Research & Data

Main Research Lines

Presidential Policy-Making Powers

I have a series of papers published with Joel Sievert regarding the use of presidential signing statements. Presidential signing statements are brief messages accompanying legislation that has passed through Congress and is being signed by the President. Such statements are used for a variety of purposes including expressing policy or constitutional concerns as well as praising aspects of the law or recognizing individuals who helped to pass the legislation.

My coauthor, Joel Sievert, and I have created a unique data set of over a thousand presidential signing statements along with accompanying information concerning political contexts and the specific piece of legislation. To date, our research suggests that such statements are a part of an ongoing inter-branch dialogue concerning the relative powers of each branch.

Joel and I have expanded our interests in inter-branch communication to include Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs), which are bill-specific presidential messages to Congress delivered during the legislative process. We have one paper published on the topic and multiple working papers. We are also working to connect our existing projects to include presidential veto messages.

Additionally, I have examined the role of presidential travel abroad (co-authored with TTU colleague Toby Rider) as an aspect of presidential policy making through personal diplomacy.

Executive Nominations

Presidents have a strong incentive to control executive agencies through the nomination of like-minded and responsive individuals to leadership posts. From the perspective of appointing presidents, personnel are policy. The Senate, however, must provide advice and consent for appointments to these key positions. While most nominees are successfully confirmed, this success rate tends to mask wide variation in the length of time it takes the Senate to make a decision. Delay of critical nominees can influence the character and capacity of an agency while hampering the policy ambitions of a president. In this way the power to delay can be as important as the power to reject a nominee.

Strategic delay of presidential nominations and recent developments in the nominations process were the topic of my dissertation entitled: "Winning the Waiting Game: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations." This project was the winner of the 2015 George C. Edwards III Dissertation Award and I have since expanded upon this work in a multitude of related directions.

My more recent work expands my interests in the executive nominations to judicial branch appointments and courts-related. This includes work on the appointment politics surrounding the selection (and dismissal) of United States Attorneys (co-authored with Boyd, Nelson, and Boldt) as well as appointments to the lower federal courts (co-authored with an MSU graduate student, Jonathan King).

Congressional Rules & Organization

My time spent as an APSA Congressional Fellow left me with an active interest in the operation of Congress as an institution. One of my key interests is how rules are used to manage limited floor time in the Senate. Not only is this related to my work on the motion to table in the Senate, but it also relates to my interest in how the "Nuclear Option" used in 2013, 2017, and 2019 by the Senate has altered the presidential nominations process.

A further interest of mine is the role of professional staff in Congress. Key questions concern how staff are used, what influence they have (if any) on productivity, and how staff use/resources have evolved over time.

Publications

• • Boyd, Nelson, Ostrander, Boldt. 2021. The Politics of Federal Prosecution. Oxford University Press.

  • Ostrander, Ian and Joel Sievert. 2020. "Presidential Communication During the Legislative Process," Social Science Quarterly, 101(3): 1165-1182.

  • King, Jonathan M. and Ian Ostrander. 2020. "Prioritizing Judicial Nominations After Presidential Transitions," Forthcoming in Presidential Studies Quarterly.

  • 2019 Ostrander, Ian and Toby J. Rider. "Presidents Abroad: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy," Political Research Quarterly, 72(4): 835-848.

  • 2017 Ostrander, Ian. "The Politics of Executive Nominations in the Post-Nuclear Senate," Congress & the Presidency, 44(3): 323-343..

  • 2017 McKee, Seth C. and Ian Ostrander and M.V. Hood III. "Out of Step and Out of Touch: The Matter with Kansas in the 2014 Midterm Election," The Forum, 15(2): 291-312.

  • 2017 Sievert, Joel and Ian Ostrander. "Constraining Presidential Ambition: Controversy and the Decline of Signing Statements," Presidential Studies Quarterly, 47(4): 752-776..

  • 2017 Madonna, Anthony and Ian Ostrander. "No Vacancy: Holdover Capacity and the Continued Staffing of Major Commissions," Journal of Public Policy, 37(4): 341-361..

  • 2016 Ostrander, Ian. "The Logic of Collective Inaction: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations." American Journal of Political Science, 60(4): 1063-1076.

  • 2016 Nelson, Michael and Ian Ostrander. "Keeping Their Appointments: The Politics of Confirming United States Attorneys," Justice System Journal 37(3): 211-231.

  • 2015 Ostrander, Ian. "Powering Down the Presidency: The Rise and Fall of Recess Appointments." Presidential Studies Quarterly, 45(3):558-572.

  • 2015 Ostrander, Ian. "The Value of Time in the U.S. Senate: A Fellow's Perspective on Obstruction." PS: Political Science and Politics, 48(3): 558-560.

  • 2014 Ostrander, Ian and Joel Sievert. "Presidential Signing Statements and the Durability of the Law" Congress & the Presidency, 41(3): 362-383.

  • 2013 Smith, Steven S., Ian Ostrander, and Christopher Pope. "Majority Party Power and Procedural Motions in the U.S. Senate" Legislative Studies Quarterly, 38(2):205-236.

  • 2013 Ostrander, Ian and Joel Sievert. "What's So Sinister About Presidential Signing Statements?" Presidential Studies Quarterly. 43(1): 58-80.

  • 2013 Ostrander, Ian and Joel Sievert. "The Logic of Presidential Signing Statements." Political Research Quarterly, 66(1): 140-152.

  • 2012 Ostrander, Ian and William R. Lowry. "Oil Crises and Policy Continuity: A History of Failure to Change." Journal of Policy History, 24(3): 384-404.

Current & Working Projects

• • "Presidential Strategies in Statements of Administration Policy," with Joel Sievert.

  • "Quick to Judge? Confirmation by Cloture in the Post Nuclear Senate," with Jonathan King.

  • "President Trump and the Changing Politics of Judicial Nominations," with Jonathan King and Peter McAndrews.

  • "The Evolution of the Executive Veto: 1792-2016," with Joel Sievert.

  • "Managers or Unitary Actors? Investigating the Effect of Staff on Legislative Productivity," with Anthony Madonna and Simon Williamson.

  • Appointments & Disappointments: The Politics of Executive Nominations [Book Manuscript].

Data

Replication and other data sets can be found in the links below. Please contact me for specific information if you can not find it below.

• • Presidential Signing Statements: Download "Public PSS Codebook.pdf" as well as "PSS Coding Carter Obama.xlsx" for data on presidential signing statements.

  • For presidential travel data, download the Base Travel Data Excel file for coding of presidential trips until 2016, the By Year Travel file for data aggregated by year and the Travel Codebook for details on coding procedure.