Far from being mere ‘servants of Congress’, pre-20th century presidents were able to use federal resources to their partisan advantage

Often characterized as impotent and servile to their parties, early American presidents have been thought to have been insignificant to policy outcomes. As Jon C. Rogowski’s work on presidential influence over the Post Office Department uncovers, however, 19th-century presidents were able to make a noticeable difference to the national distribution of federal resources, to the advantage of their fellow party politicians. His findings require a reassessment of the relative power of early presidents, and suggest their impotence has been significantly overstated

Gun Violence, Policing, and Young Communities of Color

Young people of color are leading the response to recent instances of gun violence. Young people do not all experience gun violence at the same rate nor do they feel its consequences evenly. Our research on young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 years old highlights the very different experiences young people have with guns, gun violence, and policing across racial and ethnic groups

Millennial Evaluations of Donald Trump and the Future of American Politics

The GenForward Survey is the first of its kind -- a nationally representative survey of over 1,750 young adults ages 18-34 conducted bimonthly that pays special attention to how race and ethnicity influence how young adults or Millennials experience and think about the world. Given the importance of race and ethnicity for shaping the diverse perspectives and lived experiences of young people, we believe researchers make a mistake when they present data on young adults in a manner that assumes a monolithic Millennial generation and young adult vote. Millennials now represent the largest generation of Americans, and they are by far the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in the country. About 19 percent of Millennials identify as Latino or Hispanic, 13 percent as Black or African American, and 6 percent as Asian American. Thus, to fully understand how young adults think about elections and politicians, issues such as terrorism or gun violence, as well as their economic futures and race relations, we apply an intersectional lens and pay attention to characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. In this report, we present GenForward survey data collected between June 23 and July 10, 2017. We provide an extensive look at how Millennials think about politics and political officials in both the Republican and Democratic parties

Education in America: The Views of Millennials

This GenForward report presents the views of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 on education in the United States. We asked our nationally representative and diverse sample of young adults to provide their evaluations of their own school system, their thoughts about what makes a good school, their preferences regarding proposals for reforming education, their perceptions about issues of equity in schools, and their beliefs about the promise and challenges of higher education in America today. Who better to assess the strengths and weaknesses of our educational systems than those most proximate to the American educational experience? Many Millennials recently graduated from high school, while some are currently pursuing higher educational opportunities and/or navigating educational systems for their children

Public Opinion and Presidents’ Unilateral Policy Agendas

Unilateral power is an important source of policy change for contemporary presidents. In contrast with scholarship that examines the institutional constraints on presidents’ exercise of unilateral authority, I consider presidents’ unilateral behavior in a framework of political accountability. I argue that presidents have incentives to incorporate the public's policy priorities in their unilateral agendas. I examine this account using panel data on executive orders and public opinion across issue areas from 1954 to 2018. Across a variety of model specifications and estimation strategies, I find evidence that patterns of executive action reflect the public's policy priorities. Presidents issue greater numbers of unilateral directives on issues that gain public salience, particularly on issues that are more familiar to the public and when issuing more policy-significant directives. These findings suggest that accountability mechanisms structure how presidents exercise unilateral power and have normative implications for considering presidential unilateralism in a separation-of-powers system

Replication data for: Electoral Choice, Ideological Conflict, and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This paper introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice

Replication Data for: Unilateral Powers, Public Opinion, and the Presidency

This paper explores mass attitudes toward unilateral presidential power. We argue that mass attitudes toward presidential power reflect evaluations of the current president as well as more fundamental conceptions about the nature of the office, which are rooted in beliefs about the rule of law. In four nationally representative surveys, we find low levels of support for unilateral powers, that these attitudes are stable over time, and that they are structured both by presidential approval and beliefs in the rule of law. In a fifth survey, we show that political context conditions support for unilateral power, and in a sixth we show that these attitudes are consequential for policy evaluation. Even during the Obama presidency, when presidential power is highly politicized, voters distinguish the president from the presidency. Our results have important implications for public opinion's role in constraining the use of presidential power

Replication Data for: The Public Cost of Unilateral Action

Scholarship on democratic responsiveness focuses on whether political outcomes reflect public opinion but overlooks attitudes toward how power is used to achieve those policies. We argue that public attitudes toward unilateral action lead to negative evaluations of presidents who exercise unilateral powers and policies achieved through their use. Evidence from two studies supports our argument. In three nationally representative survey experiments conducted across a range of policy domains, we find that the public reacts negatively when policies are achieved through unilateral powers instead of through legislation passed by Congress. We further show these costs are greatest among respondents who support the president's policy goals. In an observational study, we show that attitudes toward unilateral action in the abstract affect how respondents evaluate policies achieved through unilateral action by presidents from Lincoln to Obama. Our results suggest that public opinion may constrain presidents' use of unilateral powers

Ballot Reform, the Personal Vote, and Political Representation in the United States

Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics