Presidents' Legislative Preferences

总统的立法偏好概述在大多数议会民主政体中，行政人员(即总理)可以正式向议会提交立法，然后立法通常不经修改而获得通过。然而，宪法不允许总统直接向国会提交立法。然而，总统确实会使用公开呼吁和私下沟通来要求国会制定新的立法。与议会的行政同行不同，总统必须经常努力改变或阻止制定不具吸引力的立法。公众和学者对总统立法努力的了解大多来自他们的公开声明。然而，总统的公开呼吁只是他们与国会在立法事务上打交道的一部分。总统们参与了无数其他不太显眼的活动，以推进他们的立法目标。许多是非正式的、私人的和无记录的，而另一些则采用更正式的沟通机制，产生纸质和电子记录。这项研究利用了最近从管理和预算厅(OMB)的档案中获得的两个这样的正式沟通机制的记录。首先，OMB记录向个别成员和委员会提出的立法行政请求，并跟踪这些提案的立法历史。其次，OMB起草并分发总统的行政政策声明(SAP)给国会领导人。SAP是一种正式声明，总统及其代理人在声明中支持、反对和/或有时威胁要否决一些悬而未决的立法。研究人员整理了1985年至今的SAP记录，以及1979年至2007年的OMB记录。研究总统与国会关系的学生第一次详细了解了这些直接影响总统立法的关键努力。技术摘要这个项目将调查总统的要求在多大程度上有助于设定国会的议程。这项工作旨在找出有助于解释观察到的总统效力差异的结构性和个人条件。通过这样做，这项研究将更好地衡量总统相对于国会的立法偏好的意识形态内容，以及这种意识形态立场如何影响他们领导国会中的共同党派的能力。换句话说，该项目调查立法者是否对总统发出的信号做出回应，如果是，这些信号是否会影响国会所追求的议程的内容。这项工作将提供有关美国分权制度的这些基本问题的洞察，以及在政党对政府的统一和分裂控制时期，它如何影响总统和立法者。为了评估这些要点，调查员将汇编和分析一个数据库，其中包括总统的立法倡议和待决表决立场，数据库由管理和预算办公室(OMB)汇编的两条具体信息组成：1)向个别成员发送的行政立法请求日志，2)行政政策声明(SAP)。投资促进局将汇编一套1979年至2007年的管理和预算办公室的记录以及1985年至今的战略行动计划的数据。这些新数据为检验这些以及其他与总统影响力和行政立法关系有关的未被充分探索的问题提供了优越的信息。

Presidents' Legislative PreferencesGeneral AbstractIn most parliamentary democracies, executives (i.e. prime ministers) can formally submit legislation to parliament, which then generally passes without being amended. The Constitution, however, does not allow the president to introduce legislation directly to Congress. Presidents do, however, use public appeals and private communications to request new legislation from Congress. Unlike their parliamentary executive counterparts, presidents must frequently work to change or to prevent the enactment of unattractive legislation. Most of what the public and scholars learn about presidents' legislative efforts come from their public statements. Presidents' public appeals, however, constitute only a part of their dealings with Congress on legislative business. Presidents engage in a myriad of other, less visible activities to advance their legislative goals. Many are informal, private, and unrecorded, while others enlist more formal mechanisms of communication that generate paper and electronic records. This research exploits the recent acquisition of records for two such formal communication mechanisms obtained from the files of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First, OMB logs administration request for legislation to individual members and committees and tracks the legislative history of these proposals. Second, OMB drafts and distributes presidents' Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) to congressional leaders. SAPs are formal statements in which presidents and their agents endorse, oppose and/or sometimes threaten to veto pieces of pending legislation. The researcher has compiled a complete set of the records for SAPs from 1985 to the present, and from 1979 to 2007 for the OMB logs. For the first time, students of presidential-congressional relations have detailed information on these key direct efforts to influence legislation on the part of the president. Technical AbstractThis project will investigate to what extent presidential requests serve to set Congress' agenda. The work aims to identify both structural and personal conditions that help explain the observed variation in presidential effectiveness. In doing so, the research will provide better metrics of the ideological content of presidents' legislative preferences vis-à-vis Congress, and how this ideological positioning influences their capacity to lead their co-partisans in Congress. In other words, the project investigates whether legislators respond to signals from the president, and if so, do these signals affect the content of the agenda Congress pursues. This work will provide insight into these fundamental questions related to the US separation of powers systems and how it affects both presidents and legislators during periods of unified and divided party control of government. To evaluate these points, the investigator will compile and analyze a data base consisting of presidents' legislative initiatives and positions on pending floor votes comprised of two specific pieces of information compiled by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): 1) logs of administration requests for legislation sent to individual members, and 2) Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs). The PI will compile a data set of OMB logs from 1979 to 2007 and of SAPs from 1985 to the present. These new data offer superior information for testing these and other under-explored questions related to presidential influence and executive-legislative relations.