IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/sa9ke.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Presidential Leadership and Legislative Polarization

Author

Listed:
  • Noble, Benjamin S.
  • Turner, Ian R

    (Yale University)

Abstract

Presidents go public to raise issue salience, but doing so risks polarizing lawmakers. Legislative polarization can manifest in different ways---some harmful and some beneficial to the president. This creates potential risks and rewards for presidential leadership. We consider this trade-off in a model of policymaking where two pivotal legislators must agree to change policy and a president can go public to support a policy. Going public activates the parties' bases and ties the president's reelection to policy outcomes. We characterize how and when the polarizing effect of presidential leadership benefits the president. In doing so, we establish the logic of ``defensive appeals" where presidents go public to enforce co-partisan loyalty, even while alienating out-partisans. We also provide empirical implications that characterize how the president's beliefs about the potential impacts of going public, baseline polarization, and policy uncertainty affect the incentives to go public.

Suggested Citation

  • Noble, Benjamin S. & Turner, Ian R, 2024. "Presidential Leadership and Legislative Polarization," SocArXiv sa9ke, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:sa9ke
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/sa9ke
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/65ad9838b1f2b502b2b0e857/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/sa9ke?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Keith E. Schnakenberg & Ian R. Turner, 2021. "Helping Friends or Influencing Foes: Electoral and Policy Effects of Campaign Finance Contributions," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 65(1), pages 88-100, January.
    2. Nolan McCarty & Keith T. Poole & Howard Rosenthal, 2008. "Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262633612, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thanh Le & Erkan Yalcin, 2023. "Endogenous expropriation and political competition," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 313-332, March.
    2. Funke, Manuel & Schularick, Moritz & Trebesch, Christoph, 2016. "Going to extremes: Politics after financial crises, 1870–2014," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 227-260.
    3. Jacob Jensen & Ethan Kaplan & Suresh Naidu & Laurence Wilse-Samson, 2012. "Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language: Evidence from 130 Years of Partisan Speech," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 45(2 (Fall)), pages 1-81.
    4. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/f6h8764enu2lskk9p4a36i6c0 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Oren M. Levin-Waldman, 2017. "Is Inequality Designed or Preordained?," SAGE Open, , vol. 7(2), pages 21582440177, April.
    6. Daron Acemoglu & Alexander Wolitzky, 2012. "Cycles of Distrust: An Economic Model," NBER Working Papers 18257, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Schnakenberg, Keith & Turner, Ian R, 2023. "Formal Theories of Special Interest Influence," SocArXiv 47e26, Center for Open Science.
    8. Vladimir Novak & Andrei Matveenko & Silvio Ravaioli, 2021. "The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment," Working Papers 674, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    9. Little, Andrew T., 2022. "Bayesian Explanations for Persuasion," OSF Preprints ygw8e, Center for Open Science.
    10. Schnakenberg, Keith & Turner, Ian R, 2023. "Dark Money and Politician Learning," SocArXiv 3bzex, Center for Open Science.
    11. Boxell, Levi, 2020. "Demographic change and political polarization in the United States," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    12. Hughes, Niall, 2016. "Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 51-93.
    13. William Bianco & Regina Smyth, 2020. "The Bicameral Roots of Congressional Deadlock: Analyzing Divided Government Through the Lens of Majority Rule," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 101(5), pages 1712-1727, September.
    14. David Rueda, 2014. "Food Comes First, Then Morals: Redistribution Preferences, Altruism and Group Heterogeneity in Western Europe," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 200, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    15. Reza Mousavi & Bin Gu, 2019. "The Impact of Twitter Adoption on Lawmakers’ Voting Orientations," Service Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(1), pages 133-153, March.
    16. Park, Hyungmin & Squintani, Francesco, 2024. "The Choice of Political Advisors," QAPEC Discussion Papers 23, Quantitative and Analytical Political Economy Research Centre.
    17. Nathan Canen & Chad Kendall & Francesco Trebbi, 2020. "Unbundling Polarization," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 88(3), pages 1197-1233, May.
    18. Levy, Gilat & Razin, Ronny, 2019. "Echo chambers and their effects on economic and political outcomes," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 101413, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    19. Peter Buisseret & Richard Van Weelden, 2020. "Crashing the Party? Elites, Outsiders, and Elections," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 64(2), pages 356-370, April.
    20. Michael J. Barber & Brandice Canes‐Wrone & Sharece Thrower, 2017. "Ideologically Sophisticated Donors: Which Candidates Do Individual Contributors Finance?," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(2), pages 271-288, April.
    21. Oren M. Levin-Waldman, 2015. "Why the Minimum Wage Orthodoxy Reigns Supreme," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 58(1), pages 29-50, January.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:osf:socarx:sa9ke. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    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.