| dc.description.abstract | Presidential policy making in Congress is a lengthy, difficult process that
involves developing a policy initiative, proposing it to Congress, and winning the
legislature’s support. Recent empirical findings indicate that, although centralizing the
policy making process eases a president’s managerial burdens, it may also decrease the
likelihood of presidential policy success in Congress. Alternatively, decentralizing the
process increases the likelihood of policy success, but constrains the president’s
discretion over policy substance and incurs greater administrative burdens in the form of
managing differing viewpoints, contradictory interests, and increased information flow.
Such findings present an intriguing puzzle: how can presidents balance their managerial
and information needs and costs to maximize their policy success in Congress? Solving
this presidential dilemma can have substantial payoffs for the White House.
I argue that agency input provides presidents with a degree of bureaucratic
expertise and objectivity, process transparency, and agency support, which imbues
presidential proposals with bureaucratic legitimacy and aids their passage into law. To
test my hypotheses, I conduct a series of empirical analyses of pooled cross-sectional logistic regression models using a dataset on presidential legislative proposals over the
period of 1949-2007. I find that agency input and presidential signaling are key
components to increased presidential policy success in Congress. I also find that the
employment of agency input for policy development decreases the number of changes
made to the substance of a presidential initiative from its proposal stage to its passage
into law.
Because the substance of a proposal matters, sending a stronger signal for a
proposal developed with agency input should have a stronger, positive influence on
legislative success. To explore this possibility, I also incorporate the role that
voluminous presidential signaling plays at high levels of agency input and find that it has
a particularly potent, positive influence on legislative success and on lowering the extent
of change to policy substance in the Senate.
In light of these findings, I prescribe a new policy making strategy with agency
input at its core. My conclusions should also provide an impetus for scholars to
reconsider conventional wisdom regarding presidential-bureaucratic management and
legislative policy making. | en |
