Presidents and the Economic Agenda

• Author: Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha,Jeffrey S. Peake
• Published date: 01 March 2005
• Date: 01 March 2005
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800112
• Subject Matter: Articles

Agenda setting is of primary importance to the distri-

bution of power in American politics. The tradi-

tional model of agenda setting suggests the presi-

dent is the “principal instrument” for nationalizing policy

debates (Schattschneider 1960, 14). Baumgartner and Jones

(1993: 241) observe that “no single actor can focus atten-

tion as clearly . . . as the president.” Similarly, Kingdon

(1995: 23) claims that “the president can single handedly

set the agenda, not only of people in the executive branch,

but also of people in Congress and outside the government.”

As unitary leader of the United States, the president has the

“bully pulpit” at his disposal, giving him constant access to

the media and Congress (see Edwards and Wood (1999) for

a complete review of these arguments).

Influencing the policy agenda is an important—if not the

most important—source of presidential power (see, among

others, Edwards 1989). Presidential success in Congress

and influence over the policy process is likely to increase if

the president is able to dictate which issues are on the con-

gressional agenda (see Bond and Fleisher 1990). Further-

more, the ability of presidents to influence the media’s

agenda or the public salience of issues is vital to the public

support presidents receive (DeRouen and Peake 2002;

Edwards, Mitchell, and Welch 1995). Some research

demonstrates a positive link between the president’s spoken

word in the State of the Union address and the percentage

of the public who finds economic, foreign, or civil rights

policies to be the most important problem facing the United

States (Cohen 1995; Hill 1998) or media attention to many

issues (Lawrence 2003).

Although the literature suggests that presidents can set

policy agendas, especially through the State of the Union,

mounting evidence indicates that presidents are limited in

their ability to do so across all speeches and statements.

Presidents simply have much difficulty moving public opin-

ion (Edwards and Eshbaugh-Soha 2001; Page, Shapiro, and

Dempsey 1987) or influencing media attention to issues

(Edwards and Wood 1999). Presidents have some influence

over congressional and media attention to some domestic

issues including health care, education, and crime (Edwards

and Wood 1999), but they tend to react to media attention

on other domestic policies (Flemming, Wood, and Bohte

1999). Presidential agenda-setting authority is further lim-

ited over foreign policy, where presidents have been prima-

rily responsive to media attention and international events

involving the major national security policy issues of the

1980s and 1990s (Peake 2001; Wood and Peake 1998).

Despite not finding consistent presidential leadership of

policy agendas, these studies do not exhaust the possibility

of presidential influence. Scholars have long held that policy

type affects politics (Lowi 1972). Research notes variation

by policy type in the president’s agenda-setting abilities, the

impact of the president’s public approval on his success in

Congress (Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002), and politi-

cians’ influence over regulatory policy (Gormley 1986).

With this in mind, we see a glaring hole in the emerging

quantitative literature on presidential agenda setting: schol-

ars have failed to analyze the influence presidents have on

the dynamics of attention related to the economy, even

though economic issues matter greatly to presidents.

In this study, we analyze the interaction between three

key actors in economic agenda setting—the president,

Congress, and news media—using the same research

design and measures of issue attention used by other

agenda-setting scholars (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood

and Peake 1998). Although we suspect that presidents may

have some influence over congressional and media agendas

on the economy given its importance to the president, we

127

Presidents and the Economic Agenda

MATTHEW ESHBAUGH-SOHA, TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY

JEFFREY S. PEAKE, BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

The president’s ability to influence the national policy agenda is an important component of presidential

power. Although some maintain that presidents are favorably situated to set agendas, others demonstrate that

the president’s agenda-setting skills vary considerably by policy area. What is more, scholars have yet to exam-

ine the impact presidents have had focusing attention on the economy, an issue of vital importance to their

political success. Extending previous research on presidential agenda setting that did not address economic

policy (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998), we test the impact that the president’s public state-

ments on the economy have on media and congressional attention to the economy. Using Vector Autoregres-

sion (VAR), we demonstrate that although presidents have some influence over the economic agenda, presi-

dents are primarily responsive to media coverage of the economy.

NOTE: The authors wish to thank the Departments of Political Science at

Texas A&M University and Bowling Green State University for

financial support in collecting data. We also would like to

acknowledge B. Dan Wood for his help acquiring the data for this

project. Data analysis was performed using Rats 5.0. An earlier

version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the

Midwest Political Science Association, April 24-28, 2002, in

Chicago. Authorship ordering is alphabetical and does not signify

division of labor.

Political Research Quarterly,Vol. 58, No. 1 (March 2005): pp. 127-138

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