(Dallek 1991, 168-9) A fundamental issue of American politics, as well as democratic theory, is whether the public holds elected officials accountable for their policy decisions. The founders of the United States clearly desired such accountability, and for no institution more so than the House of Representatives. As Madison ([1788] 1987, 323-4) argued in Federalist 52, "As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the branch of it under consideration [the House of Representatives] should have an immediate dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people." He continued by surmising, "Frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence sympathy can be effectively secured."

We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We …nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters' interests may or may not pander to voters by choosing it; under certain conditions, the executive can actually increase his probability of reelection by choosing an unpopular policy that is in the public interest. However, we also show that an executive will sometimes face electoral incentives to enact a policy that is both unpopular and contrary to voters' interests. We illustrate our model with examples involving

While a large body of work exists on presidents' public approval, no study identifies the conditions under which approval generates policy influence. This gap is particularly significant since empirical research has produced inconsistent findings on whether popularity affects a president's legislative success. In the following, we argue that public salience and issue complexity determine the extent to which a president can capitalize on approval, and we proceed to test this hypothesis on U.S. House of Representatives roll-call votes between 1989 and 2000. The empirical analysis provides strong support for our hypothesis, which holds across a variety of econometric specifications and estimates of approval.

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An enduring and controversial debate centers on whether there exist ''two presidencies,'' that is, whether presidents exercise fundamentally greater influence over foreign than domestic affairs. This paper makes two contributions to understanding this issue and, by extension, presidential power more generally. First, we distill an institutional logic that both supports the two presidencies thesis and implies that Congress has incentives to delegate foreign policy powers to the president. Accordingly, the logic suggests that empirical analysis should incorporate these incentives. Our second contribution, then, is to test for the existence of two presidencies in a domain that Congress cannot delegate, budgetary appropriations, and a domain that explicitly incorporates delegation, agency creation. Consistent with expectations, we find presidents exercise considerably greater influence over foreign policy.