Presidential Influence in the House: Presidential Prestige as a Source of Presidential Power

1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
George C. Edwards

Presidential prestige or popularity has often been cited as an important source of presidential influence in Congress. It has not been empirically and systematically demonstrated, however, that such a relationship exists. This study examines a variety of relationships between presidential prestige and presidential support in the U.S. House of Representatives. The relationships between overall national presidential popularity on the one hand and overall, domestic, and foreign policy presidential support in the House as a whole and among various groups of congressmen on the other are generally weak. Consistently strong relationships are found between presidential prestige among Democratic party identifiers and presidential support among Democratic congressmen. Similar relationships are found between presidential prestige among the more partisan Republican party identifiers and the presidential support by Republican congressmen. Explanations for these findings are presented, and the findings are related to broader questions of American politics.

Author(s):  
Trinh T. Minh-ha

This chapter discusses the problem of an exit strategy during the final days of the George W. Bush administration and how these issues echo the U.S. policy on Vietnam of many years before. It goes further, however, to analyze how the Obama administration approached future conflict in its initial years. On the one hand, the Bush administration's official storyline had revived the familiar paranoia of having victory turned over to the enemies. On the other, the exit strategy for withdrawal also raised widespread doubt about what was achievable in Iraq and Afghanistan and what the comprehensive results of the Iraq War turned out to be. The classic double bind thus wrote itself into every discussion of the “post-Iraq” era of U.S. foreign policy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 112-153
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker

This chapter addresses U.S. relations with Chile during the Carter administration as an avenue to explore the innate tensions within a policy that simultaneously sought to promote human rights abroad and champion nonintervention. The administration, seeking to appeal to both domestic and international constituencies, sought an approach that balanced distancing the U.S. government from the Pinochet regime, maintaining pressure to improve human rights, and avoiding overt interference in domestic Chilean affairs, which could prompt a nationalist backlash. The competing demands of demonstrating to domestic audiences a cooler relationship with the Pinochet regime on the one hand, and implementing a human rights policy that would improve conditions in Chile on the other, shaped and at times undermined the Carter administration's efforts. The administration was always aware that its leverage was limited and that regime change from without was not a primary objective. The assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976, highlighted the tensions between the domestic and foreign policy objectives of the administration's human rights policy.


Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.


Author(s):  
E. Solov’ev

Unlike his predecessors, Barak Obama is bound to work amidst global balance of power rapidly changing to the disfavor of American interests. All attempts of the U.S. to build an unipolar world under its domination have failed. Obama is vigorously seeking to restructure U.S.–Russia relations; however, the divergence of interests in many fields is evident, and neither Washington nor Moscow can agree on the partnership as formulated by the other side.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks

Abstract Using the U.S.-Mexican border as the place of enunciation, Cantú’s autoethnobiographical novel insists on the materiality of the border, especially for those living on its southern side, while simultaneously deconstructing it as artificial - a line splitting families and assigning nationalities on an arbitrary basis. Being a collage of photographs from the time the writer was growing up in southern Texas and the cuentos inspired by these visuals, Cantú’s Canícula documents how border crossings and re-crossings become symptomatic of living in a liminal space and how they destabilize the concept of nationality as bi-national families must learn to live with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the undeniable materiality of the border, with its pain, fear, deportations, and other discriminatory practices; on the other, there is a growing border community of resistance cultivating the memory that they are not immigrants, that they lived in Texas before the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. The paper examines the community’s strategies of survival in the contested cultural and social space and advances the thesis that, giving her community an awareness of its homogeneity and reclaiming its place within the larger socio-political context, Cantú becomes an agent of empowerment and change. She helps decolonize knowledge and being.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7 (105)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Jens Petter Nielsen

This article deals with the background for the November treaty of 1855 between Great Britain and France on the one hand, and the United kingdoms of Sweden and Norway on the other. The November treaty explicitly pointed to Russia as a potential aggressor against Norway and Sweden and offered these states protection by the two Western Powers. The author elucidates the prerequisites for the conclusion of the treaty, and its role as a first step in Norway’s orientation between East and West — and a foreboding of independent Norway’s foreign policy (from 1905).


2020 ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This concluding chapter reflects on the influence of the United States in Chilean politics. Since the dynamics of Chilean politics replicated very closely the ideological divide of the global Cold War, the overarching goal of the U.S. strategy toward Chile between 1964 and 1970 was to keep the Marxist Left from taking power. Arguably, the most important part of that strategy was the considerable support provided to the reformist political project of the Christian Democratic Party, as it constituted a viable alternative to the growing appeal of the revolutionary Left and offered a path toward economic and social modernization that coincided with the ideological outlook of the Johnson administration's foreign policy. Despite an imbalance of power, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus did not determine the motivations or intentions of the Chilean political actors with which it established relationships, nor did it shape the political debates on which the U.S. interests in Chile could be at stake. The United States established itself as a relevant and even powerful informal actor in Chilean politics but only as an ally of forces whose interests and goals, though convergent with U.S. interests, were independent.


Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.


Author(s):  
Neziha Musaoğlu

Many important changes occurred in the Russian Federation's foreign policy since 2000s with Putin's coming to power. Although the foreign policy is defined as pragmatic during this period, it is in fact ideologically constructed on the basis of the concept of “sovereign democracy.” The concept constitutes in the same time the source of loyalty of the Russian reelpolitik towards the West, especially the USA and of the Russian anti-globalist policies. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the intellectual, normative, and conceptual dimensions of the “sovereign democracy” concept that could serve to conceive the foreign policy practice of the Russian Federation, on the one hand, and on the other hand its dialectical relationships with the West in the era of globalization.


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