Presidents’ Vetoes and Audience Costs

Veto threats may offer presidents bargaining leverage, but such leverage will be diminished if they and those with whom they transact business view a veto as hurting the president’s approval rating and his party’s prospects in the next election. How concerned must presidents be about the audience costs associated with a veto? Political science research suggests that they should be in that the public does not like vetoes and punishes presidents when they exercise this authority. In this article we test this argument with survey responses during times after presidents have issued a veto threat but before an actual veto. While on average, respondents register opposition to a veto, this preference varies greatly with the specific policy in question and with respondents’ party identification and presidential approval. The results suggest that opposition to a veto comes disproportionately, may be limited to politically distant respondents, and thus may not be as costly as the net negative numbers suggest

Replication data for: Life Before Polls: Ohio Politicians Predict the 1828 Presidential Vote

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Replication data for: Congress and America's Political Development: The Transformation of the Post Office from Patronage to Service

Students of American political development portray the transformation of the bureaucracy from patronage to service as the handiwork of progressive presidents. In this article we explore Congress' programmatic contribution to the transformation of the bureaucracy. Specifically, we examine the development of rural free delivery (RFD) during the 1890's. The early administrative history of RFD and a statistical analysis of initial route allocations identify a strong partisan and electoral rationale for the Republican Congress's decision to dismantle patronage Fourth class post offices and replace them with RFD routes. Freshmen Republican members who faced difficult campaigns in 1900 were the most successful in gathering routes while their Democratic counterparts were the least so. We conclude that the emergence of careerist congressmen looking for opportunities to serve constituents provided an important impetus in the historic reorientation of national policy from patronage to service

Replication Data for: Veto Rhetoric and Legislative Riders

Riders to appropriations bills have long been a favorite Congressional instrument for forcing presidents to accept unwanted policies. To resist unwanted riders, presidents have increasingly resorted to veto threats. Are such threats credible and do they influence legislation? To answer these questions we analyze the legislative histories of hundreds of threatened and unthreatened riders from 1985 through 2008. We find that threats are effective in bringing the final legislation closer to the president’s preferences. Threats achieve their success, in large part, by interrupting the textbook legislative process in the Senate – spawning filibusters, prompting leaders to punt bills to conference, and encouraging the use of other “unorthodox” procedures. Unlike conventional models that regard veto threats as minimally effective, the findings presented here depict veto rhetoric as integral to identifying critical riders separating the legislative parties that must be resolved in order to avoid gridlock and pass annual appropriations legislatio