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Presidential Influence in an Era of Congressional Dominance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2016

JON C. ROGOWSKI
JON C. ROGOWSKI*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
*
Jon C. Rogowski is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 (jrogowski@wustl.edu).
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Abstract

Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

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Type
Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 110 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 325 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016 

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