Presidential Materials: Politics and the Presidential Records Act

Presidential Particularism and Divide-the-Dollar Politics

When influencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country, do presidents strictly pursue maximally efficient outcomes, or do they systematically target dollars to politically influential constituencies? In a county-level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008, we find that presidents are not universalistic, but particularistic – that is they reliably direct dollars to specif...

Unleashing Presidential Power: The Politics of Pets in theWhite House

In this article, we use a multimethod approach to shed light on the strategic use of presidential pets.We draw on primary source materials to demonstrate that pets are an important power center in theWhite House. Then we turn to presidents’ strategic use of their pets in public.We present a theoretical framework and statistical evidence to explore the conditions under which presidents are most ...

Presidential Pork: Executive Veto Power and Distributive Politics

Most previous studies of the president’s role in the legislative process and the implications of veto power can be placed into two categories. The first is the application of the spatial model of agenda control. These models, which assume that the legislature has a monopoly over the legislative agenda, have typically predicted a limited role for the president in the process. The second research...

The politics of health care reforms in U.S. presidential elections.

This article analyzes why people in the United States have major problems in accessing medical care that are due to financial constraints. The author suggests that the cause of these problems is the way in which medical care and elections are funded in the United States, with private sources being the largest component in the funding of both activities. The article includes a comparison of fund...

The Presidential Bioethics Commission: pedagogical materials and bioethics education.