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Aaron Wildavsky first proposed that presidents in the United States receive more support from Congress in foreign policy and thus can expect to wield more influence and discretion in this policy arena. Since that time, scholars have scrutinized Wildavsky's contention. A recent work by Fleisher et al., using a new measure of presidential support, argues convincingly that broad generalizations about the phenomenon of increased presidential support in foreign policy must be drawn tentatively. This article addresses the two-presidencies thesis in three ways. First, the authors replicate a portion of Edwards's research to illustrate the reliability of our results. Second, the authors extend the data collection on more traditional measures used to test this thesis. Third, to address the issue of intermestic policy, the authors employ a new measure of presidential support that more carefully defines foreign and domestic policy actions. The analyses confirm the findings of Fleisher et al. and Edwards that the two-presidencies phenomenon is largely idiographic.
Since World War II, Presidents have had much greater success in controlling the nation's defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies.
-Aaron Wildavsky (1966)
Wildavsky.(1966) contended that in the United States there is something akin to "two presidencies," one for foreign policy and another for domestic policy. Since that time, people have assumed that the president ought to, and consequently does, receive more support from Congress in foreign policy. Wildavsky's original argument is based on empirical evidence that he culled from congressional roll call votes. Using Congressional Quarterly Almanac presidential box scores, he found that Congress supports presidential proposals concerning foreign policy and national security more than presidential proposals concerning domestic policy. Early follow-up research tended to confirm Wildavsky's contention (LeLoup and Shull 1979; Sigelman 1979).
Over the years, however, scholars opposed the rule established by Wildavsky (1966) (Edwards 1986; Fleisher et al. 2000; McCormick, Wittkopf, and Danna 1997; Peppers 1975; Rose and Thompson 1991).1 Still others found evidence of the phenomenon given only certain limited circumstances or considerations (Fleisher and Bond 1988; Lewis 1997; Renka and Jones 1991). The objective of this research is to bring the two-presidencies debate current by extending a comprehensive study carried out by Edwards in 1986. We use the two congressional roll call indicators of presidential support...