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Political science continues to struggle to explain what makes Presidents successful. The
largest challenge is simply defining presidential success: a handful of presidents meet the ‘you
will know a successful President when you see them’ standard, but finding a more objective
definition of success is extremely difficult. The grand historical question of who has been a
successful president rests on many criteria. However for most studies, including this one, the
search for an objective measure of presidential success quickly narrows to the legislative arena
because this offers one of the few opportunities to quantify Presidential actions that cover a
wide range of political issues.
Since Richard Neustadt’s seminal book
Presidential Power
(1960)
,
the literature on
Congressional support for the President’s legislative positions has focused on four linkage
agents between the president and Congress: 1) presidential skill and prestige; 2) public
approval of the President; 3) political parties; 4) political ideologies (e.g. Bond and Fleisher
1990; Bond and Fleisher 2000; Edwards 1989; Edwards and Barrett 2000; Jones 1994; Kernell
1997; Peterson 1990). Recent research has concluded that the skills and prestige that Neustadt
thought were so important in the mid-20
th
Century Presidency have either been made obsolete
by changes in the Washington community over the successive decades (Kernell 1997) or were
never as important as Neustadt supposed (Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards 1989; Jones 1994;
Peterson 1990; Skowronek 1993), leaving the last three linkages as the primary explanations
for support for the President’s legislative positions in Congress in the current literature.
The remaining list of linkages – co-partisanship, ideology and public approval – overlook
the way concurrent elections link members of Congress and the President. As George Edwards
has posed “…the essential question: What difference do presidential elections make? What is
their impact on support for the winner’s program in Congress?” (1989, p144)
Convention