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This article introduces two newly available sources of data on presidents' legislative programs. The first consists of administration legislative initiatives cleared by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for submission to Congress. We refer to these records as "OMB logs" because they record OMB's clearance actions on executive‐branch legislative proposals. The second consists of memoranda, officially called Statements of Administration Policy, that OMB sends to floor leaders detailing the president's position on legislation pending floor consideration. We compare these new data on presidents' legislative initiatives and policy preferences with those contained in currently available sources—The Public Papers of the Presidents and Congressional Quarterly's scoring of presidential positions on roll‐call votes—and with a long available but seldom used fifth source, the Congressional Record. Both new data sources list bills and legislative preferences that are not included in the currently available sources. We illustrate the value of these new data by calculating presidents' impressive "legislative effectiveness" in the House when all presidential initiatives are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about George Washington as a presidential leader, but little attention has been given to one important aspect of the first president's administration: his role in funding and constructing the nation's new capital city in the District of Columbia. This article highlights Washington's involvement in the creation of the Federal City by focusing on the choices he faced and decisions he made regarding Washington, DC during the last six months he was in office and showing that in terms of this facet of his presidency, he was truly a hands-on leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article establishes that transitions of power from one presidential administration to the next can act as a source of uncertainty regarding whom citizens view as responsible for national conditions. I argue that citizens confront this ambiguity in a partisan manner when making responsibility attributions of credit and blame. Using the economy and the Iraq War as examples, ordinary partisans frequently ascribe responsibility using motivated reasoning by crediting the president of their own political party for perceived successes and blaming the president of the opposite party for perceived failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a message submitted to Congress on January 22, 1807, President Jefferson called attention to activities by a combination of private individuals who had endangered the nation. Admitting that a mixture of rumors and suspicions made it difficult to determine the actual facts, he nevertheless chose to identify Aaron Burr as the principal actor 'whose guilt is placed beyond question.' In advance of a trial, submission and evaluation of evidence, and final verdict by a court, Jefferson publicly found Burr guilty of treasonous conduct punishable by hanging. What prompted Jefferson to make this accusation and what constitutional and legal violations occurred in his pursuit of Burr? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a hasty response to the 9/11 attacks, Congress authorized the 'war' against al-Qaeda in a statute known as the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). It was meant to be a temporary grant of powers to allow the president to fight the perpetrators of the attack. This article analyzes how two very different presidents have used the 2001 AUMF to justify controversial policies in ways unforeseen by its congressional makers, resulting in an accruement of power to the executive branch that could become long term, if not permanent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most political scientists assume that American presidents seek to optimize their chances of reelection and to maximize their policy preferences in strategic negotiations with their rivals. Presidents, however, have also been pressed throughout history to restrain their self-aggrandizing aims when confronted with what they take to be exigencies of governance. This article examines the governing challenges met by presidents of the early national and antebellum periods, and argues that the distinctive conditions of governance that defined the pre-Civil War polity motivated a pattern of unionist presidential restraint, prompting presidents to refrain from direct applications of federal coercion and to balance the interests of geographic sections of the Union. Presidents' preoccupation with unionism, this article argues, was ever present in this period. The article examines a diverse set of case studies to make this argument and concludes with a discussion of how changes wrought by the Civil War led to the emergence of new patterns of restraint exercised by subsequent generations of American presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the theory of presidential representation by examining its development from 1800 to 1864. In particular, it returns to the critics of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln and presents new evidence that the concept of presidential representation not only remained contested throughout this period but also grew more entangled with rival claims of representation and alternative arguments for executive power. By exploring the early development of the theory of presidential representation, the article contributes to the ongoing scholarly task of classifying arguments about the foundations of executive power and attempts to link literatures regarding the constitutional and political sources of presidential power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Richard Neustadt, scholarship on the presidency tends to focus on presidents as single-minded seekers of political power. But, precisely because of the grandness of their political stage, presidents may, in fact, have constitutional ambitions concerning not how much power they will have but how they will wield their constitutional powers. James Madison's presidency provides an important case study of a president's constitutional ambitions. Entering office with constitutional concerns about the power of the presidency relative to the other branches, Madison used his own presidency and especially the War of 1812 to model a new type of constitutional office that he thought would fit better in the system of the separation of powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presidential cabinet has long been neglected by political scientists and political historians. The former tend to dismiss the cabinet as a noninstitution that has never transcended its lack of constitutional foundation; the latter have generally ignored it. Focusing on the progressive era, and upon one of Woodrow Wilson's most prominent cabinet secretaries, this article argues for a reconsideration of the presidential cabinet and its individual members as important policy and political actors during a time of increasing federal government competency but as yet unformed White House executive agencies and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States' national security establishment lacks an integrated strategic planning capability. The current National Security Council ( NSC) system relies heavily on part-time committees that lack the clout and time to execute strategic planning. The president could overcome this difficulty by looking to President Eisenhower's NSC system. Eisenhower's NSC relied on a Planning Board-which was neither a part-time committee nor fulltime staff-to get realistic planning that was not captive to parochial interests and to foster a national, strategic mindset without falling prey to an ivory-tower mind-set divorced from reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a theoretically informed and historically grounded perspective on ideology and ideologues is developed to address a paradox: while presidents play a central role in articulating socially diffuse ideologies, such as the soft-Statism of the New Deal or the anti-Statism championed by today's Republican Party, few administrations have been hospitable to ideologues, the True Believers who develop ideologies in the first place and are dedicated to their implementation. While institutional inducements to the presidential employment of ideologues have grown throughout the modern presidential era, differential inducements to their influence have been critical in explaining when, and how, both ideologues and ideology have intersected with the modern presidency. These differential inducements are exogenous crises, the regime characteristics of each presidency, and the personal traits of presidents. The interplay of these factors is charted from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or FDR) through the Obama administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the signing statements of the modern presidency before Watergate shape the development of the tool and contribute to its institutionalization? A content analysis of the 626 signing statements from 1933 to 1974 shows that the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon administrations set important precedents for the modern constitutional use of the tool by protecting the institution from legislative vetoes and perceived encroachments in regard to foreign affairs and executive privilege. The results reveal that the constitutional logic required for the growth of challenges is rooted in this era and that Watergate served to amplify a trend that was already in motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we assess unilateral tactics and their contribution to presidential power in a less-than-unitary executive branch? To explore this question this article examines the provenance of nearly 300 executive orders from 1947 through 1987. Archival data show that executive orders are frequently a less-than-perfect representation of presidential preferences, despite the assumptions of recent work on unilateral power. That is, the issuance of executive orders often involves persuasion rather than simply command: it incorporates wide consultation across the executive branch and, frequently, White House ratification of what agencies wanted to do in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholarship has focused much attention on presidents' routine exploitation of signing statements since the 1980s to disallow provisions of bills passed by Congress. Much less is known about earlier post–World War II presidents' use of signing statements and what precedents they may have set for their successors. This study takes a sharp focus on the 934 signing statements issued from 1945 to 1980, from Presidents Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter. The analysis classifies these signing statements by policy area and by the type of comments the president made. The results accentuate how the resurgent Congress in the 1970s—including budget reform and challenges to presidential latitude in foreign policy through legislative vetoes—compelled Presidents Gerald Ford and Carter to increasingly use signing statements to nullify legislative provisos. The analysis emphasizes how cycles of congressional change affected earlier presidents' use of signing statements, laying a foundation for their successors' more broad manipulation of this rhetorical instrument to aggrandize executive prerogative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine two competing arguments relating to the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to use force from 1953 to 2000. We offer a policy availability rationale that suggests Congress matters in the decision to use force because presidents are motivated by their ability to influence legislative policy making. The models demonstrate that presidential success in Congress is the significant factor determining military action, not party control. Presidents employ force when their ability to influence policy is weak and avoid military actions when Congress supports the president's agenda. The results speak to the intersection of two important literatures, namely, presidential unilateralism and conventional theories on domestic politics and the use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy decision making during presidential transitions is an inherently difficult challenge. By examining the 1960-1961 presidential transition and resulting Bay of Pigs fiasco, this article demonstrates that there are six independent, causal variables that best determine the success or failure of foreign policy decision making during presidential transitions: national security decision-making structure, availability of information relevant to the substance and history of the crisis and its policy responses; focus of time and resources; relevant campaign commitments; 'newness' of the incoming administration; and 'inheritedness' of the policy. Three of President John F. Kennedy's most important Bay of Pigs decisions are explained using this six-variable framework. Drawing from the lessons of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, recommendations are offered for how to improve future national security transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his articles, books, and legal memoranda for the U.S. Department of Justice, John Yoo is well known for favoring broad and even exclusive presidential power in the field of national security. Less understood is his dependence on the British model and the prerogatives it extended to the king over external affairs. In his writings, Yoo devotes little attention to the framers' rejection of British executive prerogatives. Even less does he acknowledge their commitment to a republic, a form of government in which sovereign power is vested not in an executive but in the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding Terry Moe's claim, rational choice scholarship has been pursuing the least “revolutionary” of the possible lines of advance in presidential studies. This scholarship asks the same basic question that Richard Neustadt asked nearly a half century ago: how much can a president get done? It follows Neustadt as well in its strategic approach to presidential action and in thinking about the problem of presidential strategy systemically. The new rational choice scholarship has many real strengths. It has helped clarify system parameters and specify how they affect an incumbent's opportunities, incentives risks, and constraints. But this is a “rigor revolution” that does more to perpetuate the traditional preoccupations of presidential studies than to overthrow them. The real revolution will come when we start asking questions about the presidency that no one in 1960 would have thought to ask. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]