Working Paper PDF: The President's Ideal Point and Party Leadership

Abstract: 

Textbook descriptions of presidential leadership traditionally stress presidents’ party leadership within Washington and across the country. Given their national visibility and extensive dealings with other copartisans across chambers, branches, and levels of government, presidents are well positioned to issue signals, or beacons, to coordinate their party’s collective undertakings. Yet, by conventional measures, presidents occupy their party’s ideological fringe, a locale more fitting for disruptive bomb throwers. 

With recently released records of presidents’ congressional communications from 1985 through 2016, we test potential sources of selection bias. Re-estimated with the new data, presidents’ extreme ideal points persist. Following others’ suspicion that NOMINATE and similar estimation models inflate presidents’ ideal point estimates, we switch the analysis from ideal point to cutpoint estimates to identify which bills along the policy space presidents choose to endorse or oppose. Cutpoints reveal presidents concentrating their signals on centrist legislation, generating beacons well-designed to coordinate their party’s collective action.

Suggested Citation: Bonett, Derek, and Samuel Kernell. (Working Paper). "The President's Ideal Point and Party Leadership", Presented at APSA 2017.

Distribution of Yea and Nay Cutpoints According to Presidential Signal by Congress