Presidential Politics

Barack Obama ran for the presidency promising a new style of “post-partisan” politics and appealed to Democrats and Republicans to find “common ground”. With Democrats gaining their largest House and Senate majorities since 1994 and 1978 and the strength of a president’s party being a strong predictor of legislative success, the new president could expect to win strong congressional support for his legislative priorities. However, the strategic context that he encountered was not that favourable to his ambitious legislative agenda or his post-partisan aspirations. Yet, working closely with the Democratic Congress, the list of legislative accomplishments in the 111th Congress was considerable, although the record is not as strong as Lyndon Johnson’s or even Kennedy’s or Clinton’s. Moreover, there were also some glaring failures, notably climate change - and in no sense could Obama claim to have been a transformational president. Obama’s legislative successes, particularly the stimulus and the health care legislation, were essentially congressional Democratic products, albeit ones on which the White House helped facilitate congressional agreement.

Twelve years on from 9/11 and notwithstanding the extra-legal killing of the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11 atrocities in May 2011, the threat from terrorism, primarily but not exclusively from jihadists, continues. As the chapter shows in considering policies on detainees, drones, targeted assassinations, rendition and torture, the accretion of executive power in relation to the so-called ‘war on terror’ under the Bush Administration has been maintained under the Obama Administration and, in certain cases, accelerated, often by stealth, despite some softening of tone and policy changes. The Congress, moreover, has largely gone along with the administration's presidentialist approach, and sometimes reinforced it. Presidential power is not only the power to persuade, it is also about what a president can get away with—and whether the Congress and the courts will stop him or her. Indeed, the Obama Administration, like its predecessor, has gone to great lengths both to protect presidential and executive privileges and to resist accountability by the Congress and the courts. Twelve years after 9/11, we can see the continuation of a presidential shift of power to the executive instigated by George W. Bush.

US presidents have expanded executive power in times of war and emergency, sometimes aggressively so.  This article builds on the application of punctuated equilibria theory by Burnham (1999 and Ackerman (1999). Underpinning this theory is the notion that rapid changes in – or external shocks to - domestic and international society impose new and insistent demands on the state. In so doing, they produce important and decisive moments of institutional mobilization and creativity, disrupt a pre-existing, relatively stable, equilibrium between the Congress and the president, and precipitate decisions or nondecisions by the electorate and political leaders that define the contours for action when the next crisis or external shock occurs. The article suggests that the combination of President George W. Bush’s presidentialist doctrine, 9/11 and the “war” on terror has consolidated a new, constitutional equilibrium. While some members of Congress contest the new order, the Congress collectively has acquiesced in its own marginalization. The article surveys a wide range of executive power assertions and legislative retreats. It argues that power assertions generally draw on precedent: on, for example, a tradition of wartime presidential extra-constitutional leadership extending to presidents, such as John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, as well as to Cold War and post-Cold War presidentialism.

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees’ frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high-level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top-tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high-level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees’ political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.

"ABSTRACT: This article attempts to fill the gap in the literature regarding the determinants
of voter behaviour at presidential elections in a post-socialist context, taking into account
the changing patterns of competition both within the party system (parliamentary
elections) and at presidential elections. Slovenia is taken as a case study of predictors
of voting behaviour at presidential elections (1997, 2002, 2007 and 2012) based on
bivariate and multivariate methods using Politbarometer public opinion survey data.
The key findings are that the predictors of voting behaviour change over time and that
party identification has recently been declining in importance as a predictor of voting
behaviour at presidential elections.
"

"A emenda constitucional n.16/97 permitiu a
reeleição dos ocupantes de cargos do poder executivo.
Apesar das controvérsias, a reeleição permite que o eleitor,
via os princípios do Estado Democrático de Direito, decida
pela continuidade, ou não, de um mandatário, o que pode
possibilitar o desenvolvimento de um governo promissor,
que já se arrastava por 4 (quatro) anos, pelo prazo máximo
de 8 (oito) anos, uma vez que cada mandato é fixado em 4
(quatro) anos. Dentro do Direito Comparado há casos em
que a reeleição é ilimitada, noutros casos ela é vedada, e há
ainda casos em que por ter existido um número excessivo
de mandatos, o poder legislativo foi forçado a regular o
número máximo de mandatos consecutivos, como no caso
dos Estados Unidos, devido aos quatro mandatos
consecutivos do Presidente Roosevelt. As teses que refutam
a reeleição no Brasil são infundadas. Muitos doutos
reclamam pela convocação de uma Assembleia Nacional
Constituinte, por entenderem que a alteração acarretaria
numa mudança estrutural verdadeira. Há ainda os que
defendem a vedação da reeleição com a ampliação do
mandato dos chefes do executivo para 5 (cinco) ou 6 (seis)
anos. Em verdade, há de se pensar em reestruturar o poder
legislativo e a forma de condução de seus mandatários. A
reeleição, na forma prevista pela Constituição, deve ser
mantida.
"

Media accounts of presidential appointments have often characterized the ambassadorial appointments process as overtaken by patronage concerns, with the most attractive posts set aside for those responsible for the president's election, few of whom have diplomatic experience. Here, using original data on all ambassadors, envoys, and other chiefs of mission appointed during the 68th through 112th Congresses, I examine the state-level characteristics that determine whether the United States appoints a career member of the Foreign Service to serve as chief of mission, or someone with arguably fewer professional credentials.  I find that appointments are governed by a combination of domestic and international factors.  Foreign Service appointments are more likely when there is domestic partisan disagreement, when the previous chief of mission was a member of the Foreign Service, and when the state exhibits characteristics suggested by previous research to correlate with an increased probability of conflict with the United States.

Despite their responsibility for federal policy implementation in the United States, little research has focused on how presidential nominees and appointees affect public opinion. This study offers the first systematic examination of this overlooked phenomenon. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that perceived nominee competence is associated with increased trust in the administration in general and the individual nominees in particular, whereas perceptions of favoritism or patronage—characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers—are associated with decreased levels of trust in the same. Notably, perceived nominee ideology has no perceptible effect on either trust in the administration the nominees themselves.