Presidents, ideology, and macroeconomic crises: The limitations of partisanship in macroeconomic policy-making

The dissertation develops a theory of presidential choice to explain why presidents choose macroeconomic policy instruments of relative partisan consistency or divergence, given varying macroeconomic conditions. This theory posits a dynamic relationship between political incentives (both partisan and electoral) for presidential policy choice and the situational imperatives presented by macroeconomic conditions, particularly macroeconomic crises (high inflation or unemployment). The theory argues that these interactions are significantly constrained by a president's institutional mandate to stabilize the macroeconomy. Although this question has been long-debated in the politico-economic literature, the project adopts a unique approach to the problem by shifting analytic focus from macroeconomic outcomes to presidential policy choices. The project develops a discrete choice model (logit) of the limitations of partisanship in macroeconomic policymaking in the postwar world (1953-1992), in order to test hypotheses about the relationship between presidential policy choice, partisan and electoral incentives, and macroeconomic conditions. Whereas current research finds that temporal location of the president in his four-year term is the key determinant of presidential deviation from partisan policy choice, the estimation results of the discrete choice model suggest that the presence or absence of macroeconomic crisis actually has the greatest impact on the probability that a president will deviate from his partisan macroeconomic agenda. The dissertation presents in-depth comparative case studies (Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, and Reagan), which use the discrete choice results as a framework for further unpacking the president's political and institutional motivations for policy choice, under conditions of macroeconomic expansion and contraction. The case studies demonstrate that the actual policy choice behavior of these four presidents conforms to the dissertation's theory of the limitations of partisanship in macroeconomic policymaking. The dissertation concludes that partisanship in macroeconomic policymaking should be understood as a policy choice baseline which presidents either conform to, or deviate from, contingent upon the interaction of these other political and macroeconomic parameters in the policymaking environment.