IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v499y1988i1p36-46.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The President's Veto Power

Author

Listed:
  • RICHARD A. WATSON

Abstract

Drawing upon experiences with legislatively dominated government at the state and national levels in the post-Revolution period, the Founders granted the president the power to veto bills passed by Congress. An analysis of all vetoes cast by modern presidents in office from 1933 to 1981, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt and ending with Jimmy Carter, indicates that Roosevelt used the power most frequently. If, however, one focuses on public bills of national significance and takes into account the number of years each of these presidents served, Gerald Ford was the most significant vetoer of the period. Harry Truman vetoed more major bills than any of the other modern presidents and was also overridden most frequently by Congress on such bills. Most vetoed bills are eventually passed and signed by the president in a different form. The president can also affect legislation by threatening to veto proposed bills: such action may prevent their passage at all or may influence Congress to put them in a form that is acceptable to him.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard A. Watson, 1988. "The President's Veto Power," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 499(1), pages 36-46, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:499:y:1988:i:1:p:36-46
    DOI: 10.1177/0002716288499001003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716288499001003
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0002716288499001003?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:499:y:1988:i:1:p:36-46. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.