Jeffrey E. Cohen asks why US presidents send to Congress the legislative proposals that they do and what Congress does with those proposals. His study covers nearly the entire history of the presidency, from 1789 to 2002. The long historical scope allows Cohen to engage competing perspectives on how the presidency has developed over time. He asks what accounts for the short- and long-term trends in presidential requests to Congress, what substantive policies and issues recommendations are concerned with, and what factors affect the presidential decision to submit a recommendation on a particular issue. The President's Legislative Policy Agenda, 1789–2002 argues that presidents often anticipate the Congressional reaction to their legislative proposals and modify their agendas accordingly.
• Uses a comprehensive data set of all presidential proposals to Congress for legislation from 1789–2002 • Categorizes each presidential proposal by policy type, allowing us to describe shifting presidential attention across policy types • Seeks to understand the reasons behind presidential decisions to submit proposals to Congress and the Congressional disposition on proposals
Contents
Introduction. Two puzzles; 1. The president's legislative policy agenda; 2. Studying agenda building; 3. A theory of presidential legislative policy agenda building; 4. The size of the president's agenda; 5. The substantive content of presidential agenda; 6. Divided government and presidential policy moderation; 7. From the White House to Capitol Hill: presidential agenda success in Congress; 8. Conclusions.
Reviews
'A real step forward for presidential studies … Cohen's arguments about a president's forethought and capacity for strategy provide considerable traction in explaining his empirical findings. This imaginative, painstaking, and astoundingly large-scale analysis by one of our best presidential scholars will surely stimulate a new wave of empirical work and (one hopes) some tough-minded theorizing about presidential proposal power.' Charles M. Cameron, Princeton University
'When attempting to gauge presidential influence in Congress, scholars confront a basic fact: what presidents seek is at least partially a function of what they think they can get. Rather than treat this fact as a nuisance, Jeffrey Cohen subjects it to sustained inquiry. Tracking the size and content of presidents' legislative agendas over the course of the nation's entire history, Cohen puts on the table some essential facts with broad implications for our assessments of presidential power.' William Howell, University of Chicago
'Handcuffed by data limitations and intimidated by conceptual complexity, quantitative studies of presidential-congressional legislative relations too often examine only 'modern' presidents and domestic issues, as though historical development has no bearing on understanding the executive and presidents inhabit a world of splendid isolation from the international arena. In this important book, Jeffrey Cohen explodes these artificial boundaries. Exploiting a data set of presidential legislative initiatives that takes us from George Washington to George W. Bush and cuts across multiple policy domains, foreign and domestic, he brings to the fore patterns, continuities, and variations in the presidential-congressional relationship that were unknowable from previous research.' Mark A. Peterson, University of California, Los Angeles
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