Timothy
Callaghan
PhD
Candidate
Appealing Politics? Using the Bully Pulpit to Change Opinions and Influence Policy
Appealing Politics? Using the Bully Pulpit to Change Opinions and Influence Policy
In the modern political landscape, politicians at all levels
of government attempt to shape public discourse through carefully crafted
statements designed to influence the public’s policy positions and the behavior
of other actors in the political system. Despite this phenomenon's profound democratic
implications, our understanding of this bully pulpit use remains underdeveloped
in many respects. Most importantly, we lack compelling theories and methods that
can outline and test the conditions in the political environment that make
influence over the public and other political actors more or less likely. In
other words, while some research (see Canes-Wrone 2001 and Rottinghaus 2010) has
pointed to the potential conditionality of influence through the bully pulpit,
more research is needed to test and define the specific bounds of elite
influence.
In my dissertation, I argue that testing and developing this
broader understanding of conditionality in the context of the presidency, while
a focal point of past research, can be difficult to achieve due to the lack of
variation across time at the national level in many political conditions of
interest. To overcome this problem, I focus my analysis of the conditional
influence of the bully pulpit on another prominent executive in the political
system – US governors. By doing so, my dissertation leverages the unique
variation across US states in political, economic, and institutional
circumstances in order to provide a detailed investigation of the conditions in
the political environment that constrain an executive’s ability to influence
his or her constituents and subsequent policy debates in state legislatures. I
then draw lessons from the state level to help us better understand the
conditional influence of the bully pulpit at all levels of the political
process, most importantly the presidency.
To analyze the influence of the gubernatorial bully pulpit, my
dissertation focuses on the analysis of one key policy issue – the Affordable
Care Act (ACA). Using a content analysis
of gubernatorial State of the State addresses from 2010-2014 to capture elite
appeals, monthly ACA opinion polls to capture policy salience and support, and
a collection of the 3,600 ACA bills introduced in state capitols during that
period, my dissertation explores the influence of the bully pulpit on the
general public and the legislature while accounting for a variety of
conditioning factors. My analysis finds that even on highly polarized policy
issues like health reform, governors’ attempts to ‘go public’ can prove quite
successful, but only when key conditions are met in the political environment. I find for example, that the public is more
likely to change policy opinions in response to speeches from popular governors and messages delivered
during election years. However, the
public is generally unaffected by media coverage of key addresses or the
prominence of the governor. In addition, I study legislative behavior and
demonstrate that gubernatorial statements and the opinion change that those
statements cause influence the behavior of state legislators. Specifically, I
find that legislative leaders respond to statements by governors in support of
or opposition to key public policies and alter their behavior on those policy
issues accordingly.
University of Minnesota
Department of Political Science
267 19th Ave. S.
Minneapolis MN 55455
Constitutions
and Presidents: How formal rules constrain and empower
By Anna Fruhstorfer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
PhD committee: Silvia von Steinsdorff, Zachary Elkins, Ellen Immergut
(defended in July 2015)
Although
presidential power is a hot topic in political science research, little
attention was paid to presidents in systems with a powerful parliament and
prime minister. So far, scholars have mostly been focusing on semi-presidential
systems, whereas parliamentary systems with an indirectly elected president
like in Germany or Estonia are hardly ever discussed (with the
exception of Tavits 2009). In addition, little is known about the role constitutions play in the
evolvement of presidential de-facto power. Treating constitutions as the
explanatory variable for a high or low level of de-facto power is unusual. However, some influential
studies have sought to explain the central role of constitutions in
presidential power. From
different angles, Amorim Neto and Strøm
(2006), Schleiter and Morgan-Jones (2010) and Tavits (2009) have significantly
contributed to our understanding of presidential power. This
thesis built on these findings and expanded the perspective on a joint analysis
of parliamentary and
semipresidential systems. Nevertheless, because most studies are concerned with explaining why a
discrepancy between constitution and reality occurs, they do not pay much
attention to how constitutions influence reality. Thus, in my thesis I argued
that specific characteristics of constitutional power make presidential
institutions more sensitive to outside influences than others. Presidents that
act within these institutions adapt their behavior accordingly. What emerges
from these actions and what we can observe are different patterns of
presidential leadership.
In the course of the development
of the stated argument and the conceptualization of power, it became clear that
established measurement tools of presidential constitutional power are not
always adequate to describe the president’s role in parliamentary systems. Hence,
I developed the index of constitutional presidential strength (CPS) for this
study. It advances established tools to better capture the functional logic of
parliamentary systems, to facilitate both low-level and high-level
constitutional competences, and to enhance methodological and conceptual
issues. It measures constitutional power of presidents for more than 3000
observations in 46 countries, for up to 75 years.[1] Based on this comparative
perspective, I further stressed the effect of constitutions on how constitutional
power shapes and determines presidential behavior in decision-making for
individual cases.
I created in-depth descriptions of political situations in a diverse group of countries,
based on a 2-dimensional perspective of constitutional power (among them
Austria, Albania, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Moldova, Slovenia,
and Ukraine). For these countries I pointed out multiple causes and their
interaction for the varying patterns of presidential de-facto power. I found
convincing evidence that the role of constitutions in the explanation of these
different patterns is more important than usually suggested and that we have to
treat constitutions again as an independent variable when trying to explain
varying presidential power
Amorim Neto, Octavio, and Kaare Strøm. 2006. “Breaking the Parliamentary
Chain of Delegation: Presidents and Non-partisan Cabinet Members in European
Democracies.” British Journal of
Political Science 36 (4): 619–43.
Fortin, Jessica. 2013. “Measuring presidential powers: Some pitfalls of
aggregate measurement.” International
Political Science Review 34 (1): 91–112.
Schleiter, Petra, and Edward Morgan-Jones. 2010. “Who’s in charge?
Presidents, assemblies, and the political control of semipresidential
cabinets.” Comparative Political Studies
43 (11): 1415–41.
Tavits, Margit. 2009. Presidents
and Prime Minsters. Do Direct Elections Matter? Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford Univ.
Press.
[1] In
cooperation with the Comparative Constitutions Project at University of Texas
at Austin
Name: Neil V.
Hernandez
Dissertation Title: “Immigration & Naturalization Policy
Innovation Through Bureaucratic
Reorganization” [Defended September
2015, CUNY Graduate Center]
Dissertation Summary:
During the early 20th
century, Congress and the presidency created new bureaucracies to liberalize
the restrictive immigration laws then in effect. This dissertation expounds a
process that is referred to as “policy innovation through bureaucratic
reorganization.” The case study method is utilized to examine the formation and
evolution of the Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization from 1906 to 1913
and the Immigration & Naturalization Service from 1933 to 1940. In these
periods, elected officials increased the numbers of immigrants and naturalized
citizens. Such administrative results were produced by decreasing agency
resources like funding, staffing, and infrastructure, as well as appointing
“liberal bureaucrats” in key positions to loosen operational rules. The
expansion of immigration and (with naturalization) the expansion of the body
politic formed part of the political objectives of officeholders. They
exploited these outcomes to advance additional goals such as interest group
management, reelection, and retaining control of the legislature. For the study
of bureaucracy, this investigation contributes to political control theory by
showing that bureaucratic reorganization provides politicians with power over
agencies for up to seven years. It also adds to immigration and citizenship
research by demonstrating that statutes can be temporarily reformed through the
policy implementation process. Furthermore, this study’s findings are applied
to a contemporary case—the development of the Department of Homeland Security
from 2002 to 2014. This example confirms that officeholders employ the same
procedure described by the thesis to prevent the deportation of undocumented
aliens.
Title: Castling the King: Institutional Sequencing and Regime
Change
The question that this dissertation
seeks to answer is the following: What conditions determine the timing of
political institutions in authoritarian regimes? An increasing focus in the
comparative research on modern autocracies is on the institutions by which
different forms of authoritarianism govern. In terms of formal political
institutions--the rules and expectations by which politics is conducted and
society operates--non-democracies have displayed a remarkable diversity and
survivability. The thesis attempts to explain the relative benefits of
authoritarian institutions--particularly the legislature--in situations with
high uncertainty. Recent work has highlighted major differences between modern
autocratic institutions, such as parties and legislatures, which seemingly “go
together.” In contrast, this study addresses antecedent conditions that predict
the turn to neither, to one, or to both. I argue that historical patterns of
state building show a common trend in which contestation precluded
participation, and that this trend helps to explain the timing and success of
institutions in authoritarian regimes. Noting that a majority of
non-democracies have legalized legislatures but are not based on a political
party, and that leaders who adapt institutions are more likely to allow a
legislature than to encourage parties, I draw on a real-world example in which
a dictator confronted issues of power-sharing to better understand the
attractiveness of an authoritarian legislature. A prime example of
power-sharing problems is nineteenth century Mexico, during which a federal
government was being forged out of protracted post-independence conflict
between multiple parties with different ideologies. The administration of
Porfirio Diaz--roughly, 1876-1911--maintained relative stability in the absence
of modern political parties and with a regularly meeting Congress. I
demonstrate that regional bosses emerged after Independence and Reform as a
consequence of local violence patterns, and that their capacity to contain
regional politics earned them a say in the formation of law. The problems
facing Porfirio Diaz therefore differed from those facing post-Revolutionary
leaders, which explain the timing of legislative and party institutions in
Mexico. Using a cross-national dataset on levels of executive recruitment and
political competition for 1800-2013, I examine whether there are ‘modal’
patterns of institutional development. I find that transitions that firstly
involved regularizing contestation characterize the bulk of countries in my
sample. In turn, this state positively predicts regime type, ethnic diversity
in party leadership, and the survival of authoritarian regimes. The results
suggest that the emergence of modern authoritarian institutions is conditioned
by conflict and unrest, and that particular institutional arrangements provide
distinct solutions to different problems related to governance. Though applied
to a modern sample, the historical case and the tested logic encourage scholars
to further consider whether there exist distinct paths of institutional
development. The research supports comparative research by considering the
long-term temporal dimension of institutional change, utilizing the richness of
experiences in Latin America to explain political transitions, and adding
nuance to the study of authoritarian parties and legislatures.
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