Hss assignment – Due 6/5

Ext: Klein = Wrong

Reagan disproves Klein’s arguments.

There are some important points to be made about this. First: we should be careful not to take opinion polls too seriously. Gallup may say that attitudes toward taxes didn't change a lot pre- and post-Reagan, but the real world says different. Before 1980, it was possible to raise taxes both locally and at the federal level. After 1980 it became virtually impossible, and after the early 90s it became very nearly literally impossible. In Congress and at the polling place, where it really matters, public opinion was loud and clear: higher taxes were a killer. Second: it's not just broad public opinion that matters. Persuading the base matters. Ramping up intensity matters, even among a minority. Raising money matters. And persuading the chattering classes matters. Those are all things that presidential persuasion can affect, even if they don't get picked up in the latest Gallup poll. Third, there's always a pendulum effect. If your campaign to lower taxes succeeds in lowering taxes, it's natural that even the tax fighters will start to relax some and become more open to the idea that existing tax rates are OK. That doesn't mean persuasion on taxes has failed. Just the opposite: it means it worked! But no amount of persuasion will keep people heated up no matter how low taxes go. That's just not a realistic bar. Now, I don't want to pretend that the tax revolt of the past 30 years was all Ronald Reagan's doing. It wasn't. He came into office on a wave of anti-tax sentiment that was already ramping up, and there was a big institutional movement to back him up. But did he really have no effect at all? That's a tough nut to swallow. He was the most important public face of the anti-tax crusade, and I think his choice to talk about taxes endlessly for eight years made a difference. Three decades later, it still does.

AT: Going Public

Going public works- public opinion critical to determining presidential success- gives leverage as Congressional members try to avoid electoral repercussions

Gibbs, '09, Christine, James H. Dunn Memorial Fellowship Program in Illinois government, a political science and international studies double major at Wesleyan Illinois 'Presidential Success in Congress: Factors that Determine the President's Ability to Influcence Congressional¶ Voting"¶ http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/polisci_honproi/35

The weakening of president -party relations has given more leverage to the president to act independently. This has allowed the president to use his unique resources, such as media attention, to further policy proposals. It has also allowed the president to bully members of Congress by essentially threatening their popularity in their electoral districts if they do not support the president. It is necessary to understand how the president can boost the office's powers in the legislative arena to increase voting preferences for his policies in order to understand how the president, in general, can influence policies.¶ Presidential Effort¶ Scholars have also attributed presidential success to the president's ability to "go over the heads" of members of Congress to take their message directly to the people (Tulis 1987,4). Jeffrey Tulis states that the President acts as a spokesperson for "the people," bringing their proposals not only to the people but also to members of Congress. Edwards and Wood claimthat presidents have the ability to use their elevated position to create attention where none exists (Edwards and Wood 1999).¶ Due to the limited resources of presidents, Steger, Prins and Marshall have stated that presidents need to allocate their resources carefully in order to make them useful. Steger claims that "[resource] limitations compel presidents to set priorities and choose fights selectively [because] they cannot afford to waste scarce resources and political capital pursuing futile legislation" (Steger 2005, 315). If a president is using his resources on a particular policy measure, it can be assumed that the issue is of particular importance to the president.¶ Samuel Kernell has stated that presidents will use their "bully pulpit" powers to influence the populace to become more activated on a particular topic or to influence Congress directly. In similar studies, Jacobs and Shapiro have found that politicians "attempt to change public opinion not by directly persuading the public on the merits of the policy choices" but by priming public opinion (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000, xiv). Priming refers to the politicians' aim to increase publicity of certain poticy themes in order to boost favor for particular policies (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). Jacobs and Shapiro came to the conclusion that presidents use public opinion polls not to create policies that reflect the opinions of the nation, but in order to craft speeches and allocate resources to package their proposals in a way that will convince the public and members of Congress to support their proposals (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000).¶ By taking his influence directly to the people, the president has the ability to target constituents of the politicians who depend on their vote. This puts significant power in the hands of the president in that what he needs to do "is convince a sufficient number of politicians that the political cost of resisting his policy is greater than any potential gain" (Kernell 1997,250). This power is so strong, says Kernell, that at times, even when the representatives knows that their position is not the same as the president's, they may vote with the president in order to avoid the poEtical backlash that may occur should the president 'lake his case to the people" (Kernell 1997, 250). The assumption that Kernell makes is that when the president takes his message directly to the people, they will be more aware of how their representative will vote in regards to the policy issue. The representative, being aware of this increased focus on the issue, will feel pressured to vote in favor with the president in order to avoid electoral repercussions.¶ Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were two of the first to use the strategy of "going public" to win favor for poEcy measures. The diverging strategy, as opposed to simple negotiations that were previously used, was necessary to use for these presidents due to their progressive proposed reforms that would have stripped power from the politicians that would need to vote to enact them (Kernell 1997). Since it was first employed by these presidents, it is now seen to be used by presidents to appeal to the public for support and in turn to influence Congress to support the president's policies.

Aff’s generalizations about going public are irrelevant – not the only factor.

Dickinson 9. [ Matthew, Professor of Political Science - Middlebury College, “We All Want a Revolution: Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and the Future of Presidency Research” Presidential Studies Quarterly Volume 39 Issue 4 -- December – p 736-770]

More systematic efforts to test the utility of going public produce mixed empirical results. Again, much of the research employs quantitative analysis and focuses on legislative outcomes as a measure of presidential influence. Some studies claim a positive correlation between increases in aggregate levels of presidential approval and presidential influence in Congress (Brace and Hinckley 1992, Rivers and Rose 1985). But others find a more variable effect, with the impact of presidential approval depending on the legislators' partisan affiliation (Edwards 1989; Bond and Fleisher 1990), and some see no relationship at all (Mouw and MacKuen 1992b; see also Collier and Sullivan 1995). It is not clear, however, whether studies utilizing aggregate levels of presidential popularity are appropriate tests of Neustadt's more nuanced claim regarding the power of a president's public prestige. Neustadt warns that "one rarely finds a one-to-one relationship between appraisals of his general popularity and responses from some public in particular" (1990, 77). Instead, he argues that the relationship between a president's public prestige and bargaining effectiveness varies based on several factors, including the parties involved, the issue saliency and complexity, the affected publics' level of interest and knowledge, and prior presidential statements (78-85). The latest scholarly studies support Neustadt's more textured assessment; they find that rather than a direct correspondence between presidential popularity and legislative outcomes, a president's prestige influences congressional behavior in a more nuanced, less direct fashion. Simple generalizations regarding prestige and power, then, are difficult to make.

Public appeals aren’t even the main source of capital – your article’s generalizations are wrong.

Dickinson 9. [ Matthew, Professor of Political Science - Middlebury College, “We All Want a Revolution: Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and the Future of Presidency Research” Presidential Studies Quarterly Volume 39 Issue 4 -- December – p 736-770]

If higher approval ratings can augment a president's persuasive power in select cases, Neustadt remains skeptical that presidents can substitute "going public" for bargaining as a general means of influence. "Public appeals," he argues instead, "are part of bargaining, albeit a changing part since prestige bulks far larger than before in reputation" (Neustadt 1990, xv). A key reason why presidents cannot expect to rely on prestige to augment their power is that approval levels are largely governed by factors outside their control. "[L]arge and relatively lasting changes [in Gallup Polls measuring popular approval] come at the same time as great events with widespread consequences" (81).

Going public is not the same as political capital theory – doesn’t disprove it.

Cameron and Park 11. [Charles, jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, M.P.A. and Ph.D. (Public Affairs) from Princeton University, Jee-Kwang, Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State, “Going Public When Opinion Is Contested: Evidence from Presidents' Campaigns for Supreme Court Nominees, 1930-2009” Presidential Studies Quarterly41. 3 (Sep 2011): 442-470.]

Progress in theory development has been somewhat slower. Early studies of going public adopted a "political capital" theory in which the president could move public opinion rather easily, simply through the exertion of effort (Kernell 1986). A major refinement came with conditional escalation theory in which the popularity of issues acts as a constraint on the tactic's effectiveness and hence the president's willingness to employ it (Canes- Wrone 2001b, 2006). However, both approaches implicitly assume an uncontested information environment - the president's opponents do not initiate a public fight or countermobilize in response to a presidential initiative. Some scholars have begun to explore a further development, which we call opinion contest theory. This approach assumes the president faces competition in messages and hence a struggle over public opinion (see, e.g., Jacobs and Shapiro 2000; Rottinghaus 2010). Contested opinion theory adds a new level of strategic complexity to going public and makes its effectiveness more problematic. In this article, we explore opinion contest theory and contrast it with political capital theory, using new data on going public and new data on interest group mobilization against the president. The data come from the same policy event repeated many times across multiple presidencies: presidential nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. This research design may be distinguished from those involving repeated instances of the same speech (e.g., the State of the Union speech; see Cohen 1997), repeated instances of the same type of rhetoric (e.g., economic appeals; see Wood 2007), or multiple kinds of rhetoric across many programs or events (Canes- Wrone 2006; Edwards 2003; Rottinghaus 2010). By focusing on the same policy event, we implicitly control for many factors that vary across issues, programs, or policy arenas. In addition, we can tailor the predictions and our empirical models to the specific context of Supreme Court nominations. By the same token, however, our findings may be somewhat special to Supreme Court nominations. That acknowledged, we examine the triggers for going public over Supreme Court nominees, the content of the president's messages, and their impact on Senate voting on nominees. Because we collect consistent data on interest group mobilization, we are able to explicitly address opinion contest theory. In addition, the length of our data - covering some 80 years, from 1930 to 2009 - allows us to examine the historical development of going public over much of the 20th century and into the early 21st century, at least in this one arena. There is little prior research on presidents going public on behalf of Supreme Court nominees. We discuss the principal study, Johnson and Roberts (2004), below. However, useful comparisons come from work examining going public on lower court nominations (Holmes 2007, 2008) and work examining interest group activity during nominations (Scherer 2005); for broader comparisons across types of nominations, see Krutz, Fleisher, and Bond 1998. More generally, we know of no other work that contrasts the predictions of political capital theory and opinion contest theory and applies them systematically to data from a single frequently recurring policy event. Our principal empirical findings are the following. Prior to about 1965, presidents virtually never went public over Supreme Court nominees, even (as in the case of Herbert Hoover's 1930 nominee, Judge Parker) when the nominee ran into serious trouble. But this changed thereafter, with presidents going public defensively when interest groups mobilized against the nominee. Beginning with Ronald Reagan, presidential efforts became significantly more intense. In addition, Republican presidents went public more aggressively when their nominee would move the median justice on the Supreme Court in a conservative direction. In explaining the intensity of going public, models based on opinion contest theory substantially out-perform political capital models. In fact, formal nonnested F-tests reject political capital models based on filibuster pivots or opposition seats in favor of an opinion contest model based on interest group mobilization against the nominee. In essence, presidents went public over Supreme Court nominees when - and almost only when - groups mobilized against the nominee. We also find that when presidents do go public over the nominee, they engage in what Jacobs and Shapiro call "crafted talk": they emphasize the nominee's professional qualifications and positive personal qualities, not his or her often extreme ideological commitments. Finally, as predicted by opinion contest theory, going public in an opinion contest is associated with more negative votes in the Senate, not fewer. This is because presidents go public over Supreme Court nominees only when battling a vigorous and active opposition. In short, at least for understanding going public over Supreme Court nominees, the data strongly favor an opinion contest perspective.

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