Regulating Presidential Powers

Presidential Inaction and the Separation of Powers

Are All Presidents Created Equal? Presidential Powers and the Shadow of Presidential Elections

Presidential elections with few candidates held in temporal proximity to legislative elections are believed to promote the nationalization and consolidation of the legislative party system. However, contrary to the existing literature, we argue here that the shadow presidential elections cast over legislative elections is contingent upon the relative powers of the president vis-à-vis the legisl...

Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan: Presidential Authority and the Separation of Powers

In light of Elena Kagan's nomination to serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, this report analyzes then-Professor Kagan's views of executive power and the doctrine of separation of powers as laid most extensively out in her 2001 Harvard Law Review article Presidential Administration. This report will proceed as follows. First, it will briefly describe the constitutio...

Constitutional Design and Decision-Making Processes in Presidential Systems: An Analysis of the President’s Executive Powers Over Cabinets

Our objective in this paper is to analyze the degree of political dominance exercised by the executive power on cabinets in presidential systems. According to the 1990s debate, in contrast to parliamentary systems where a joint decision-making process is prevalent, presidential systems are characterized by a non-collegial decisionmaking process, led and personalized in the figure of the preside...

Presidential Rhetoric

While presidents are often credited with agenda-setting powers over the public, empirical support is limited. Important exceptions to this limited evidence were provided by Cohen (1995, 1997) and Hill (1998). They found a link between the content of State of the Union addresses and subsequent pub lic concern about policy problems for the period 1953-1989. Recently Baum and Kernell (1999) demons...