Search

We examine Barack Obama’s influence over the Democratic Party as an ex-president from three vantage points: his popularity among partisans, his control over party nominations, and his rhetorical influence over party platform stances. The findings are somewhat mixed. Compared with other contemporary presidents, Obama is far more popular among co-partisan voters. However, he has had only modest influence in presidential nominations, and, unlike other modern presidents, a waning influence on party platform stances. The findings are suggestive not only about Obama’s own interests but also about institutional constraints of modern presidents.

We can all agree that the presidential election result was a shocker. According to news reports, even the Trump campaign team was stunned to come up a winner. So now seems like a good time to go over various theories floating around in political science and political reporting and see where they stand, now that this turbulent political year has drawn to a close. In the present article, we go through several things that we as political observers and political scientists have learned from the election, and then discuss implications for the future.

This essay assesses the rhetorical achievement of Barack Obama comparing and contrasting it with the style which brought Donald J. Trump to power.

One of the themes of 2016 so far has been the challenges faced by political institutions. From Brexit to Bernie Sanders’ potent critique of the Democratic Party, we’ve heard a lot about how voters ...

The politics and party system of the late Civil War era are strikingly similar to what we have in the present day. Elections were consistently close; race, culture, immigration, and populism were salient issues; and states almost always voted for the same party in election after election. The states that supported Democrats then, however, mostly support Republicans now, and vice versa. In 1896, though, a new party system began to emerge. In this article, we evaluate bygone elections alongside contemporary ones to assess whether 2016 might be the beginning of something new in American electoral politics. Are national politics likely to follow the familiar pattern of the last four presidential races, or are Americans going to be presented altogether different choices? Our analysis suggests that race and populism are guideposts for potential change in 2016: if the concerns of race continue to define political conflict, the electoral map should change little, but if economic populism eclipses race as it did in 1896, a new political era may be ushered in in America.

Five responses from leading scholars of American politics have given us a great deal to think about. Several themes emerge from the responses. The first is the challenge of the addressing how relev...

Objectives This article examines Barack Obama's efforts to interpret and characterize the contrasting outcomes of the 2008 and 2010 elections, using an original data set of presidential communications. Methods We performed a content analysis of 241 presidential communications. Results Obama's post-2008 mandate claims alternated between claiming a mandate on a variety of policy issues and framing the election as a repudiation of Republican theories of governing. Post-2010, however, Obama framed the midterm results as evidence for electoral demand for bipartisan cooperation, rather than a repudiation of Democratic policies and ideas. Conclusions Obama's choices in framing the 2008 election contributed to the administration's failure to communicate effectively. Specifically, Obama neglected to create a strong narrative linking the election's results to support for his policy agenda, focusing instead on the election as a repudiation of Republican policies. In contrast, his interpretations of the 2010 midterms appear to be more effective. By identifying the Republicans' behavior as “dysfunctional” and conceding that the election had indicated a demand for the ideas of both parties, Obama offered a more successful alternative to the Republican narrative.

Often treated as a unified concept with a single definition, the presidential mandate actually encompasses multiple definitions, each connected to distinct ideas about democracy and presidential leadership. This article looks at how and when modern presidents have used mandate rhetoric and seeks to explain changes in presidential mandate-claiming patterns. Using an original dataset of 1,467 presidential communications from 1933 through 2009, I find that after 1969 presidents became more likely to use election results to justify their actions. However, they also became less likely to emphasize the magnitude of the election result, focusing their mandate rhetoric instead on campaign promises and distinctions between candidates and parties. Evidence suggests that this shift is the result of a combination of several factors: changes to the presidential nomination system, polarized party politics, and an overall decline in presidential approval ratings. Based on this research, I conclude that ideas about the presidential mandate are closely connected with the political conditions and challenges facing presidents. As the place of the presidency has shifted in American politics, the ways in which presidents interpret and communicate about elections have also changed.

In this article, we examine the linkage between presidential policy proposal messages and legislative success. Employing a data set on presidential legislative proposals that covers the years 1949-2010, we find that politics matters less than policy. Purely political messages that reference the electoral logic of mandates or appeal to a sense of bipartisanship appear to have no impact on presidential legislative success, nor does policy signaling, though highlighting the role of agency-based policy experts in crafting legislation does. From these results, we conclude that although the way presidents communicate their messages to Congress represents an important component of presidential-legislative relations, it is instead the perceived quality of the legislation that more strongly shapes congressional support of presidential policy efforts.

Scholars of the developing world have driven a surge of interest in unwritten or informal institutions as determinants of political outcomes. In advanced industrial democracies, by contrast, informal institutions often remain consigned to the analytic margins. This article makes a case for greater attention to informal political institutions in established democracies, and it introduces a theoretical framework to support such analysis. Informal institutions, understood as the unwritten rules of political life, are seen to perform three functions: they complete or fill gaps in formal institutions, coordinate the operation of overlapping (and perhaps clashing) institutions, and operate parallel to formal institutions in regulating political behavior. These three roles of informal institutions are associated with different characteristic patterns of institutional stability and change. The article illustrates its theoretical framework with case studies from American politics, the subfield in which formal-institutional analysis has flourished most. These cases are the historical norm of a two-term presidency (a completing institution), the unwritten rules of the presidential nomination process (coordinating institutions), the informal practice of obstruction in the Senate (a parallel institution), and the normative expectation that presidents should address the public directly (which performs all three functions).