Who Influences Whom? The President, Congress, and the Media

Influencing the policy agenda has long been viewed as one of the most important sources of political power. For decades, scholars have maintained that the president has the most significant role in setting the policymaking agenda in Washington, but little systematic empirical work has been done to measure the president's influence. We explore the president's success in focusing the issue attention of Congress and the mass media by evaluating time-series measures of presidential, mass media, and congressional attention to five issues: crime, education, health care, U.S.–Soviet relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. We find that most of the time the president reacts, responding primarily to fluctuations in media attention and world events. In domestic policy, we find a more interactive relationship, one that appears to offer the president the opportunity to act in an entrepreneurial fashion to focus the attention of others in the system on major presidential initiatives.

[1]  J. Durbin,et al.  Techniques for Testing the Constancy of Regression Relationships Over Time , 1975 .

[2]  Andrew Harvey,et al.  The econometric analysis of time series , 1991 .

[3]  S. Iyengar.  Is Anyone Responsible , 1991 .

[4]  James D. Hamilton.  Time Series Analysis , 1994 .

[5]  R. Moe,et al.  Congress as Policy-Maker: A Necessary Reappraisal , 1970 .

[6]  D. Runkle,et al.  Vector Autoregressions and Reality , 1987 .

[7]  C. Granger.  Investigating Causal Relations by Econometric Models and Cross-Spectral Methods , 1969 .

[8]  C. Eyal,et al.  Agenda Setting for the Civil Rights Issue , 1981 .

[9]  S. Iyengar.  Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. , 1991 .

[10]  M. McCombs,et al.  The State of the Union Address and the Press Agenda , 1980 .

[11]  Charles D. Elder,et al.  Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building , 1975 .

[12]  William J. Gonzenbach.  The Media, the President, and Public Opinion: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Drug Issue, 1984-1991 , 1995 .

[13]  George C. Edwards,et al.  The Legislative Impact of Divided Government , 1997 .

[14]  E. Ziegel.  Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Econometrics , 1989 .

[15]  George C. Edwards.  At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress , 1989 .

[16]  Jack L. Walker.  Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection , 1977, British Journal of Political Science.

[17]  Paul M. Kellstedt,et al.  Long-memoried processes, unit roots, and causal inference in political science , 1998 .

[18]  Harald Uhlig,et al.  Understanding unit rooters: a helicopter tour , 1991 .

[19]  Jeffrey S. Peake,et al.  The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting , 1998, American Political Science Review.

[20]  Charles O. Jones.  Separate but Equal Branches: Congress and the Presidency , 1995 .

[21]  J. Stock,et al.  INFERENCE IN LINEAR TIME SERIES MODELS WITH SOME UNIT ROOTS , 1990 .

[22]  C. Sims.  MACROECONOMICS AND REALITY , 1977 .

[23]  Andrew Harvey,et al.  Testing for functional misspecification in regression analysis , 1977 .

[24]  John R. Freeman,et al.  Vector Autoregression and the Study of Politics , 1989 .

[25]  Brian W. Hogwood,et al.  In Search of the Issue-Attention Cycle , 1985, The Journal of Politics.

[26]  B. Jones,et al.  Agendas and instability in American politics , 1993 .

[27]  Larry M. Bartels.  Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[28]  Philip A. Schrodt,et al.  Validity Assessment of a Machine-Coded Event Data Set for the Middle East, 1982-92 , 1994 .

[29]  M. McCombs,et al.  How President's State of Union Talk Influenced News Media Agendas , 1989 .

[30]  Roy B. Flemming,et al.  One Voice Among Many: The Supreme Court's Influence on Attentiveness to Issues in the United States, 1947-92 , 1997 .

[31]  C. Powell,et al.  My American Journey , 1995 .

[32]  Jon A. Krosnick,et al.  Altering the Foundations of Support for the President Through Priming , 1990 .

[33]  P. Light,et al.  The President's Agenda , 1982 .

[34]  J. Wrighton,et al.  A `presidency-augmented' model of presidential success on House roll call votes. , 1995 .

[35]  Charles S. Bullock,et al.  Public policy and politics in America , 1978 .

[36]  Lee E. Ohanian,et al.  The spurious effects of unit roots on vector autoregressions: A Monte Carlo study , 1988 .

[37]  Everett Mrogers,et al.  Agenda-Setting Research: Where Has It Been, Where Is It Going? , 1988 .

[38]  Roy B. Flemming,et al.  Attention to Issues in a System of Separated Powers: The Macrodynamics of American Policy Agendas , 1999, The Journal of Politics.

[39]  D. Shaw,et al.  The Evolution of Agenda-Setting Research: Twenty-Five Years in the Marketplace of Ideas , 1993 .

[40]  T. Tyler,et al.  Media and agenda setting: effects on the public, interest group leaders, policy makers, and policy. , 1983, Public opinion quarterly.

[41]  D. Kinder.  Presidents, Prosperity, and Public Opinion , 1981 .

[42]  D. Morris.  Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties , 1997 .

[43]  John W. Kingdon.  Agendas, alternatives, and public policies , 1984 .

[44]  L. P. Ribuffo,et al.  How to Win Votes and Influence Congress@@@Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. , 1960 .

[45]  Shanto Iyengar,et al.  Experimental Demonstrations of the “Not-So-Minimal” Consequences of Television News Programs , 1982 .

[46]  C. Sims.  Bayesian skepticism on unit root econometrics , 1988 .

[47]  Jon A. Krosnick,et al.  The Impact of the Gulf War on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Multidimensional Effects of Political Involvement , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[48]  J. Cohen.  Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda , 1995 .

[49]  J. R. Bond,et al.  The President in the Legislative Arena , 1992 .

[50]  C. Granger,et al.  Forecasting Economic Time Series. , 1988 .

[51]  John Anthony Maltese,et al.  Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[52]  Charles O. Jones.  The Presidency in a Separated System , 1994 .