Do Presidents' Veto Threats Matter?

否决权是总统成功应对反对党控制的国会的关键工具。它不仅允许总统阻止反对党通过其立法计划，而且可以将否决权作为讨价还价游戏的一个阶段，迫使国会适应总统的偏好。最近的博弈论研究已经确定了一些条件，在这些条件下，基于否决权的讨价还价可以扩展到总统言论的领域，特别是否决威胁。当总统的偏好不确定时，否决威胁可能是有效的工具，众所周知，他重视自己的声誉，并且已经公开了他的威胁，以至于退缩会损害他的声望和他所在政党的选举前景。总而言之，目前的研究发现，否决威胁在适当条件下可以发挥作用。这项研究提出了一个更经验性的问题，总统的否决威胁通常重要吗？在开发了一个由总统决定发送可变成本的实证模型之后，本研究测试了自1981年以来收集的2000多个否决威胁的有效性，包括立法的政策内容和失败率以及党派立法者的点名行为。这项研究评估了在分裂政府中总统议程设定的一个潜在重要工具。它还建立并规定传播两个关于否决威胁的主要数据集。第一份文件包括2500页行政政策声明的扫描图像，其中总统威胁要否决国会正在审议的一项法案。第二个数据集表示所有编码的威胁及其协变量。

The veto is a key instrument of presidential success in dealing with an opposition-controlled Congress. Not only does it allow the president to prevent the opposition party from passing its legislative program, the veto can be enlisted as a stage in a bargaining game to force Congress to accommodate the president's preferences. Recent game theoretic research has identified conditions in which veto-based bargaining can be extended into the realm of presidential rhetoric specifically, veto threats. Veto threats can be effective instruments when the president's preferences are uncertain, he is known to value his reputation, and has publicized his threat to the extent that backing down would harm his prestige and his party's electoral prospects. In sum, current research has found that veto threats can under appropriate conditions matter. This research asks a more empirical question, do presidents' veto threats generally matter?After developing an empirical model that has presidents deciding to send a variable costly, this research test the effectiveness of the more than 2,000 veto threats enlisted since 1981 on the policy content and failure rate of legislation and the roll call behavior of partisan legislators. The research assesses a potentially important tool of presidency agenda setting in divided government. It also creates and provides for the dissemination of two major datasets of veto threats. The first consists of scanned images of 2500 pages of Statements of Administration Policy in which the president threatened to veto a bill under consideration in Congress. The second data set represents all coded threats and their covariates.