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AT: AlterPrefer our evidence- Alter is old- talking about Obama before health care and stimulus successes- Obama has been able to use PC empiricallyAT: Beckman and KumarBeckman and Kumar conclude neg- proves that PC is key in close votes and, in fact, is the ONLY thing to explain why there is success given polarization in congress- PC is a vital determinantMatthew N Beckmann and Vimal Kumar 11, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, econ prof at the Indian Institute of Tech, “Opportunism in Polarization”, Presidential Studies Quarterly; Sep 2011; 41, 3 The final important piece in our theoretical model—presidents’ political capital— also finds support in these analyses, though the results here are less reliable. Presidents operating under the specter of strong economy and high approval ratings get an important, albeit moderate, increase in their chances for prevailing on “key” Senate roll-call votes (b = .10, se = .06, p < .10). Figure 4 displays the substantive implications of these results in the context of polarization, showing that going from the lower third of political capital to the upper third increases presidents’ chances for success by 8 percentage points (in a setting like 2008). Thus, political capital’s impact does provide an important boost to presidents’ success on Capitol Hill, but it is certainly not potent enough to overcome basic congressional realities. Political capital is just strong enough to put a presidential thumb on the congressional scales, which often will not matter, but can in close cases. ---their card ends--- Lastly, two of the control variables are particularly noteworthy. The first is the president’s public declaration of his preferred outcome (b = .64, se = .26, p < .05), which shows that presidents fare far better on publicized positions—24 points better, holding all else at its 2008 values. While this relationship may partly be causal, it is more likely reflects the fact that presidents tend to publicize popular policies (see Canes-Wrone 2005) and also that public statements are symptomatic of a broader lobbying campaign (see Beckmann 2010). The other significant control variable is the one accounting for nonideological polarization changes occurring inWashington over the last50years (a secular trend captured by the natural log of the number of Congresses since the 83rd). Results for this variable show more recent senators have been more willing to defeat the president on key, contested roll-call votes, all else equal (b = -0.42, se = 0.13, p < .05). To the extent senators’ ideological polarization has intertwined with the postwar Washington’s more politicized environment, it has muted presidents’ ability to exploit centrist senators’ increased isolation. All told, the multiple regression results corroborate the basic model and its principal hypothesis: ideological polarization around that pivotal voter’s position provides presidents with a better opportunity to win key roll-call votes. This is especially true if the president is backed by high public approval and buoyed by a strong economy. By contrast, a president confronting a far-off pivotal voter surrounded by like-minded colleagues has few options for achieving legislative success, regardless of his political potency. Discussion The United States’ founders never intended federal lawmaking to be easy and, in fact, fashioned a constitutional design—including bicameralism and vetoes, staggered terms and separated constituencies—to ensure the nation’s elected officials could not easily impose new laws on their constituents. As a first point, therefore, it is worth underscoring that disagreements across Pennsylvania are not necessarily symptomatic of a poorly functioning republic. If anything, George Will’s insight is apt: “Gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement” (Washington Post, November 4, 1999, A 35). Yet widespread disagreement does not necessarily indicate a broken policy-making process, nor are legislative failures always benign. For even though the framers did not want congressional coalition-building to be easy, nor did they want it to be impossible— not in addressing the nation’s pressing problems, not in answering citizens’ considered demands. And this is why the polarization that currently grips the nation’s capital matters. By making winning coalitions so hard to assemble, a broad swath of status quos effectively impossible to replace, polarization presents a comparable challenge for practitioners and political scientists alike: understanding how, even amidst vast divisions, the nation’s representatives can corral the votes needed to avoid “doing nothing.” A modest step in this direction is what this paper sought to offer. First, building on previous research that shows congressional polarization frequently produces legislative gridlock, we augmented this work in ways that helped uncover polarization’s conditional impact on lawmaking. We did so by first highlighting presidents’ key coalition-building role in postwar America and second, incorporating it into familiar voting models while varying both presidents’ political capital and Congress’s polarization. Theoretical results showed that even as polarization renders coalition building more difficult when the president lacks political capital (or chooses not to use it promoting legislation), also uncovered was an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive prediction: polarization around the pivotal voter can actually provide presidents a unique opportunity to win key votes, secure legislative success, and influence national legislation. Using CQ’s key Senate votes from 1954 to 2008, a first test of our opportunism in polarization model corroborated these principal hypotheses, including the prediction that polarization qua polarization can actually boost presidents’ chances for prevailing on important, contested roll-call votes, especially when enjoying high approval ratings and strong economic growth. In doing so, these results also shed light on familiar empirical findings showing presidents often, but not always, help pass important legislation even when confronted with substantial polarization, divided government, or both (Beckmann 2010; Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Mayhew 2005; Peterson 1990). Going forward, then, we hope this study spawns follow-up work on the relationship between polarization, presidents, and policy making. For our argument and evidence suggest that in today’s polarized political environment—where winning coalitions rarely emerge effortlessly—key to understanding policy-making outcomes is understanding what policies presidents support and, even more, what policies they are willing to invest resources promoting on Capitol Hill. Thus, research better capturing presidents’ lobbying and political capital would offer more precise estimates of presidents’ attempts at exerting influence, while developing better measures of policy outcomes (especially ones not inferred from roll-call votes) would permit more robust tests of those efforts’ effectiveness. All of this would shine new light on the conditions that shape national policy making in today’s polarized environment, particularly presidents’ vital role therein. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.3 Mb. Share with your friends:
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