The Presidency, Congress, and Divided Government: A Postwar Assessment

8. Conclusion

At the end of this journey through presidents’ experiences under unified and divided party control of national institutions we are now in a better position to return to the two fundamental issues posed in the introduction. The first goal was to reconcile the normative claims of party government advocates about the importance of unified government for presidential leadership with chief executives’ actual legislative records. The second goal was to grasp presidents’ strategic response to the condition of divided government across time. Systematicempiricalanalysisunderscoresthesubtleyetconsistentwaysin which unified government has facilitated positive presidential engagement of Congress. High floor success rates and agenda synergy are common characteristics of single-party control. Presidents have sometimes been able to provide agenda leadership on their own set of preferred objectives. At other times, their role has been to cultivate support for and advance continuing agendas in Congress. From the vantage point of the White House, party control of Congress certainly does matter. There has been far more diversity in presidential strategy and success in times of divided government. The impact of split-party control on the legislative presidency today is qualitatively different compared to the s. Chapters – emphasized how presidents were frequently able to engage in crossparty coalition building, maintain relatively high floor success rates, and sometimes provide agenda leadership in the earlier decades of the postwar era. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, presidents’ floor success rates have fallen dramatically. Congressional majorities now set more of the policyagenda.Inlightoftheobstaclespresidentsfaceinbuildingwinninglegislative majorities, post-passage and preemptive veto politics have become routine on domestic policies of national import. The variable effect of divided government on the modern legislative presidency is best understood through the lens of political time. An emphasis on Conclusion 8  the particular electoral, institutional, and environmental contexts within which split-party control has occurred provides a firmer basis for meaningful comparisons of presidents’ experiences. Superficially similar partisan configurations of the presidency and Congress have often appeared to have little in common during the last fifty years. Democratic Presidents Truman and Clinton, for example, faced Republican majorities in Congress, but their legislative presidencies bore little similarity in terms of veto leverage. Two-term Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan were dealt the hand of divided government for a majority of their tenure, but Eisenhower was better abletosustaincoalition-buildingleverageandhigherfloorsuccessrates.Presidents Nixon and Bush confronted large Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, but their strategies and the type of influence they could exert over legislative outcomes diverged significantly because of the electoral context and voting alignments in Congress. The framework of presidential leverage in political time imposes an order on these complex and diverse cases of divided government. Subdividing periods of split-party control within distinct contextual eras in the postwar period relieves confusion about presidents’ contrasting experiences. The approach sharpens our grasp of the conditions under which divided government has been most salient to the legislative presidency. The central contribution of this book has been to show how and why presidents ’ success, strategy, and credit-claiming opportunities in the legislative realm have varied by degree across time. Broad trends in presidents’ electoral resources, internal dynamics in Congress, agenda magnitude between the branches, and the larger policy-making environment have conditioned presidents ’ strategic modes of engagement. A multifaceted interpretation of presidentialsuccessthatconsidersfloorvictoryrates ,leadershipofandsupportfor landmark domestic initiatives, and negotiation with opposition majorities through the veto power crystallizes fundamental differences in presidents’ leadership of Congress between periods of unified and divided party control. Several common threads run through the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton cases of unified government. These presidents had the most consistently high floor success rates. The significant domestic laws identified by Mayhew showed a consistent linkage to presidents’ stated policy objectives .1 A stronger shared policy agenda between the branches created more opportunities for joint credit claiming and the attainment of partisan policy objectives. All of these presidents differed in terms of their autonomous influence over Congress and their ability to garner substantial independent Conclusion  policysuccesses,butonlyLyndonJohnson’sterm—whichbeganwithanelectoral landslide and strong coattails—comes close to resembling the beau idéal of presidential direction of the national agenda. Nevertheless, scholars have overlooked how unified government has facilitated presidential legislative leadership in important ways, even if singleparty control typically resembled neither Johnson’s term nor a hybrid form of “responsible party government” within our separated institutional structure. As the case studies of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton showed, these presidents had weak positive leverage over Congress...