Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.

Constructing the Political Spectacle

An enduring and controversial debate centers on whether there exist “two presidencies,” that is, whether presidents exercise fundamentally greater influence over foreign than domestic affairs. This paper makes two contributions to understanding this issue and, by extension, presidential power more generally. First, we distill an institutional logic that both supports the two presidencies thesis and implies that Congress has incentives to delegate foreign policy powers to the president. Accordingly, the logic suggests that empirical analysis should incorporate these incentives. Our second contribution, then, is to test for the existence of two presidencies in a domain that Congress cannot delegate, budgetary appropriations, and a domain that explicitly incorporates delegation, agency creation. Consistent with expectations, we find presidents exercise considerably greater influence over foreign policy.

/pdf/toward-a-broader-understanding-of-presidential-power-a-putgs9ap4f.pdf

Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis

SUBTITLE: NEWLY-APPOINTED PRESIDENT OF FEDERAL RAILWAYS OF BRAZIL ENG PAULO MUNHOZ DA ROCHA REVEALS HIS MANAGEMENT AND INVESTMENT STRATEGY TO RAILWAY GAZETTE

The president's agenda

A number of presidents have aided the auto industry, protected it from external threats, or saved it from collapse, while presidential rhetoric about the industry is positive and consistent across political parties and over time. I conduct rhetorical analyses of the entire history of presidential speech about the industry to explain the evolution of the relationship between these two institutions. I argue that this relationship is an example of the institutionalization of speech; perfunctory campaign praise became habitual and eventually coalesced into a rhetorical legacy that entailed rhetorical and material resources and constraints for the institution of the presidency. In the case of the auto industry, presidents sought political support from the auto industry as a constituency, erased blameworthy aspects of industry history, and created an industry identity that was exceptional, which served as justification for defense of the industry and intervention during periods of economic recession, regulatory stress, foreign competition, and imminent collapse of an automaker. Such cases of institutionalized speech between the presidency and other institutions are special, but not unique; this case provides an instructive example of how speech becomes legacy over time, and of what the consequences of such legacies might include for this case and for possible others. INDEX WORDS: Rhetorical presidency, Presidential rhetoric, Collective identity, Collective memory, Epideictic, Auto industry INSTITUTIONALIZED SPEECH: THE PRESIDENCY AND THE DOMESTIC AUTO INDUSTRY

Institutionalized Speech: The Presidency and the Domestic Auto Industry

Since World War II, Presidents have had much greater success in controlling the nation's defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies. --Aaron Wildavsky (1966) Wildavsky (1966) contended that in the United States there is something akin to "two presidencies," one for foreign policy and another for domestic policy. Since that time, people have assumed that the president ought to, and consequently does, receive more support from Congress in foreign policy. Wildavsky's original argument is based on empirical evidence that he culled from congressional roll call votes. Using Congressional Quarterly Almanac presidential box scores, he found that Congress supports presidential proposals concerning foreign policy and national security more than presidential proposals concerning domestic policy. Early follow-up research tended to confirm Wildavsky's contention (LeLoup and Shull 1979; Sigelman 1979). Over the years, however, scholars opposed the rule established by Wildavsky (1966) (Edwards 1986; Fleisher et al. 2000; McCormick, Wittkopf, and Danna 1997; Peppers 1975; Rose and Thompson 1991). (1) Still others found evidence of the phenomenon given only certain limited circumstances or considerations (Fleisher and Bond 1988; Lewis 1997; Renka and Jones 1991). The objective of this research is to bring the two-presidencies debate current by extending a comprehensive study carried out by Edwards in 1986. We use the two congressional roll call indicators of presidential support that Edwards found to be most relevant and a third measure of support that omits intermestic policy issues. In our context, intermestic issues are not easily classified as either foreign or domestic policy. We pick up where Edwards left off in 1986 and report levels of support for the president in the two policy domains using "nonunanimous" and "key vote" indicators through 1998. To test the reliability of our coding scheme, we replicate a portion of Edward's study representing the years 1981-83. In addition, we report the levels of congressional support for the president (in both foreign and domestic policy) from 1988 to 1998 using a third measure of support, which we term "nonintermestic" votes. We examine general patterns of support among all members of Congress and, specifically, congressional support among members of the president's opposing party. In each case, we employ all three indicators of support to increase the veracity of our findings. (2) Indicators of Support We rely on congressional roll call data to test the two-presidencies thesis. Although somewhat controversial (see Krehbiel 2000; Lindsay and Steger 1993), the use of roll call analysis is a well-established method that is both intuitive and generally reliable. The research reported here, like that of Edwards (1986), uses multiple roll call indicators of congressional support for the president. (3) First, we include a nonunanimous indicator that only considers congressional roll call votes in which the winning side obtains less than 80 percent of the total vote. To illustrate, if a Senate vote breaks eighty-one to nineteen, the vote is excluded from consideration. Second, we test the thesis using key votes. The Congressional Quarterly Almanac (1994-98) defines key votes as congressional roll call votes that represent "matter(s) of major controversy; a matter of presidential political power" or "a matter of potentially great impact on the nation and lives of Americans" (p. C3). The rationale for using key votes is an attempt to define matters of substance and to remove trivial or purely procedural roll call votes from consideration. Third, we use a measure that we term "nonintermestic" votes. The Almanac, beginning in 1988, classifies roll call votes on which the president has taken a position into four categories: (1) trade and economic matters, (2) Senate votes on presidential nominations, (3) defense and foreign policy, and (4) domestic policy. …

The Two Presidencies, 1984‐98: A Replication and Extension

This research provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of "going public," defined here as a presidential strategy to promote policy initiatives by appealing for public support or calling ...

The Two Rhetorical Presidencies An Analysis of Televised Presidential Speeches, 1947-1991

This study examines media coverage of war powers for a five-month period before the Persian Gulf War. Previous research has shown that the range of foreign policy debate reported in the media is a function of the range of debate in Washington, DC. Based on an analysis of AB CNews, the New York Times, and presidential news conferences, the authors find that reporting on war powers?and in particular, the perspective that congressional authorization is required prior to the use of military force?is linked to the dynamics of institutional debate in Washington. In the midst of a massive mili tary buildup wherein the prospect of conflict with Iraq was a distinct possibility, the issue of war pow ers was virtually ignored by media sources until it became a source of conflict between Congress and the Bush administration. The authors argue that the lack of independent reporting on war powers

The President, the Press, and the War‐Making Power: An Analysis of Media Coverage Prior to the Persian Gulf War

How can we explain when ideology is more likely, and less likely, to influence Supreme Court decision making? We examine this question by comparing ordered and unanimous votes on the Rehnquist Court between 1994 and 2004. Building on previous research, our results suggest that the influence of attitudes on Supreme Court decisions varies by the level of case salience. When the case before the Court raises important questions of politics or policy, and therefore attracts a disproportionate amount of attention, the attitudinal model performs admirably: the justices are more likely to split into ideologically coherent blocs and less likely to produce unanimous opinions. Yet the explanatory power of the attitudinal model diminishes significantly in non-salient cases with lower political stakes. These findings underscore the utility of a conditional approach to the study of judicial attitudes.

Case Salience and the Attitudinal Model: An Analysis of Ordered and Unanimous Votes on the Rehnquist Court

Critics of the “imperial judiciary” have accused the United States Supreme Court of usurping authority from legislators and executives by creating new rights that are found nowhere in the text of the Constitution. In this paper, I use two case studies to argue that unenumerated rights can be reconciled with democratic values. First, the protection of aggressive palliative care in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) exemplifies a consensus-building decision whereby the Court holds that a broadly accepted norm or practice has constitutional underpinnings. Second, the invalidations of durational residency requirements for welfare benefits in Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) and Saenz v. Roe (1999) represent broadened-access decisions in which the state is required to extend a benefit to an excluded group yet retains the authority to define the benefit's content. These types of decisions are compatible with democratic norms insofar as they do not disable elected representatives from performing their quintessential task: deciding what policy values the state should pursue and how it should purse them. My argument suggests that a focus on Roe v. Wade (1973) exaggerates the ambitions and consequences of judicial protection for unenumerated rights and overlooks how such protection may enhance democratic politics.

David A. Lewis

Papers

The Two Rhetorical Presidencies An Analysis of Televised Presidential Speeches, 1947-1991

The President, the Press, and the War‐Making Power: An Analysis of Media Coverage Prior to the Persian Gulf War

Case Salience and the Attitudinal Model: An Analysis of Ordered and Unanimous Votes on the Rehnquist Court

The Fourteenth Amendment Through Roe-Colored Glasses: Unenumerated Rights and the “Imperial Judiciary”