| Under what conditions do presidents claim electoral mandates? I attempt to answer this question through the creation of a dataset that includes roughly 3000 presidential speeches, news conferences, and inter-elite communications. The hypothesis tested is that mandate claims are made only under certain conditions, because such claims are intrinsically linked to the political process and the image of the president as a politician. Contrary to contemporary depictions of the plebiscitary president, I argue that the paradigm of the president as statesman was influential through the twentieth century, although it has eroded over time. I find that election result alone does not explain the use of presidential mandate claims, and that presidents invoke the election when they are in a position to ground their leadership in politics rather than national statesmanship; that is, when public approval is low, party control of government is unified, and foreign policy crisis is absent. Qualitative case studies bolster this finding, examining the election interpretation and communication strategies of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter. By looking at the internal communications among speechwriters and other public relations aides in these administrations, I find when presidents are concerned with projecting an image of national leadership, mandate claims are less likely to be used, even when the election result was deemed a landslide. When the president is reliant on a political base, and faces lower overall public approval ratings, mandate claims are used, even when the election result was less impressive. |
