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 the role of the U.S. president in public policy to better understand why the president is thought to be incredibly powerful, while often failing to enact policy in the ways that they want. “The Prioritizer-In-Chief” presents an original theory of how the structure of the presidency presents both opportunities and limitations which shape presidential decision making and create the paradoxical image of presidential power. At the heart of this theory is the information processing perspective, which highlights the challenges associated with decision making that are a part of the human experience.
By using data from Presidents Reagan through the first Trump administration, I capture how presidents use strategy to the best of their ability to channel their policy goals into the tools that they think will give them the best chance at success, but due to the incessant demands on the attention of the president are forced to constantly switch their attention. This dynamic of constantly having to shift attention results in presidents having to make trade offs between the issues they are interested in, resulting in more limited success than their public appearance of power would suggest.
This manuscript relies on original data on presidential activity and policy agendas from 1981 to 2020 which provide insight into seven types of presidential activity that have not 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, which when combined with existing data on the State of the Union address, executive orders, and veto threats resulting in a dataset of over 27,000 observations.
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 an 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.