Presidential Leadership and Legislative Polarization

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.