Presidents' Legislative Preferences

总统的立法偏好一般摘要在大多数议会民主国家，行政长官（即总理）可以正式向议会提交立法，然后该立法通常无需修改即可通过。然而，宪法不允许总统直接向国会提出立法。然而，总统确实会利用公开呼吁和私下沟通向国会要求新的立法。与议会行政长官不同，总统必须经常努力改变或防止颁布没有吸引力的立法。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就立法事务打交道的一部分。为了推进自己的立法目标，总统们还参与了无数其他不那么引人注目的活动。许多是非正式的、私人的、没有记录的，而另一些则采用更正式的交流机制，生成纸质和电子记录。本研究利用了最近从管理和预算办公室（OMB）的文件中获得的两种正式通信机制的记录。首先，行政管理和预算办公室向个别成员和委员会记录行政立法请求，并跟踪这些提案的立法历史。其次，OMB起草并向国会领导人分发总统的行政政策声明（SAPs）。sap是总统及其代理人支持、反对和/或有时威胁否决某些待决立法的正式声明。研究人员编制了一套完整的sap从1985年至今的记录，以及从1979年到2007年的OMB日志。研究总统与国会关系的学生第一次详细了解了总统影响立法的这些关键直接努力。本项目将调查总统的要求在多大程度上影响了国会的议程。这项工作旨在确定有助于解释观察到的总统效率差异的结构和个人条件。在此过程中，该研究将更好地衡量总统对-à-vis国会的立法偏好的意识形态内容，以及这种意识形态定位如何影响他们领导国会同僚的能力。换句话说，该项目调查立法者是否对总统发出的信号做出反应，如果是这样，这些信号是否影响国会追求的议程内容。这项工作将深入了解与美国权力分立制度有关的这些基本问题，以及它如何影响总统和立法者在统一和分裂党控制政府的时期。为了评估这些观点，调查人员将编制和分析一个数据库，其中包括总统的立法倡议和对待决投票的立场，该数据库由管理和预算办公室（OMB）编制的两项具体信息组成：1)发送给个人成员的行政立法请求日志，2)行政政策声明（SAPs）。PI将编制1979年至2007年的OMB日志和1985年至今的sap日志数据集。这些新数据为测试这些问题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讨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.