Abstract Since the International Criminal Court commenced its work, much has been made of institution-building role successive ICC Prosecutors as central to Court’s legal framework and ambassadors for “fight against impunity”. Much less said about Presidency, smallest organ, Presidents. Yet Presidency operates at apex an international organisation, manages relations with states, coordinates int...

In a recent article Goren (American Journal of Political Science, 46, 627–641, 2002) draws upon theories of negativity bias, partisan bias, and motivated reasoning to posit that the more strongly people identify with the opposition party of a presidential candidate, the more heavily they will rely on character weakness impressions to construct global candidate evaluations. This paper modifies t...

Cognitive frameworks and belief systems are the primary lenses through which presidents view the world. Two important questions are whether these beliefs ever change significantly, and if so, what causes these changes? This article develops empirical data on the strategic and operational beliefs of President George W. Bush (GWB) as a means of examining the theoretical basis for how and why core...

On-line databases of presidential speeches now allow for a diachronic exploration of language use at the highest political levels. This allows for a contrast between legislative and legal advances for minorities and the integration of those advances into the presidential lexicon. In this paper, I explore language use pertaining to ‘people’ in the American State of the Union addresses from 1945 ...

This study investigates why, despite the potential credibility enhancement associated with generating domestic audience costs, leaders (in this instance, U.S. presidents) frequently opt to “go private” by conducting foreign policy out of the public spotlight. The author argues that they do so for two primary reasons: (1) public scrutiny disproportionately raises the potential political price of...

When President Donald Trump was impeached for a second time, many commenters pointed out that, if were to be convicted by the Senate, he would likely lose millions of dollars in future taxpayer-funded benefits. These benefits are provided ex-presidents Former Presidents Act, 1958 statute considerable political significance and ongoing controversy, that nevertheless has this point been ignored c...

How influential is the president’s advantage in cabinet formation in presidential systems? Do presidents receive more and the most important portfolios? What factors lead to a more or less disproportionate distributions of portfolios? In this study, I suggest answers for these questions through a theory in which the disproportional allocation of portfolios can be explained by the privileged pos...