentive to centralize priorities mixed with a tendency to look to complex items that may have larger impact. Indeed, Ponder (forthcoming) shows that high presidential leverage leads to greater success on big ticket items and historic legislation. Thus, whereas members of Congress are likely to use public cues such as approval for decreasing uncertainty, presidents can use leverage as a barometer to gauge the likelihood of seeing their warrants clearly and taking chances accordingly.

Strategies of Presidential Policy Making In his classic study of change in presidential bargaining strategies, Samuel Kernell (2007) argues that the American political system has moved from a relatively small set of bargaining actors (“institutionalized pluralism”) to a fragmented, highly complex network of actors with a stake in bargaining outcomes (“individualized pluralism”). Extending this insight and applying it to presidential policy making, Ponder argued that such an atomistic system leads presidents to delegate policy making to the executive branch well outside the cozy confines of the EOP but that White House staff activity will always be prevalent, though not always as the primary manufacturer of that policy. Thus, “staff shift” suggests that policy making will run the gamut from fully centralized in the White House to fully decentralized to the bureaucracy (though in the latter case, it is likely to be only to agencies which are sufficiently politicized). Staff involvement shifts in accordance with presidential preferences located within a strategic context (Ponder 2000). Detailed below are Ponder’s categories, mirroring my coding of the dependent variable estimated in below. Staff as Director. Politically charged issues are likely to be centralized, and staff acts as the “director” of policy making so as to ensure a high degree of responsiveness. Bureaucrats in the executive branch are thus largely responsible for implementation rather than a source of independent authority. 20. An issue that naturally arises here is that of presidential compatibility with bureaucratic agencies. While full consideration of this topic is outside the scope of the present work, future research could explore the degree that presidential leverage may have an effect on policy formulation location. One possible, perhaps counterintuitive hypothesis could be that high-leverage presidents who are less ideologically compatible with an agency may delegate to those agencies relatively more than low leverage presidents, given the considerations addressed above. For example, low-leveraged presidents may be less likely to be successful at controlling the political definition of their policies (but highly motivated to do so) unless they centralize, be less credible with the public, and thus be less willing to delegate policy construction to agencies with which they have little in common ideologically. High-leverage presidents can use that leverage to raise salience, be more credible with voters and, perhaps, with Congress (as an extension), and thus more likely (though perhaps not to a far greater amount) to delegate to less compatible presidents. Regardless, this would be one of several exploratory hypotheses, but for now it is, as noted, well outside the parameters of this study. See Clinton and Lewis (2008) for a systematic effort to measure agency ideology separate from the personnel who staff those agencies.

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Staff as Facilitator. If a policy cuts across numerous department or agency jurisdictions, presidents centralize less often, preferring to obtain gains from expertise, and thus act as “facilitators,” coordinating the work of departments and agencies, playing a developmental role themselves, but by necessity neither controlling nor fully delegating the formulation of a particular policy. Staff as Monitor. Finally, policy formulation can be fully delegated to external agencies. The White House staff can, and often does, maintain a role in supervising the content in what might be referred to as a policy of “decentralized centralization.” In other words, departments and/or agencies can make policy, but the White House staff monitors the content and maintains “creative control” over the final outcome. This is similar to the process of legislative clearance wherein policies are cleared with the White House to make sure they are consistent with the president’s program. Staff monitors bureaucrats in times of high leverage. Bureaucrats do not have reelection incentives, but a president’s leverage and the leeway and warrants that vary with that leverage ground and guide executive decision makers. The public component plays an important role but not in the same way that members of Congress will use public opinion as a means to decrease uncertainty. Rather, leverage acts as a signal quantifying the president’s place in institutional context (see also Kamarck 2009). If leverage and centralization are correlated, the arrow of causality most likely flows from presidential leverage to the decision to centralize. However, it should not be interpreted that leverage itself represents a public preference against centralization; rather leverage provides the president with an advantageous strategic position, and he is less threatened by the political context, making it more likely that policy will be decentralized. With the exception of high-profile policy initiatives (such as the Clinton and Obama health care reform efforts), the public is unlikely to know (or even care) whether the policy proposal is centralized or decentralized.21 Clinton’s effort at health care reform was scuttled in part because political opposition successfully branded the process as closed off and elitist; in short, opposition forces were successful at redefining what the president was trying to do, much to the detriment of the administration and its reform effort.22 When the stakes are high, it is often to the president’s advantage to decentralize policy making for political reasons (such as cultivating inclusiveness), or policy expediency, such as when the issue is complex or cuts across department and agency jurisdictions (see Ponder 2000; Rudalevige 2002). Thus, leverage allows presidents to politicize and makes centralization less necessary. My expectation is that presidents with high levels of leverage will centralize less, and I explain why below. As noted above, Rudalevige and Lewis (2005) argue that while strategies of centralization and politicization are geared toward the same end (i.e., greater responsiveness to presidential programs), they act as substitutes rather than complements. Presidents 21. Villalobos and Vaughn (2009, 444-45) make basically the same argument in reference to presidential incentives to politicize the bureaucracy. 22. Skowronek (1993) argues that successful presidents protect the meaning of what they are trying to accomplish, fending off opposition attempts to paint them in the most negative light possible. This, it seems to me, is what largely accounts for the failure of Clinton’s attempts at health care reform.


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who have a store of responsive agents in the relevant bureaucracies are less likely to centralize because they simply do not need to do so. Conversely, if they do not have presidential loyalists in place in the executive branch, they are more likely to pull policy making inward to the White House, controlling policy from the center. Adding a public component to the politicization argument, Villalobos and Vaughn (2009) show that presidents with higher policy-specific approval are more likely to politicize the Council of Economic Advisers. Combining these two perspectives, my expectation is that presidents who enjoy higher levels of presidential leverage will centralize less because they are somewhat more likely to politicize the executive branch. Thus, stronger presidents will centralize less than weaker presidents. A paradox emerges, though, in that that centralization is often used by publicly weak presidents to play defense, but a centralized measure is less likely to find success in Congress than a decentralized one (Rudalevige 2002). Still, as Ponder (2000) notes, presidents closely guard the nature and definition of their program, particularly when they are weak and can make this argument publicly. If they are going to lose on a policy issue, then they need to publicly control the definition of that loss and control the content so they can plausibly argue that though they “lost,” they were faithful to their core beliefs. In sum, given the findings of Villalobos and Vaughn (2009) and Rudalevige and Lewis (2005), I expect that presidential leverage will be negatively associated with centralization, reflecting the contention that politicization and centralization are substitutes and that more publicly popular presidents are more likely to politicize.23 Thus, the first and second hypotheses: H1: As presidential leverage increases, centralization of policy making decreases. H2: As the percent of merit service employees increases, presidents will centralize less.

Divided Government and Political Ideology Much ink has been spilled trying to determine whether divided government has any significant impact on policy outcomes. Scholars such as David Mayhew (1991) and Keith Krehbiel (1998) (though Krehbiel approaches the subject from a largely nonpartisan framework) argue that divided government does not matter much in the production of significant legislation and the incidence of congressional investigations of the executive (Mayhew) or policy gridlock (Krehbiel). Presidents in periods of divided government may be less amenable to decentralization since executive agencies have their own relationships with Congress (Rudalevige 2002). Congress and its committees serve “two masters” as they fall under the executive branch but are responsible to Congress, 23. I ran a simple regression estimating the percentage of the bureaucracy covered by merit protection as a function of presidential leverage and various other covariates (such as a time counter and dummys for the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and new presidents). The coefficients for leverage on politicization were in the same predicted direction regardless of the specification (high leverage led to greater civil service protection), but not statistically significant.

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particularly for their funding. Presidents are in competition to maintain control over executive agencies in the face of stiff congressional competition. Thus, the claims of Mayhew and Krehbiel notwithstanding, I hypothesize that divided government is likely to have a positive effect on centralization. H3: Presidents will centralize more in periods of divided government.

Presidential Ideology and Congressional Strategy The past two decades or so have witnessed promising advances in political scientists’ ability to measure directly unobservable phenomena. Among the most valuable have been the contribution of legislative scholars, such as Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (2008) among others, to measure, albeit imperfectly, the ideological predispositions of political actors, particularly members of Congress. Their NOMINATE scores map roll call votes onto member choice and produce a left-right continuum bounded on each side by 1 and -1. The closer a member is to 0, the more “moderate” she is, while scores located toward 1 on either end denote various degrees of liberalism or conservatism (positive numbers denote conservative positions, and negative numbers indicate liberalism). Recently, their work has been supplemented with estimates, which “pretend” that the president is simply another member of Congress, and estimates presidential ideology.24 For purposes of comparison, I measured ideological distances between the president and other institutional actors. When comparing presidents to Congress, some interesting patterns emerge. In general, presidential NOMINATE scores are strongly correlated to those of presidential copartisans in the House (zero-order Pearson’s r = .94) and the Senate (zero-order Pearson’s r = .78). But since divided government is often the status quo in American politics, it makes sense to look closer at the relationship of the president to Congress in ways other than simply intraparty compatibility. Most any theoretical framework seeking to explain presidential strategy takes some account of the president’s relationship with Congress since the final proposal will often be constructed with the knowledge of an eventual congressional encounter where the proposal will live or die. Usually, this is done by simply conceptualizing presidential strength in Congress as a function of the number of copartisans in each chamber. However, as much research has shown, a relatively large number of presidential copartisans is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for presidential success (see, inter alia, Bond and Fleisher 1990; Jones 1994; Krehbiel 1998; Mayhew 1991). If partisan strength is not consistently linked to legislative success in Congress, there is no robust theoretical expectation that it should play a part in strategic calculations as to the “front end” of agenda activity, which is the setting and construction of a presidential policy plan. Since presidents cannot necessarily count on partisan support in Congress (witness the case of Jimmy Carter), I employ an alternative measure of presidential strength, 24. An interesting and very accessible description of the project can be found in Keith T. Poole, “NOMINATE: A Short Intellectual History” at http://www.voteview.com/nominate/nominate.htm, and the data can be found at www.voteview.com (accessed December 3, 2011).


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namely, Congressional Compatibility, requiring more than a mere counting of partisan seats. Thus, I measure presidential compatibility with Congress by measuring the ideological distance between the president and the median member of Congress, regardless of the party identification of that member. Since research has shown that presidential strategy in Congress is paramount and that context matters (Collier 1997; Rudalevige 2002; Sullivan 1990), I examine the absolute value of the difference between presidential first dimension NOMINATE scores and that of the median member of Congress.25 The greater this distance (i.e., the larger the number), the less compatible is the president with Congress. Following others (Ponder 2005; Rudalevige 2002), I expect the compatibility coefficient to be positive. Conversely, the more compatible the presidentialcongressional relationship, the less likely the president is to centralize, instead reaching out to the bureaucracy, Congress, interest groups, and the like.26 Since presidents are likely to include Congress in their calculation of the context, less ideologically compatible presidents are more likely to centralize the policy process (see also Rudalevige 2002, esp. chaps. 5 and 6). Still, the measure of congressional compatibility may not tell the whole story, and divided or unified government may play a role separate from ideological predisposition. Therefore, in the model below, I included a dummy variable for Divided Government (1 = yes).27 H4: As the distance between presidents and the median member of Congress increases, presidents will centralize more.

Variables and Measurement I employ leverage along data collected by Andrew Rudalevige (2002) for his work on presidents and their programs. In particular, I adapt Rudalevige’s framework to that of presidential leverage to explore the possible linkage between leverage derived from public evaluations and the processes of presidential policy making in the White House. Accordingly, my dependent variable is Rudalevige’s measure of centralization, which is analogous to Ponder’s (2000) concept of staff shift, discussed above. Rudalevige’s measures correspond nicely to the staff shift framework, as he codes unique policy proposals 25. Using presidential NOMINATE scores is not without its challenges, as the estimation procedure yields only one estimate for a president that is implicitly assumed to be constant across all years of an administration (see Trier 2010). Nonetheless, it is likely that presidential ideology does not shift much over the course of a term (though rhetoric and aspiration may soften or wane). Thus, to remain compatible with the congressional measure, I employ NOMINATE scores and take the absolute value of the difference between the president and the median member of Congress. Unlike Rudalevige (2002), I do not estimate the House and Senate differently. While chamber-specific differences are intuitively appealing, it is methodologically intractable, given that the measures of presidential differences between the House on the one hand and the Senate on the other are fraught with multicollinearity and yield unstable results. 26. In results not reported here, I did take account of partisan seats in Congress. The probit coefficient was miniscule (-.02) and nowhere near conventional levels of significance (p = .17, one-tailed test). 27. I checked for collinearity among the Divided Government and Congressional Compatibility measures in the results reported below, and as might be expected, there is correlation between the two (.63). While collinearity diagnostics revealed no significant problems, Divided Government is not a significant predictor of centralization, as I demonstrate below. Even when compatibility is taken completely out of the equation, the variable for Divided Government remains insignificant (p = .23, two-tailed test).

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for whether they were staffed out to the bureaucracy (equivalent to Ponder’s staff as monitor), a mixed strategy in which the White House staff or EOP coordinates the process among several participants (Ponder’s “facilitator” category), or fully centralized in the White House staff (corresponding to staff as “director”). The main independent variable of interest is leverage, operationalized as the ratio of presidential approval (measured as the average annual level of presidential approval) to public trust in government measured as by Keele (2003).28 The institutional and partisan variables are measured as follows. Congressional Compatibility is the absolute value of the difference between the president’s NOMINATE score and that of the median member of Congress. I also control for the partisan context in terms of the institution (a dummy variable for Divided Government, taking the value of 0 for unified government and 1 for divided) as well as the party of the president (1 = Democrat; 0 = Republican). Other control measures come largely from Rudalevige (2002, chap. 4 and 5) and I refer the reader to the source for a full accounting of their inclusion (see the Appendix for a brief description of those variables). In particular, I use his measures for executive capacity. Executive capacity is measured in two ways, first as the size of the EOP, and the second measuring the percent of the civil service with civil service protection. One final caveat needs to be noted. Because of data limitations on both the primary independent variable (leverage) and the dependent variable (centralization), the analysis explores the time period from 1958 to 1996. The available data necessary to construct presidential leverage goes back only to 1958. Rudalevige’s (2002) analysis concludes in 1996. Thus, what follows should not be interpreted as a direct replication and extension of his results.

Findings and Implications Although I employed many of Rudalevige’s covariates as controls in modeling centralization, I limit my discussion to the four hypotheses set out above. While the data are more truncated than in Rudalevige, the results are strikingly similar. Table 1 displays the results of an ordered probit estimation, while Table 2 displays the marginal impacts associated with the probit coefficients. For example, see Table 2 and inspect the cells for the probabilities of a fully decentralized (0) and fully centralized (3) policy proposal. Hypothesis 1 is strongly supported; presidential leverage is a significant predictor of the probability of centralization. Consistent with the theory outlined above, the 28. At its most basic level, Public Trust is analogous to Stimson’s (1991) measure of public mood. Indeed, Keele adopted Stimson’s method of backward and forward recursion, which allows for the estimation of missing values to fill in the gaps of survey instruments administered at uneven intervals over time. The survey instruments Keele used included the usual suspects on the dimension of trust, such as whether respondents trusted government to “do the right thing,” or whether the respondent felt that government was run by “big interests.” Using these instruments, Keele was able to combine several questions, all tapping the same underlying attitudinal dimension (public trust), and the measure can best be thought of as an aggregation of several samples, yielding an overall index of trust in government (2003, chap. 2). It is this measure, aggregated annually, that I employ as the denominator in the ratio of presidential approval to public trust in government.


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TABLE 1 Probit Estimates of Institutional, Partisan, and Public Contexts on Policy Centralization Independent Variable PUBLIC CONTEXT Presidential Leverage (lagged one quarter) PARTISAN/CONGRESSIONAL CONTEXT Divided Government Democrat President Congressional Compatibility EXECUTIVE CAPACITY EOP Size Merit Percent PROGRAMMATIC Cross Cutting Jurisdictions Reorganization Impact Complexity Policy Type (Foreign/Domestic) New Item Priority Item (State of the Union) Policy Salience EXTERNAL CONTEXT Budget Situation (Deficit as percent of gross domestic product) Crisis TEMPORAL CONTEXT Month of Term N Likelihood Ratio Probability > X2

COEFFICIENT -.83** (.39) .25 (.36) .97*** (.37) 2.92*** (.80) .001*** (.0003) -.04 (.03) .19*** .35*** -.30*** -.14*** .77*** .30** -.16

(.03) (.10) (.10) (.05) (.16) (.16) (.24)

.02 (.04) -.18 (.21) -.009* (.007) 290 123.02 .000

*** p ⱕ .01 ** p ⱕ .05 * p ⱕ .10 One-tailed tests. Coefficients are ordinal probit estimates; standard errors in parentheses.

greater the degrees of presidential leverage, the less likely presidents are to centralize. Conversely, weaker leveraged presidents are more likely to bring policy making into the White House. A unit change in presidential leverage increases the probability of decentralizing policy making to a department by nearly .2 of 1%. Recall presidential leverage is measured in continuous, discrete units, so if leverage were to increase from 2.0 to 2.10, the probability of full decentralization increases by 1.93%. Similarly, the same shift in leverage decreases the likelihood of full White House Office/EOP centralization by approximately 2.3%. One implication is that presidential leverage provides a context within which presidents do not have to centralize policy in order to seek or maintain authority over the policy making process. While it is possible that there is a reciprocal relationship at work here (high leverage leads to more decentralization which in turn implies openness to government policy making and thus further buttresses presidential approval and leads to stronger leverage), the findings offer strong confirmation of the impact of the strategic presidency. The findings persist in the presence of partisan and contextual covariates.

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TABLE 2 Impacts of Explanatory Variables on Likelihood of Policy Location Level of Centralization Independent Variable PUBLIC CONTEXT Presidential Leverage (Lag 1 quarter)

0 Department

1 Mixed (Dept.)

2 Mixed (EOP)

3 (WHO/EOP)

.200

.133

-.105

-.225

PARTISAN/CONGRESSIONAL CONTEXT Divided Government -.062 Democrat President -.214 Congressional Compatibility -.692

-.039 -.151 -.466

.034 .093 .369

.067 .277 .789

EXECUTIVE CAPACITY Executive Office of the President Size Merit Percent

-.0002 .009

-.0001 .006

.0001 -.005

.0002 -.011

PROGRAMMATIC Cross Cutting Jurisdictions Reorganization Impact Complexity Policy Type (Foreign/Domestic) New Item Priority Item (State of the Union) Policy Salience

-.044 -.083 .071 .033 -.216 -.067 .040

-.030 -.056 .048 .022 -.083 -.051 .023

.024 .044 -.038 -.017 .126 .033 -.023

.050 .094 -.081 -.038 .173 .085 -.041

-.005

-.004

.003

.006

.046

.026

-.023

-.041

.002

.002

-.001

-.003

EXTERNAL/FISCAL CONTEXT Budget Situation (Deficit as percent of gross domestic product) Crisis TEMPORAL CONTEXT Month of Term

Note: Figures indicate percentage change in the probability of obtaining a result in the indicated category, from least to most centralized, given a unit shift in the particular independent variable, or a shift from 0 to 1 in the case of dummy variables.

In general, hypothesis 2 is not confirmed. Where leverage is a strong, significant predictor, the percent of merit based civil servants is not, though the coefficient is in the hypothesized direction and is not far from reaching the .10 level of significance in a one-tailed test (p = .12). As Rudalevige argues, this may be partly a by-product of the fact that finding department-by-department measures for politicization is difficult and the data available are insufficient to the task (2002, 110, 228n56). Indeed, the fact that the variable fails to achieve statistical significance may itself be an artifact of data quality, particularly given how close it comes to achieving statistical significance. Hypothesis 3 on the impact of divided government does not fare well either. Divided government holds little sway over whether presidents centralize or delegate policy formulation to those outside the immediate confines of the White House. However, hypothesis 4 is strongly confirmed. Presidential distance from the median congressional voter is a very strong predictor of the probability of centralization. Like


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Rudalevige (2002), I find that the larger the ideological gulf between president and congressional median, the more likely policy is to be centralized. This combined with the null result in hypothesis 2 lends further evidence to the claim that it is not simply the presence or absence of a unified governmental apparatus at the national level that seeps into presidential strategy. Rather, it is the relationship presidents have with Congress (of which ideology is only one, albeit an important, component), and the fact that institutional rules (such as the 60-vote requirement to break a filibuster) often make simple partisan head counts almost irrelevant absent some knowledge of the ideological distribution of congressional preferences that condition presidential choices. One other interesting finding is that Democratic presidents are much more likely to centralize. Much of the literature on presidential agendas indicates that Democratic presidents are more active in terms of the sheer volume of legislative requests and the attendant strategies, such as messages to Congress (Light 1999). Nathan (1983) argues that some presidents (e.g., Nixon) felt that the bureaucracy leaned left and was therefore stacked against Republicans. I performed a difference of means test on the number of the presidential proposals and the number of messages to Congress. In both cases, Democrats had systematically higher rates of activity than their Republican counterparts. This holds even when Lyndon Johnson, whose volume of legislative requests in 1965 was nearly three standard deviations above the mean, is removed from the analysis. Why this is the case, or even if it should matter, is a task for future research. In short, even in light of those variables Rudalevige (2002) found to be significant predictors of centralization, such as the cross-cutting nature of a policy proposal, whether it had reorganization implications, was a presidential priority mentioned in the State of the Union address, and the like, presidents enjoying stronger presidential leverage are less likely to centralize, while presidents who are less ideologically compatible with Congress and are Democrats are more likely to centralize.

Conclusions Jeffrey Cohen (2009) suggests that one way for scholars to move the field forward is to link two of the most important developments in the modern presidency, the rise of the public as a source of influence, and the development of the institutional presidency. In this article, I explicitly linked presidential leverage and presidential decisions as to where to expend staff resources in the making of public policy, be it centralized in the White House, farmed out to the bureaucracy, or some mixed strategy in between. I extend Rudalevige’s (2002) study of the determinants of centralization and add a measure of presidential leverage as well as a modified measure of ideological compatibility with Congress. As expected, I find that presidential leverage has a robust, inverse relation to centralization. Presidents better publicly situated are less likely to centralize policy making in the White House. Presidents seek responsiveness to their policy proposals. Centralization of policy proposals are but one means to this end. This article has staked out a path to combine the public and institutional presidencies and showed that stronger leveraged presidents will

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likely decentralize policy making and thus claim gains from exchange, while weaker presidents are more likely to control policy making from within the White House, though they are less likely to win in the congressional arena. The next phase of the project moves outward from policy location to examine other policy contexts and agenda setting strategies in light of presidential leverage. Finally, while the Obama administration is not included in the analysis presented here, one thought about leverage in the current political climate is in order. President Obama faces a harsh reality as his public approval has floated consistently below 50% for much of his presidency, dipping as low as 38% in August 2011. As I write in January 2012, his approval rating is 46%, and in December 2011 he became only the second recently elected president (Carter was the other) to average below 50% in December of his third year in office. However, Congress is consistently bogged down by 13% approval. Obama has enjoyed significant victories, such as a fiscal stimulus, reforms of health care and Wall Street, foreign policy coups such as troop withdraw from Iraq, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda is by some accounts in disarray. So why is he not more persistently successful, particularly with respect to approval? One possible mitigating factor is the almost unprecedented polarization of Americans and its institutions.29 A toxic political environment exacerbated by a fragmented media that reinforces rather than changes citizen views probably mean little room for maneuver. Recent positive economic news on the jobs front may help turn this around, but this potential only underscores the fundamental properties of the expectations gap where presidents are largely punished or rewarded for events and developments outside their control. Of course, it may well be that Obama has more leverage than a preliminary back-of-the-envelope calculation might suggest. A gifted campaigner, the president has begun an aggressive counteroffensive by forcefully putting Congress, particularly congressional Republicans, on the defensive by arguing for an extension of the payroll tax cut, which many Republicans are hesitant to do given Social Security and budget concerns. Where the president is trying to score political points is in pointing out that many of those same congressional Republicans who are inclined to let the payroll tax cuts expire also insist that Bush-era tax cuts, aimed primarily at wealthier citizens, should be extended. Whether this works or not (see Edwards 2003), the opportunity is there, and he is trying to use Congress’s unpopularity to leverage his limited political capital and tap into voter resentment. It is a tall order to be sure, and it is far from certain it will succeed. Polarization, both publicly and institutionally, may be an important intervening consideration. I have only scratched the surface here, looking at polarized institutions, but it is not at all clear in which direction polarization at the system level would work. Would a polarized system help or hinder a president? Would it make any difference if he has leverage as I have defined it here? These musings of a link between polarization and leverage are very tentative and preliminary, but they generate questions only the future, and future research, can answer. 29. Cameron (2002) provides an excellent overview of the problem, and others have taken up the challenge of considering the presidency in the context of polarization. Two recent examples are Jacobson (2008) and Cohen (2011).


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Appendix: Variables VARIABLE Dependent variable: Policy Centralization INDEPENDENT VARIALBES Presidential Leverage Divided Government Democratic President Congressional Compatibility EOP Size Merit Percent Cross-cutting jurisdictions Reorganization Complexity Foreign/Domestic Policy Budget Impact New Item Presidential Priority Salience Budget Situation Crisis Month of Term

DESCRIPTION 0 (decentralized) to 3 (fully centralized) with mixed processes in between. Description

— Expected Direction

Ratio of presidential approval to public trust in government (lagged one quarter) 0 for unified; 1 for divided 0 for Republicans; 1 for Democrats Poole-Rosenthal distance between president and median member of Congress Size of Executive Office of the President Percentage of civil service under merit service protection Number of agencies affected

Negative

Whether the issue included reorganization Index 1-3 Index -2 fully domestic to +2 fully foreign Dichotomous index, spending impact = 1 New item = 1 Mentioned in the State of the Union. Salient issue = 1 Ratio of budget surplus or deficit to outlays

Positive Negative Negative Positive Positive Positive Positive Negative: Surplus → less centralization Positive Agnostic

Crisis legislation Month as measured from start of the presidency

Positive Positive Positive Positive Negative Positive

Source: Most variables adapted from Rudalevige (2002). Leverage, congressional compatibility, and presidential party collected by author.