Presidential Legislative Activity: Using Quantifiable Measures to Explore Leadership in the American System

Presidential Legislative Activity explores the presidency and develops a typology that examines presidential activities. Author Carl D. Cavalli uses samples from the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to explore questions about presidential behavior. The data confirms much of the heretofore descriptive and anecdotal evidence on such things as levels of presidential activity and travel, but dispute the popular conception of presidents being legislators. One advantage to this approach is the ability to explore commonalities across presidencies, instead of uniquely labeling each administration. Another advantage is the ability to empirically explore the president's relationship with Congress. A regression analysis of activity determines that contact with individual members of Congress is driven by their status within the hierarchy and secondarily by partisan concerns. Finally, there is also some evidence that contact with Congress varies directly with a president's legislative success.