Congressional opinions of war change with the events on the battlefield

The Iraq War Resolution of October 2002 was broadly supported in Congress, passing with bipartisan majorities in both chambers (296-133; 77-23), but the conflict rapidly became unpopular, especially with members of the Democratic Party. Drawing on data from the Iraq War, Douglas Kriner examines how members of Congress respond to casualties, both on the national level and within their constituencies. He argues that congressional feelings on a conflict should be of great concern to the president because members of Congress are highly effective at rallying their constituents to support a war

Sustained congressional investigations into the president can seriously erode their popular support

Recent years have seen increasing concerns over the influence of presidents on the policymaking process, often bypassing Congress through the use of executive orders. But Congress may not be completely helpless in the face if an ‘imperial presidency’. In new research, Douglas Kriner and Erick Schickler have examined 3,500 investigative hearings from 1953 through 2006 and finds that sustained congressional investigations into the president can be as damaging to their approval rating as a fall in consumer confidence in the economy would be

When it comes to executive actions, Americans’ partisan and policy preferences trump constitutional concerns

Facing a gridlocked Congress, the last 18 months have seen President Obama make increasing use – as promised – of his “pen and phone” to implement policy via executive actions. While Obama has been roundly criticized from the right for taking such unilateral actions, do Americans instinctively oppose them? Using survey experiments to test this question, Dino Christenson and Douglas Kriner find little evidence that Americans oppose unilateral actions as threats to checks and balances. Instead, constitutional concerns are overwhelmed by partisanship and policy preferences. The means through which the president pursues his policy priorities – be it legislation or unilateral action – is largely irrelevant

Presidents create political inequality by allocatingfederal dollars to electorally useful constituenciesacross the country

For decades, many have been concerned over pork barrel politics in Congress with power over the allocation of federal spending recently flowing towards the presidency as a counter. But what if presidents pursue policies that also channel federal grants to parts of the country that are electorally useful? In new research, Douglas Kriner and Andrew Reeves find that presidents allocate more federal resources (which are worth billions) to swing states, states which reliably back them in elections, and those which elect co-partisans that they are able to build coalitions with

Replication Data for: Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power

These files contain all of the data and STATA code to replicate the empirical analyses in Investigating the President. It also includes a file with the CIS numbers for each investigative hearing in our data set from 1898 through 2014