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Abstract
This dissertation examines the influence of the president over member voting and the policymaking process of the U.S. House of Representatives. The substantive chapters survey the influence of the president in the policy arenas of civil rights and trade politics. Central to each analysis are two principles: the notion that presidential influence cannot be understood outside the context of legislative behavior, and the idea that every act designed to influence another actor has both immediate and delayed consequences.
Chapter 1 provides the theoretical foundations of the analysis, with emphasis on these two principles. The following three chapters examine presidential influence over civil rights policymaking. Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of the issue area, with particular emphasis on the changes in preferences for new policy initiatives after the mid-1960s. Chapter 3 uses the spatial model to generate measures of these preferences for both legislators and the president. The analysis uses these measures of policy preference to explain why presidents sometimes announce their positions on upcoming legislation and how this position taking affects the likelihood that the House will enact a policy the president prefers. Chapter 4 examines presidential influence over civil rights policy using a beta-logistic statistical model of legislative behavior to capture unobserved factors that determine the voting patterns of individual legislators. Presidential influence, according to statistics calculated from model estimates, affects the voting of House members roughly as one might expect from the historical analysis in Chapter 2.
Chapter 5 analyzes the impact of President Bill Clinton's bargaining initiative before the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, using data coded from popular press accounts of the bargains he struck with individual legislators. Chapter 6 surveys the long-term consequences of the president's bargaining over NAFTA, especially its effect on legislators' positions on the reauthorization of President Clinton's use of the Fast Track policymaking procedure in 1997. Chapter 7 offers some conclusions, including a discussion of the general usefulness of the approaches used here in future attempts to quantify presidential influence.
