Prioritizer-in-chief : the role of the president in the policy process from Reagan to Obama

This dissertation sets out a fresh approach to understanding presidential decision-making by connecting the presidency to information processing theories. This approach to behavioral choice highlights how the structure of the presidency creates a decision-making process that relies on the cognitive and emotional capacities of the individuals in the office, while the political and policy environment put pressures on their choices. Once presidents have decided to get involved in policy making, they have to process information about the responsibilities of the office, the policy and political environment, as well as their own political strength, to make decisions about what policy areas to prioritize and what strategies they should use to pursue those policy goals. To examine those decisions and understand the forces that shape them, I analyze ten datasets of presidential actions, seven of which are original to this project: presidential press conferences, budget messages, State of the Union addresses, major televised addresses, addresses to a joint session of Congress, proclamations, memoranda, signing statements, executive orders, and veto threats. By examining these datasets of presidential policy action, from Ronald Reagan (1981) to Barack Obama (2014), we gain a clearer insight into the decisions that presidents make about the policy process, their strategies, and the factors that affect their abilities to make trade-offs between their policy priorities and strategies. This dissertation makes a contribution to the presidency and policy process literatures by moving towards a empirically-grounded study of the presidency, one which relies on the combination of theory and data to better understand the decisions that presidents make and the factors that shape those decisions.