Public Opinion Toward Presidential Power

Political scientists, legal scholars, historians, pundits, lawmakers, jurists, and the public have long questioned the nature and limits of presidential power. The scrutiny over the limits of the commander in chief has intensified during the Obama administration. In June 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that President Barack Obama exceeded his authority by declaring the Senate to be in recess when he made three appointments in 2012 to the National Labor Relations Board without receiving Senate confirmation. A month later, the House of Representatives voted to authorize Speaker John Boehner to sue Obama for overstepping his legal authority in delaying the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Still later in 2014, when Obama issued memoranda to direct the Department of Homeland Security to modify its enforcement of deportation laws, key Republican leaders criticized the president's "brazen power grab." (1) Throughout it all, Obama has cited the unwillingness of Congress to pass legislation to address pressing national issues and repeatedly threatened--sometimes following through, as in the case of immigration reform--to use his executive authority where Congress refused. At one level, the terms of these interbranch disputes are clear: when power is shared across political institutions and different political parties control those institutions, conflict over the nature of power is inevitable. More fundamentally, however, President Obama and Republican congressional leaders have appealed to different principles in supporting their arguments. Obama has repeatedly referenced his responsibility to carry out the will of the American people in response to the public's expectations of an almost omnipotent presidency. The public, research has found, holds its president accountable for the national economy (e.g., Hibbs 2000), the conduct of foreign wars (Karol and Miguel 2007), and the distribution of federal largesse (Kriner and Reeves 2012, 2015a). Further research shows that the president is blamed for things well beyond his or any human's control, including natural disasters (Gasper and Reeves 2011; Healy and Malhotra 2009; Reeves 2011), shark attacks (Achen and Bartels 2002), and even the performances of local sports teams (Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2010). House Republican leaders, on the other hand, have accused Obama of subverting the constitutional separation of powers by claiming power that belongs to the legislative branch. Indeed, the public's extraordinary expectations--hallmarks of the modern presidency--stand in sharp contrast with the few formal powers granted to the presidency (Edwards 1989; Neustadt 1990), therefore setting into motion contestation over the limits of presidential power. In this article, we examine public opinion across a range of presidential powers. Building upon and extending the research by Aberbach, Peterson, and Quirk (2007) in the context of the presidency, we build upon studies of Americans' attitudes toward political institutions. Most studies in this vein focus on Congress (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995) and the courts (Caldeira and Gibson 1992). In contrast with most previous research that has focused on the correlates of public approval of the individual who occupies the White House, we investigate Americans' views toward the powers available to the office of the presidency. Furthermore, we examine the extent to which Americans' support for presidential power is associated with their approval of the president himself. Executing an original nationally representative survey of U.S. adults, we present results on Americans' attitudes toward the tools of presidential power. While the president's co-partisans are more supportive than members of the opposite party of the powers available to presidents, partisans are substantially more polarized in their evaluations of the president himself than they are when evaluating the powers of the presidency more generally. …