I am currently involved in the following large-scale research projects:
Presidential Agendas
My book manuscript, “The Prioritizer-In-Chief: The Role of the President in the Policy Process from Reagan to Obama,” examines on the U.S. presidential policy agenda. Previous attempts to map the president’s agenda have ignored the fact that the president has many channels through which to make policy and communicate his policy preferences. My dissertation separates out the agendas embedded in individual policy instruments (e.g. addresses to a joint session of Congress, executive orders, presidential memoranda) and considers how policy area and political context shape the strategies and incentives for presidential participation in the policy process.
“The Prioritizer-In-Chief” presents an original theory of how the ability to process information drives presidential decision-making. Central to this theory is the idea that the immediate considerations and daily demands overwhelm grand policy strategy. By examining Presidents Reagan through Obama (ending in 2014), I capture how the policy agendas of the presidents have shifted over time and policy areas, in response to changing political environments, and reflect the limited time that the president has to get involved in order to understand the tremendous impacts the president has as an agenda setting agent for the political system.
The substantive chapters test this theory using original data on presidential activity and policy agendas from 1981 to 2014. These data provide insight into seven types of presidential activity that have never before been analyzed for their policy content, budget messages, presidential press conference opening statements, proclamations, signing statements, addresses to a joint session of Congress, memoranda, and televised speeches, resulting in 13,140 new observations. This is the major empirical contribution that my dissertation makes to the literature. Using a variety of quantitative methods, I examine how presidential attention to policy shifts over time in different policy areas, in the choice to unilaterally act or communicate, and in response to different political forces. Consistent with my theory, I find that presidents routinely pay attention to a small number of policy areas, with attention spiking at times of crisis or policy change. Additionally, presidents vary widely in the decision to act or communicate and attention is largely resistant to external political forces. As such, the project opens new pathways for understanding the potential effects the presidency has on other political actors.
Policy Agendas Project
I am the former manager of the U.S.- based Policy Agendas Project (Fall 2015 to Summer 2017). The Project provides 13 original datasets and provides access to 5 more on the national policy agenda, which include over 300,000 observations categorized by issue area. In collaboration with UT-Austin’s LAITS, the Project has recently launched a new, interactive website for the Comparative Agendas Project, which allows for the on-the-fly comparison of U.S. data with comparable data from over a dozen U.S. states and countries around the world.