POLS 230 Parties and Prez (MN 4)

The Prez vs. Parliamentary System

• Parliamentary system

  • national government is elected at once in parliamentary elections

  • ruling party or party coalition pick an executive

    • prime minister’s governing agenda emanates from the ruling party

  • Fates of legislators and the executive are substantially intertwined

Why Stay United in a Presidential System?

• Shared platform helps coordinate between Prez & Congress

• Linked electoral fate: legislators want to keep president popular and project unity, even if they disagree with him on some things.

Presidents as Agenda-Setters

Two classic ideas about the presidency:

• Mandate: the winning candidate (or their party) gets to do what they won on.

• Honeymoon period: people are nice to Presidents in their first year.

Presidential Success Rates Decline Over Presidency

Does it seem like people do what the President says just because the President says it?

• Instead, Presidents raise salience of issues.

• Double-edged sword: both your co-partisans AND your out-partisans pay more attention to it.

So, What Determines Presidential Success?

• Unified government: example Congress is controlled by your party (much more likely in first Congress)

• Polarization: the further apart the parties are, the more important it is for congressional co-partisans to stick together.

• Public Opinion: if on the fence, Congress more likely to support a popular executive.

• Agenda Size: the fewer the goals, the more likely you are to succeed at each

Presidents as Party Leaders

Ways in which presidents can support their party:

• Direct Federal Spending to MARGINAL CO-PARTISANS

• Coalition Management: Office of Public Liaison. Bring interest groups into the coalition

• Negotiate with Social Movement leaders

Presidents as Campaigners

Coattails: Popularity of President affects co-partisan elections (for good or ill)

• President is prominent and partisan figure, feelings about Prez are heuristic for more complicated task of evaluating individual candidate strengths/weaknesses.

• However, since Presidents typically become less popular as they do more stuff, their congressional co-partisans lose seats in midterm elections

Presidents in Political Time

Basic idea: when major realignments happen, it tends to change which party is “dominant”; the other party is then mostly in opposition.

So, presidencies come in four types:

• Reconstruction: dominant party at a transition point (Reagan)

• Disjunction: dominant party between transition points (Carter)

• Articulation: weak party at a transition point (LBJ)

• Preemption: weak party between transition points (Clinton)