Presidential Influence

Until recently, the dominant line of presidential research asserted that by “going public”, presidents have the ability to influence voters and that this ability pressurizes Congress into passing legislation that the president wants (Kernell, 2007). Contrary to this line of thinking, Edwards (2003) argued that presidents who attempt to move public opinion to support their policies are more likely to fail than to succeed. He finds that presidents are not usually able to move public opinion, even presidents known for being great communicators such as Reagan and Clinton, largely failed to obtain the public’s support for their high priority initiatives. He concluded that if presidents want to move policy agenda, then they need to convince lawmakers

Virtually all presidents in recent history bemoaned their failure to take advantage of the bully pulpit. For example, after the Democrat’s stunning defeat in the 1994 elections, Clinton said, “I got caught up in the parliamentary aspect of the presidency…and missed the leadership, bully pulpit function which is so critical” . The fact that, in the face of so much academic empirical evidence against the strategy of “going public”, presidents continue to use national addresses and the bully pulpit leaves one to question whether scholars have fully explored the avenue of presidential influence. In this paper, I argue that the lack of evidence supporting “going public” comes from implicit assumption of those who use national approval polls to demonstrate that the president is hoping to create a shift in public approval large enough to persuade the institution of Congress. However, this is not the case. President is trying to persuade specific members of Congress into passing his preferred

Some scholars argue that presidents visit districts of key members of Congress with the hope of persuading those representatives. This is a more narrowly focused approach to Congressional relations, but there is no strong reason that the desired outcome of the broadly targeted approach of the national address would be any different, especially if the goal is to persuade members of Congress to vote in a way they would not do otherwise. While all the people may be overhearing the president’s address, the average citizens might not be the people he intends to persuade with his words. As Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake noted, “Most presidential speeches involve advocating a policy position or supporting a course of policy action” (Eshbaugh-Soha and Peak 2008, 614). If speeches are aimed at influencing policy, then the people president intends to address are not in the general population. The addressees are members of Congress or agency heads because they are the ones who can most directly influence the policy outcome. Additionally, while the broadly targeted approach is less focused it may let the president persuade a greater number of legislators in shorter time. The barnstorming tour may take weeks, while a presidential address can be written and delivered in a relatively short