Presidential Influence in an Era of Congressional Dominance

Abstract

R esearch on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president's copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism

“…Conducting the analysis at the state level rather than the county level produces nearly identical results. Using the number of post offices at the state level as the dependent variable and estimating the state‐level models shown in Rogowski (), I continue to find that the use of at‐large districting reduced the provision of post offices in a state by between 7 and 9% . Returning to the county‐level analysis, I also find that at‐large districting was associated with significantly smaller increases in the number of post offices .…”

“…In this article, I build upon these literatures and other recent research on nineteenth‐century distributive politics in the United States (e.g., Finocchiaro ; Rogowski ) to study how districting institutions affect the provision of particularistic goods. Though prior theoretical work predicts that SMD increases the provision of distributive goods relative to MMD (e.g., Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita ; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina ; Dixit and Londregan ), empirical scholarship has produced limited evidence in support of this expectation (e.g., Hirano ; Snyder and Ueda ).…”

All the President's Senators: Presidential Copartisans and the Allocation of Federal Grants

“…Moreover, recent research makes clear that presidential influence over distributive outcomes is nothing new. Even in an era of congressional dominance, presidents channeled one of the nation's most precious patronage-producing resources, post offices, disproportionately to constituencies that elected copartisans to the House (Rogowski 2016).…”

“…For example, Lavelle fought to honor Senator Richard Lugar's (R-IN) request to announce funds for a cleanup at Seymour, Indiana, before his re-election bid. 4 Prior empirical analyses of federal spending have offered considerable evidence that presidents, through these and other mechanisms, exert considerable influence over the geographic allocation of federal dollars (Berry, Burden, and Howell 2010;Dynes and Huber 2015;Hudak 2014;Kriner and Reeves 2015b;Rogowski 2016). Data from the 2014 Survey on the Future of Government Service confirm that career executives in a wide range of federal agencies believe that the president has at least some direct influence over how funds appropriated by Congress are spent (Lewis 2016, 20).…”

“…Finally, although our focus is the Senate, we also account for dynamics in the House. Previous research suggests that presidents channel resources to districts represented by copartisan representatives (Berry, Burden, and Howell 2010;Kriner and Reeves 2015a;Rogowski 2016). States that elect presidential copartisan senators may also choose copartisans to fill a large share of their House delegation.…”