Presidential Agenda Setting During Recessions

• In Event: Presidents and Executive Politics & Public Policy Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Presidents and Executive Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Presidency scholars often assert that agenda setting is an important presidential power. As such, several studies have looked at the president’s influence on the legislative agenda in Congress (Edwards III, Peake, and Barrett 1997; Taylor 1998; Edwards III and Barrett 2000). Yet we know very little about the role played by the president in agenda setting during a domestic economic emergency such as a recession. This is curious considering the president is often seen as needing to provide legislators with leadership on policy priorities to help them overcome their collective action problems (Moe 2002). An event such as a recession provides the president with an opportunity to provide Congress with such leadership.

This paper utilizes an original dataset of every bill Congress considered in response to eleven recessions since 1946 to examine presidential agenda setting during recessions in the post war era. It goes about this by exploring the quantity, quality, and success of proposals the president placed on the congressional agenda to address a recession in the post war era. This paper finds that presidential proposals to address recessions in the post war era have experienced much more success in Congress than the president’s overall legislative agenda. Additionally, this paper finds that the president has set a smaller portion of the congressional agenda when addressing the recessions since the 1960s. This paper also finds that the quality of presidential proposals to address recessions has decreased since 1980, and that a president’s pre-tenure career impacted the quality of their proposals placed on the agenda. Presidents who were former members of Congress offered legislative initiatives that were broader in scope and more specific than presidents who did not have a legislative background. The findings in this paper add to our understanding of presidential agenda setting, presidential success, and presidential leadership in the post war era.

Author

• Scott Newsome, University of California, Santa Cruz