The president's agenda and Congress's support for the president's programs are key drivers in American public policy and electoral politics. This dissertation grant project suggests a stream of research to examine the relationship between the president and the US House of Representatives. Beginning with an analysis of presidential position taking, the research discusses the structure for examining the normal legislative process that accounts for legislative support for the president's program, presidential vetoes, and legislative overrides of those vetoes. The research offers a program that examines the conditions under which presidency- and legislative-centered variables affect presidential position taking, legislative support for the president, and presidential veto/legislative overrides on votes before the US House of Representatives. The project also introduces the concepts of political and regime time as critical variables that both constrain and augment the effects of more traditional president- and legislative-centered predictors of presidential-legislative relations. The intellectual merits of the project are both methodological and theoretical. The research program proposes collecting a large data set-over 3,300 votes in the US House of Representatives-that incorporates each of the possible actions the president and House of Representatives take on votes before the House. The research specifically addresses using the data set to assess the conditions under which presidential position taking, legislative support for those positions, and presidential veto/legislative override actions occur. The research suggests that a carefully collected data set will allow analyses of each discrete stage in the presidential legislative relationship, making possible analysis of nested models of presidential and legislative activity on House votes. The project proposes using cross sectional time series analysis-with probit, logit, or nested logit non-linear, parametric models-to examine the relationship between Congress and the president. Broader value: the study can enhance understanding of how presidents influence the behaviors of US House members.
