Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-ksm4s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-11T10:07:08.341Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Who Influences Whom? The President, Congress, and the Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

George C. Edwards III  and
B. Dan Wood
George C. Edwards III
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
B. Dan Wood
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Influencing the policy agenda has long been viewed as one of the most important sources of political power. For decades, scholars have maintained that the president has the most significant role in setting the policymaking agenda in Washington, but little systematic empirical work has been done to measure the president's influence. We explore the president's success in focusing the issue attention of Congress and the mass media by evaluating time-series measures of presidential, mass media, and congressional attention to five issues: crime, education, health care, U.S.–Soviet relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. We find that most of the time the president reacts, responding primarily to fluctuations in media attention and world events. In domestic policy, we find a more interactive relationship, one that appears to offer the president the opportunity to act in an entrepreneurial fashion to focus the attention of others in the system on major presidential initiatives.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 327 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, James E. 1978. Public Policy and Politics in America. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.Google Scholar
Baker, James A. III. 1995. The Politics of Diplomacy. New York: Putnam.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 1993. “Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure.” American Political Science Review 87 (June: 267–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumgartner, Frank, and Jones, Bryan D.. 1993. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bond, Jon R., and Fleisher, Richard. 1990. The President in the Legislative Arena. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brody, Richard A. 1991. Assessing the President. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R., Durbin, J., and Evans, J.. 1975. “Techniques for Testing the Constancy of Regression Relationships over Time.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B) 37 (2): 149–63.Google Scholar
Cobb, Roger W., and Elder, Charles D.. 1972. Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.Google Scholar
Covington, Cary R., Wrighton, J. Mark, and Kinney, Rhonda. 1995. “A ‘Presidency-Augmented’ Model of Presidential Success on House Roll Call Votes.” American Journal of Political Science 39 (November: 1001–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey E. 1995. “Presidential Rhetoric and Agenda Setting.” American Journal of Political Science 39 (February: 87–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Fay Lomax, Tyler, Tom R., Goetz, E. G., Gordon, M. T., Protess, D., Leff, D., and Molotch, H. L.. 1983. “Media and Agenda-Setting: Effects on the Public, Interest Group Leaders, Policy Makers, and Policy.” Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (Spring: 16–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dearing, James W., and Rogers, Everett M.. 1996. Agenda Setting. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doan, Thomas A. 1996. RATS Manual, Vector Autoregression. Evanston, IL: Estima.Google Scholar
Downs, Anthony. 1972. “Up and Down with Ecology: The Issue Attention Cycle.” Public Interest 28: 38–50.Google Scholar
Edwards, George C. III. 1989. At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, George C., III, and Barrett, Andrew. 1998. “Presidential Agenda Setting in Congress.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston.Google Scholar
Edwards, George C. III, Barrett, Andrew, and Peake, Jeffrey. 1997. “The Legislative Impact of Divided Government.” American Journal of Political Science 41 (April: 545–63.Google Scholar
Edwards, George C. III, and Wayne, Stephen J.. 1999. Presidential Leadership. 5th ed. New York: St. Martin's.Google Scholar
Flemming, Roy B., Bohte, John, and Wood, B. Dan. 1997. “One Voice among Many: The Supreme Court's Influence on Attentiveness to Issues in the United States, 1947–1990.” American Journal of Political Science 41 (October: 1224–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flemming, Roy B., Wood, B. Dan, and Bohte, John. 1995. “Attention to Issues in a System of Separated Powers: The Macro-Dynamics of American Policy Agendas.” Working paper, Texas A&M University.Google Scholar
Freeman, John R., Kellstedt, Paul, and Williams, John. 1996. “Long Memoried Processes, Unit Roots, and Causal Inference in Political Science.” Paper presented at the annual Political Methodology Conference, Ann Arbor, Michigan.Google Scholar
Freeman, John R., Williams, John T., and Lin, Tse-min. 1989. “Vector Autoregression and the Study of Politics.” American Journal of Political Science 33 (November: 842–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilberg, Sheldon, Eyal, Chaim, McCombs, Maxwell, and Nicholas, David. 1980. “The State of the Union Address and the Press Agenda.” Journalism Quarterly 57 (Winter: 584–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzenbach, William. 1996. The Media, the President, and Public Opinion: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Drug Issue, 1984–1991. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Granger, C. W. J. 1969. “Investigating Causal Relations by Econometric Models and Cross-spectral Methods.” Econometrica 37 (August: 424–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granger, C. W. J., and Newbold, Paul. 1986. Forecasting Economic Time Series. New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Grossman, Michael B., and Kumar, Martha J.. 1981. Portraying the President. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Hamilton, James D. 1994. Time Series Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, Andrew C. 1990. The Econometric Analysis of Time Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harvey, Andrew C., and Collier, P.. 1977. “Testing for Functional Misspecification in Regression Analysis.” Journal of Econometrics 6 (July: 103–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huntington, Samuel P. 1965. “Congressional Responses to the Twentieth Century.” In The Congress and America's Future, ed. Truman, David B.. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Pp. 6–38.Google Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto, Peters, Mark D., and Kinder, Donald R.. 1982. “Experimental Demonstrations of the ‘Not-So-Minimal’ Consequences of Television News Programs.” American Political Science Review 76 (December: 848–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaroslovsky, Rich. 1984. “Manipulating the Media Is a Specialty for the White House's Michael Deaver.” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 1984, p. 44.Google Scholar
Jones, Charles O. 1994. The Presidency in a Separated System. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Jones, Charles O. 1995. Separate but Equal Branches: Congress and the Presidency. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.Google Scholar
Judge, George G., Griffiths, W. E., Hill, R. Carter, Lutkepohl, Helmit, and Lee, Tsoung-Chao. 1988. Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Econometrics. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinder, Donald R. 1981. “Presidents, Prosperity, and Public Opinion.” Public Opinion Quarterly 45 (Spring: 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kingdon, John. 1995. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A., and Brannon, Laura A.. 1993. “The Impact of the Gulf War on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Multidimensional Effects of Political Involvement.” American Political Science Review 87 (December: 963–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A., and Kinder, Donald R.. 1990. “Altering the Foundations of Support for the President through Priming.” American Political Science Review 84 (June: 497–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Light, Paul C. 1991. The President's Agenda. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Linsky, Martin. 1986. Impact: How the President Affects Federal Policymaking. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
MacKuen, Michael Bruce, and Coombs, Steven Lane. 1981. More than News. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Maltese, John A. 1992. Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell, and Estrada, George. 1997. “The News Media and the Pictures in Our Heads.” In Do the Media Govern? Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America, ed. Iyengar, Shanto and Reeves, Richard. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell, and Shaw, Donald. 1993. “The Evolution of Agenda Setting Research: Twenty-Five Years in the Marketplace of Ideas.” Journal of Communication 43 (Spring: 58–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moe, Ronald C., and Teel, Steven C.. 1970. “Congress as a Policymaker: A Necessary Reappraisal.” Political Science Quarterly 85 (September: 443–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Dick. 1997. Behind the Oval Office. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Neustadt, Richard E. 1991. Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Ohanian, Lee E. 1988. “The Spurious Effects of Unit Roots on Vector Autoregressions: A Monte Carlo Study.” Journal of Econometrics 39 (November: 251–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Benjamin I., and Shapiro, Robert Y.. 1992. The Rational Public. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, B. Guy, and Hogwood, Brian W.. 1985. “In Search of the Issue-Attention Cycle.” Journal of Politics 47 (February: 238–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Peter C. B. 1992. “Simultaneous Equation Bias in Level VAR Estimation.” Econometric Theory 8 (June: 307.Google Scholar
Powell, Colin. 1995. My American Journey. New York: Ballentine.Google Scholar
Protess, David L., and McCombs, Maxwell, eds. 1991. Agenda Setting: Readings on Media, Public Opinion, and Policymaking. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rogers, Everett M., and Dearing, James W.. 1994. “Agenda-Setting Research: Where Has It Been, Where Is It Going?” In Media Power in Politics, 3d ed., ed. Graber, Doris A.. Washington, DC: CQ Press.Google Scholar
Rozell, Mark J. 1992. The Press and the Ford Presidency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rozell, Mark J. 1996. The Press and the Bush Presidency. Westport, CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Runkle, David E. 1987. “Vector Autoregressions and Reality.” Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 5 (October: 437–42.Google Scholar
Schrodt, Philip A., and Gerner, Deborah J.. 1994. “Validity Assessment of a Machine Coded Data Set for the Middle East, 1982–1992.” American Journal of Political Science 38 (August: 825–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, Christopher A. 1980. “Macroeconomics and Reality.” Econometrica 48 (January: 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, Christopher A. 1988. “Bayesian Skepticism on Unit Root Econometrics.” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 12 (June/September): 463–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, Christopher A., Stock, James H., and Watson, Mark W.. 1990. “Inference in Linear Time Series Models with Some Unit Roots.” Econometrica 58 (January: 113–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, Christopher A., and Uhlig, Harald. 1991. “Understanding Unit Rooters: A Helicopter Tour.” Econometrica 59 (November: 1591–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Jack L. 1977. “Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection.” British Journal of Political Science 7 (October: 433–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wanta, Wayne, Stephenson, Mary Ann, Turk, Judy VanSlyke, and McCombs, Maxwell E.. 1989. “How President's State of Union Talk Influenced News Media Agendas.” Journalism Quarterly 66 (Autumn: 537–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, James P., and Eyal, Chaim H.. 1981. “Agenda-Setting for the Civil Rights Issue.” Public Opinion Quarterly 45 (Fall: 376–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, B. Dan, and Peake, Jeffrey S.. 1998. “The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting.” American Political Science Review 92 (March: 173–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.