The Contextual Determinants of Support for Presidential Power
Research Question
How stable are public attitudes toward unilateral presidential action, and how are they affected by contextual features such as the president’s identity, the tool used, and the issue at stake?
Main Finding
Public attitudes toward unilateral presidential power are surprisingly consistent and largely unaffected by contextual framing–-except in explicitly political contexts. Even with different presidents or justifications, support for unilateral action remains low and stable.
Research Design
A series of large-scale survey experiments testing how public support for unilateral action changes under different political and institutional scenarios.
Data Employed
More than 7,500 responses across several experiments that vary the identity of the president, policy area, justification, and tool used (e.g., executive orders).
Substantive Importance
Challenges assumptions that public opinion is highly malleable in response to presidential framing. Shows that views on unilateral power are deeply held, shaping how we understand presidential legitimacy and public constraint on executive action.
Research Areas
Presidential Power, Survey Experiments, Public Opinion, Institutional Design, Democratic Accountability
Citation
@article{asking,
author = {Reeves, Andrew and Rogowski, Jon C. and Seo, Min Hee and Stone, Andrew R.},
title = {The Contextual Determinants of Support for Presidential Power},
journal = {Presidential Studies Quarterly},
volume = {47},
number = {3},
pages = {448--470},
year = {2017},
}