The Two Presidencies, 1984‐98: A Replication and Extension

Since World War II, Presidents have had much greater success in controlling the nation's defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies. --Aaron Wildavsky (1966) Wildavsky (1966) contended that in the United States there is something akin to "two presidencies," one for foreign policy and another for domestic policy. Since that time, people have assumed that the president ought to, and consequently does, receive more support from Congress in foreign policy. Wildavsky's original argument is based on empirical evidence that he culled from congressional roll call votes. Using Congressional Quarterly Almanac presidential box scores, he found that Congress supports presidential proposals concerning foreign policy and national security more than presidential proposals concerning domestic policy. Early follow-up research tended to confirm Wildavsky's contention (LeLoup and Shull 1979; Sigelman 1979). Over the years, however, scholars opposed the rule established by Wildavsky (1966) (Edwards 1986; Fleisher et al. 2000; McCormick, Wittkopf, and Danna 1997; Peppers 1975; Rose and Thompson 1991). (1) Still others found evidence of the phenomenon given only certain limited circumstances or considerations (Fleisher and Bond 1988; Lewis 1997; Renka and Jones 1991). The objective of this research is to bring the two-presidencies debate current by extending a comprehensive study carried out by Edwards in 1986. We use the two congressional roll call indicators of presidential support that Edwards found to be most relevant and a third measure of support that omits intermestic policy issues. In our context, intermestic issues are not easily classified as either foreign or domestic policy. We pick up where Edwards left off in 1986 and report levels of support for the president in the two policy domains using "nonunanimous" and "key vote" indicators through 1998. To test the reliability of our coding scheme, we replicate a portion of Edward's study representing the years 1981-83. In addition, we report the levels of congressional support for the president (in both foreign and domestic policy) from 1988 to 1998 using a third measure of support, which we term "nonintermestic" votes. We examine general patterns of support among all members of Congress and, specifically, congressional support among members of the president's opposing party. In each case, we employ all three indicators of support to increase the veracity of our findings. (2) Indicators of Support We rely on congressional roll call data to test the two-presidencies thesis. Although somewhat controversial (see Krehbiel 2000; Lindsay and Steger 1993), the use of roll call analysis is a well-established method that is both intuitive and generally reliable. The research reported here, like that of Edwards (1986), uses multiple roll call indicators of congressional support for the president. (3) First, we include a nonunanimous indicator that only considers congressional roll call votes in which the winning side obtains less than 80 percent of the total vote. To illustrate, if a Senate vote breaks eighty-one to nineteen, the vote is excluded from consideration. Second, we test the thesis using key votes. The Congressional Quarterly Almanac (1994-98) defines key votes as congressional roll call votes that represent "matter(s) of major controversy; a matter of presidential political power" or "a matter of potentially great impact on the nation and lives of Americans" (p. C3). The rationale for using key votes is an attempt to define matters of substance and to remove trivial or purely procedural roll call votes from consideration. Third, we use a measure that we term "nonintermestic" votes. The Almanac, beginning in 1988, classifies roll call votes on which the president has taken a position into four categories: (1) trade and economic matters, (2) Senate votes on presidential nominations, (3) defense and foreign policy, and (4) domestic policy. …