Presidential Agenda Setting:Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Welfare Reform.

“Presidential power in an era of divided government”. While this may sound paradoxical, the modern governmental context highlights the reality of this statement. Given the modern political environment where public opinion is the currency of individualized pluralism, Samuel Kernell (1997) claims that ‘going public’ represents the most effective strategy for presidential influence. Paul Light (1999) asserts that agenda setting can be a formidable source of presidential influence: “…control of the agenda becomes a primary tool for securing and extending power” (2). Although a rich agenda setting literature exists which is frequently utilized to examine congressional policy making and its subsequent implications for representation writ large (e.g. Cobb and Elder 1983; Kingdon 1984; Baumgartner and Jones 1993), studies of presidential agenda setting are more sparse (Light 1999; Cohen 1995). The presidencies of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon present a unique opportunity to explore problem definition and agenda setting in the context of the domestic policy arena. Intriguing aspects of the policy process are overlooked when scholars myopically hone in on the legislative branch to the (relative) exclusion of the executive branch. This paper endeavors to illuminate the important role that two presidents played in setting the welfare reform agenda. As such, an exploration of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan as a case of policy failure and Clinton’s Welfare Reform as a case of policy success will undoubtedly shed new theoretical insight and raise questions for future research in the areas of problem definition and presidential agenda setting. Indeed, these two policy cases amply demonstrate the inseparability of the concepts of problem definition and agenda setting. Finally, a ‘window of opportunity’ exists to test different theories of agenda setting for efficacy with regard to the president. A perusal of presidential rhetoric, in the form of speeches, press releases, and other public statements, will be utilized to determine the extent to which welfare reform permeated Nixon and Clinton’s public strategies. Furthermore, Deborah Stone’s theory of causal stories will serve as an analytical framework whereby an examination of competing efforts to define the problem both within and outside the presidential arena will be conducted. Since the initial framing and definition of a policy problem has a significant impact on the shape and tenor of a policy, presidential agenda setting has real implications for public opinion concerning and congressional estimations about public policies, particularly salient ones like welfare reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]