U.S.President's Entrepreneurial Policy Making(1945-2016)

Since Roosevelt's New Deal,U.S.presidents have played a significant role in the legislative process.This study focuses on a particular type of legislation,namely,entrepreneurial legislation,whose costs are narrowly concentrated but whose benefits widely distributed.Conventional wisdom suggests it's irrational for the presidents propose the entrepreneurial policy legislations given their low success rates and the political risks involved.However,from 1 945 to 2016,237 out of 776 legislative drafts proposed by the presidents are entrepreneurial policies,according to the author's calculation.Then the puzzle arises:why do the presidents insist on proposing entrepreneurial policy legislations despite the difficulties in sight?It also leads to another puzzle:under what circumstances would the entrepreneurial policy legislations proposed by the presidents see a better chance of being enacted?The first puzzle relates to the study of presidential legislative agenda-setting.The scholars in this field are mostly realists,believing that the presidents set their legislative agenda either to deal with the outbreaks of crisis or to take advantage of their congressional partisan advantages.In this view,presidents are opportunists who respond to legislative windows to maximize their proposal's chances of being enacted.These studies highlight the institutional environments accounting for the presidential legislative agenda-setting,while overlooking the president self's initiative.Using the method of difference,this paper compares the U.S.public education reforms proposed by President Reagan,Clinton,and Bush Jr.respectively,and studies the influence of the crisis outbreaks,congressional advantages,and presidents'personal preferences on the presidential entrepreneurial policymaking.This paper believes that the presidents'personal preference for good policymaking is critical for the presidents to put the entrepreneurial policy reform on their legislative agenda.The second puzzle concerns the presidential legislative success rate,which is a popular topic in the field of substantive presidential power research.By using the logistic regression model,this paper tests the five independent variables frequently appeared in the literature,including presidential approval,congressional partisan divide,congressional ideological composition,crisis outbreaks,and honeymoon effect.The result indicates that only the crisis and honeymoon significantly affect the success rate of the presidents'proposed entrepreneurial policy legislation.Most legislative analysis assumes that the presidents tend to propose the legislations which are promising to be enacted.Thus,such factors as presidential approval or congressional partisan divide are used to explain both the presidential legislative agenda-setting and their success rate.This assumption is true in lots of cases,but not in entrepreneurial policies which are tough issues by nature.By restricting the research object to the entrepreneurial policies,this paper studies the presidential legislative power with the degree of legislative difficulty under control,which could evaluate the substantive presidential power more objectively.