Bryan W Marshall
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122755 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bryan W Marshall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bryan W |
| FAMILY NAME | Marshall |
| SIGNATURE | MARSHALL B W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Miami University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8368-3692 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 219 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The impact of party conflict on executive ascendancy and congressional abdication in US foreign policy
Veto-Proof Majorities, Legislative Procedures, and Presidential Decisions, 1981–2008
Super-majorities have occurred frequently in Congress but have escaped scholarly attention. This paper employs new measures of positive agenda control and a unique data set of 3,407 nontrivial bills from 1981 to 2008 to answer two questions: how did legislative leaders construct veto-proof coalitions, and what did presidents do with them? Legislative leaders, we argue, deployed procedures to expand and sustain veto-proof coalitions, despite incre…
When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy
There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of ch…
Presidential Signing Statements and Lawmaking Credit
Journal Article Presidential Signing Statements and Lawmaking Credit Get access Kevin Evans, Kevin Evans KEVIN EVANS is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. His research focuses on the presidency, Congress, and interbranch relations. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bryan Marshall Bryan Marshall BRYAN MARSHALL is a professor of…
The Politics of Credit in Presidential Signing Statements
The separation of powers often makes it difficult to understand who is responsible for legislative outcomes. Both members of Congress and presidents seek to shape perceptions of policy responsibility to their advantage. Yet, the relative size of the president's rhetorical stage gives him disproportionate influence in molding these discussions at critical moments. Given these circumstances, how, when, and why, do presidents claim credit for themse…
See Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin Run? Party, Ideology, and the Influence of Female Role Models on Young Women
Previous research suggests that women’s descriptive representation may have a role-model effect on young women, encouraging them to greater levels of political participation. Using data from the Monitoring the Future Survey and the National Survey of Political and Civic Engagement of Young People, we examine whether highly visible female role models like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin, and viable female candidates for governor and…
Preserving Institutional Power
We argue that the S upreme C ourt's long‐term goal of maintaining legitimacy and institutional power reflects an underdeveloped strategic consideration in models of judicial decision making. Our article posits that both institutional‐ and policy‐related incentives exist for the C ourt to engage in strategic behavior, and that those motivations may be differentially applicable to decision making in constitutional versus statutory cases. Our result…
Assessing the Rhetorical Side of Presidential Signing Statements
Recent work on the constitutional signing statement suggests such tools can be designed to defend constitutional and institutional powers or help presidents shape policy. Much less is known about rhetorical signing statements and their significance for presidential power. Our analysis from 1981‐2008 demonstrates that rhetorical signing statements are calculated messages that vary in purpose from heaping praise on C ongress to credit claiming and …
So You Want Tenure? Factors Affecting Tenure Decisions in Political Science Departments
This article investigates the variables that affect the award of tenure in political science departments in the United States. We examined two dependent variables: (1) whether a department has denied tenure in the past five years, and (2) whether a positive departmental tenure recommendation has been reversed by higher college or university authorities during the same period of time. Five clusters of independent variables were evaluated: (1) coll…
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
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 pa…
Going it Alone
Objectives. Until recently, the signing statement—a written statement the president can append to a bill after he signs it into law—remained buried in the footnotes of history. However, for modern presidents, the signing statement has become one important, albeit understudied, example of presidential unilateralism—strategies employed to preserve executive prerogatives and advance presidential policy in the face of gridlock. This article examines …
A Glimpse of History
The rapidity, duration, and intensity of it all caught me by surprise. Nearly at a full run, I dashed through a corridor and down a winding staircase to my first morning meeting. I took a place along a wall with a few other staff, but my eyes were fixed upon the principals. Gathered around a vast table were the chairs, the majority leader, and my boss—the house majority whip. The discourse was mostly heavy—President Obama's historic election, the…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
Assessing Presidential Power
Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executive's unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the president's bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The analysis suggests that signing statements, although un…
An Informal and Limited Alliance”
Presidential influence transcends some of the barriers imposed by the separation of powers to influence decision making by the Supreme Court. Specifically, we test Robert Scigliano's proposition that an informal and limited alliance exists between the president and the Court. The analysis utilizes Supreme Court decisions on civil rights and civil liberties cases from 1953 to 2000 to assess the effects of the presidency, Congress, judicial policy …
The Last Word
Signing statements have become an important device that both protects and enhances presidential power by signaling how legislation is to be implemented, offering a mechanism of electoral reward, and protecting presidential prerogatives. We offer a first cut at explaining signing statements by applying William Howell's theory of unilateral action. The evidence shows that presidents use signing statements under conditions of gridlock, such as divid…
Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House
We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates…
Keepers of the Covenant or Platonic Guardians? Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court
How do the justices of the Supreme Court make their decisions? How does the Supreme Court of the United States make its decisions? The answer to these questions may not be the same. In studying judicial decision making, there has been a disconnection between individual and institutional levels of analysis. Lifetime tenure insulates individual justices and permits them to act on their substantive preferences. At the same time, the Court lacks the …
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
Explaining Congressional-Executive Rivalry in International Affairs
Revisiting the Two Presidencies
Recent scholarly attention has considerably advanced our understanding of executive orders. We argue that executive orders represent a valuable opportunity to assess the relevance of the two presidencies and the distinction between foreign and domestic policies. The over-time analysis (1953-1997) demonstrates significant differences in the effects for most of the variables explaining executive orders depending on the issue area. For example, we f…
Controlling the Agenda with Special Rules
One of the central questions in legislative politics is whether rules are used to achieve non‐median policy outcomes (Dion and Huber 1996: Krehbiel 1991; Sinclair 1999). This study does not measure outcomes directly. Rather, the analysis assesses expectations from theories of legislative organization regarding both congressional process and behavior. Restrictive procedures are associated with policies that tend to have important collective conseq…
Presidential Success in the Realm of Foreign Affairs
Objective This analysis focuses on institutional reform and the House foreign policy committees to assess the resurgent‐Congress explanation of presidential success in international affairs between 1953–1998. Method Logit models are used to determine the changing effects on presidential success resulting from the support of chairmen and the president's co‐partisans on the foreign policy committees due to the 1970s congressional reforms. Results T…
Examining Claims about Procedural Choice
See Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin Run? Party, Ideology, and the Influence of Female Role Models on Young Women
Previous research suggests that women’s descriptive representation may have a role-model effect on young women, encouraging them to greater levels of political participation. Using data from the Monitoring the Future Survey and the National Survey of Political and Civic Engagement of Young People, we examine whether highly visible female role models like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin, and viable female candidates for governor and…
Congressional Support of the President
Recent research on congressional‐executive relations has concluded that partisan and ideological forces explaining decision making in domestic policy have also become dominant in the realm of foreign policy. Accordingly, scholars have inferred the effective demise of the two‐presidencies. In this analysis, the authors compare models explaining bipartisan congressional support of the president on domestic issues with that of foreign and defense. A…
The Last Word
Signing statements have become an important device that both protects and enhances presidential power by signaling how legislation is to be implemented, offering a mechanism of electoral reward, and protecting presidential prerogatives. We offer a first cut at explaining signing statements by applying William Howell's theory of unilateral action. The evidence shows that presidents use signing statements under conditions of gridlock, such as divid…
Revisiting the Two Presidencies
Recent scholarly attention has considerably advanced our understanding of executive orders. We argue that executive orders represent a valuable opportunity to assess the relevance of the two presidencies and the distinction between foreign and domestic policies. The over-time analysis (1953-1997) demonstrates significant differences in the effects for most of the variables explaining executive orders depending on the issue area. For example, we f…
Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House
Four competing explanations have emerged regarding restrictive rules in Congress. Informational theory claims that rules reduce information costs and facilitate committee specialization. The distributional perspective suggests that rules enforce legislative bargains and help members achieve gains‐from‐trade. Another claim is that rules increase the Rules Committee's independent influence over policy. Lastly, partisan theory asserts that rules are…
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
Assessing Presidential Power
Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executive's unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the president's bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The analysis suggests that signing statements, although un…
An Informal and Limited Alliance”
Presidential influence transcends some of the barriers imposed by the separation of powers to influence decision making by the Supreme Court. Specifically, we test Robert Scigliano's proposition that an informal and limited alliance exists between the president and the Court. The analysis utilizes Supreme Court decisions on civil rights and civil liberties cases from 1953 to 2000 to assess the effects of the presidency, Congress, judicial policy …
Fighting Fire With Water
While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within …
Preserving Institutional Power
We argue that the S upreme C ourt's long‐term goal of maintaining legitimacy and institutional power reflects an underdeveloped strategic consideration in models of judicial decision making. Our article posits that both institutional‐ and policy‐related incentives exist for the C ourt to engage in strategic behavior, and that those motivations may be differentially applicable to decision making in constitutional versus statutory cases. Our result…
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
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 pa…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
Assessing the Rhetorical Side of Presidential Signing Statements
Recent work on the constitutional signing statement suggests such tools can be designed to defend constitutional and institutional powers or help presidents shape policy. Much less is known about rhetorical signing statements and their significance for presidential power. Our analysis from 1981‐2008 demonstrates that rhetorical signing statements are calculated messages that vary in purpose from heaping praise on C ongress to credit claiming and …
So You Want Tenure? Factors Affecting Tenure Decisions in Political Science Departments
This article investigates the variables that affect the award of tenure in political science departments in the United States. We examined two dependent variables: (1) whether a department has denied tenure in the past five years, and (2) whether a positive departmental tenure recommendation has been reversed by higher college or university authorities during the same period of time. Five clusters of independent variables were evaluated: (1) coll…
Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House
We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates…
The Pendulum of Congressional Power
Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll …
The impact of party conflict on executive ascendancy and congressional abdication in US foreign policy
Veto-Proof Majorities, Legislative Procedures, and Presidential Decisions, 1981–2008
Super-majorities have occurred frequently in Congress but have escaped scholarly attention. This paper employs new measures of positive agenda control and a unique data set of 3,407 nontrivial bills from 1981 to 2008 to answer two questions: how did legislative leaders construct veto-proof coalitions, and what did presidents do with them? Legislative leaders, we argue, deployed procedures to expand and sustain veto-proof coalitions, despite incre…
The Politics of Credit in Presidential Signing Statements
The separation of powers often makes it difficult to understand who is responsible for legislative outcomes. Both members of Congress and presidents seek to shape perceptions of policy responsibility to their advantage. Yet, the relative size of the president's rhetorical stage gives him disproportionate influence in molding these discussions at critical moments. Given these circumstances, how, when, and why, do presidents claim credit for themse…
When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy
There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of ch…
Keepers of the Covenant or Platonic Guardians? Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court
How do the justices of the Supreme Court make their decisions? How does the Supreme Court of the United States make its decisions? The answer to these questions may not be the same. In studying judicial decision making, there has been a disconnection between individual and institutional levels of analysis. Lifetime tenure insulates individual justices and permits them to act on their substantive preferences. At the same time, the Court lacks the …
Presidential Success in the Realm of Foreign Affairs
Objective This analysis focuses on institutional reform and the House foreign policy committees to assess the resurgent‐Congress explanation of presidential success in international affairs between 1953–1998. Method Logit models are used to determine the changing effects on presidential success resulting from the support of chairmen and the president's co‐partisans on the foreign policy committees due to the 1970s congressional reforms. Results T…
Examiining Claims about Procedural Choice
Congressional theories offer competing explanations of the role of restrictive amendment rules in the U.S. House (Krehbiel 1997; Dion and Huber 1996; Sinclair 1999). But this literature has largely ignored the importance of waivers in the legislative process. Our analysis begins to address this gap by utilizing waivers to test theoretical claims that to this point have only been applied to the amendment portion of special rules. We find waivers a…
Controlling the Agenda with Special Rules
One of the central questions in legislative politics is whether rules are used to achieve non‐median policy outcomes (Dion and Huber 1996: Krehbiel 1991; Sinclair 1999). This study does not measure outcomes directly. Rather, the analysis assesses expectations from theories of legislative organization regarding both congressional process and behavior. Restrictive procedures are associated with policies that tend to have important collective conseq…
Fighting Fire With Water
While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within …
Partisanship and the Purse
We analyze floor decision making on taxing and spending legislation during the 96 th , 100 th , and 104 th Congresses in order to assess how electoral forces, fiscal pressures, and institutional change have affected the role of the money committees. Examination of decision making on legislation from these committees provides insight into how different committees and different institutions responded to this volatile post‐reform environment. We fin…
Congressional Support of the President
Recent research on congressional‐executive relations has concluded that partisan and ideological forces explaining decision making in domestic policy have also become dominant in the realm of foreign policy. Accordingly, scholars have inferred the effective demise of the two‐presidencies. In this analysis, the authors compare models explaining bipartisan congressional support of the president on domestic issues with that of foreign and defense. A…
Examining Claims about Procedural Choice
Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House
Examiining Claims about Procedural Choice
Congressional theories offer competing explanations of the role of restrictive amendment rules in the U.S. House (Krehbiel 1997; Dion and Huber 1996; Sinclair 1999). But this literature has largely ignored the importance of waivers in the legislative process. Our analysis begins to address this gap by utilizing waivers to test theoretical claims that to this point have only been applied to the amendment portion of special rules. We find waivers a…
Explaining the Role of Restrictive Rules in the Postreform House
Four competing explanations have emerged regarding restrictive rules in Congress. Informational theory claims that rules reduce information costs and facilitate committee specialization. The distributional perspective suggests that rules enforce legislative bargains and help members achieve gains‐from‐trade. Another claim is that rules increase the Rules Committee's independent influence over policy. Lastly, partisan theory asserts that rules are…
The Pendulum of Congressional Power
Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll …
Controlling the Agenda with Special Rules
One of the central questions in legislative politics is whether rules are used to achieve non‐median policy outcomes (Dion and Huber 1996: Krehbiel 1991; Sinclair 1999). This study does not measure outcomes directly. Rather, the analysis assesses expectations from theories of legislative organization regarding both congressional process and behavior. Restrictive procedures are associated with policies that tend to have important collective conseq…
Presidential Success in the Realm of Foreign Affairs
Objective This analysis focuses on institutional reform and the House foreign policy committees to assess the resurgent‐Congress explanation of presidential success in international affairs between 1953–1998. Method Logit models are used to determine the changing effects on presidential success resulting from the support of chairmen and the president's co‐partisans on the foreign policy committees due to the 1970s congressional reforms. Results T…
Explaining Congressional-Executive Rivalry in International Affairs
Revisiting the Two Presidencies
Recent scholarly attention has considerably advanced our understanding of executive orders. We argue that executive orders represent a valuable opportunity to assess the relevance of the two presidencies and the distinction between foreign and domestic policies. The over-time analysis (1953-1997) demonstrates significant differences in the effects for most of the variables explaining executive orders depending on the issue area. For example, we f…
Agendas, Side Issues and Leadership in the US House
We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates…
Keepers of the Covenant or Platonic Guardians? Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court
How do the justices of the Supreme Court make their decisions? How does the Supreme Court of the United States make its decisions? The answer to these questions may not be the same. In studying judicial decision making, there has been a disconnection between individual and institutional levels of analysis. Lifetime tenure insulates individual justices and permits them to act on their substantive preferences. At the same time, the Court lacks the …
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
An Informal and Limited Alliance”
Presidential influence transcends some of the barriers imposed by the separation of powers to influence decision making by the Supreme Court. Specifically, we test Robert Scigliano's proposition that an informal and limited alliance exists between the president and the Court. The analysis utilizes Supreme Court decisions on civil rights and civil liberties cases from 1953 to 2000 to assess the effects of the presidency, Congress, judicial policy …
The Last Word
Signing statements have become an important device that both protects and enhances presidential power by signaling how legislation is to be implemented, offering a mechanism of electoral reward, and protecting presidential prerogatives. We offer a first cut at explaining signing statements by applying William Howell's theory of unilateral action. The evidence shows that presidents use signing statements under conditions of gridlock, such as divid…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
Assessing Presidential Power
Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executive's unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the president's bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The analysis suggests that signing statements, although un…
Going it Alone
Objectives. Until recently, the signing statement—a written statement the president can append to a bill after he signs it into law—remained buried in the footnotes of history. However, for modern presidents, the signing statement has become one important, albeit understudied, example of presidential unilateralism—strategies employed to preserve executive prerogatives and advance presidential policy in the face of gridlock. This article examines …
A Glimpse of History
The rapidity, duration, and intensity of it all caught me by surprise. Nearly at a full run, I dashed through a corridor and down a winding staircase to my first morning meeting. I took a place along a wall with a few other staff, but my eyes were fixed upon the principals. Gathered around a vast table were the chairs, the majority leader, and my boss—the house majority whip. The discourse was mostly heavy—President Obama's historic election, the…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
So You Want Tenure? Factors Affecting Tenure Decisions in Political Science Departments
This article investigates the variables that affect the award of tenure in political science departments in the United States. We examined two dependent variables: (1) whether a department has denied tenure in the past five years, and (2) whether a positive departmental tenure recommendation has been reversed by higher college or university authorities during the same period of time. Five clusters of independent variables were evaluated: (1) coll…
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
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 pa…
Assessing the Rhetorical Side of Presidential Signing Statements
Recent work on the constitutional signing statement suggests such tools can be designed to defend constitutional and institutional powers or help presidents shape policy. Much less is known about rhetorical signing statements and their significance for presidential power. Our analysis from 1981‐2008 demonstrates that rhetorical signing statements are calculated messages that vary in purpose from heaping praise on C ongress to credit claiming and …
Political science (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Public Administration (19 works) · Law and economics (16 works) · Presidential system (16 works) · Public Administration (16 works)