Research

Ambassadors promote domestic exports to a host country and represent the interests of their home country at large. However, are trade benefits equally distributed domestically? In the United States, a substantial number of ambassadors are former governors or legislators ("politician ambassadors"). We argue that politician ambassadors are particularly equipped with knowledge and incentives to promote exports from their home states to host countries. Leveraging the biographic information of 164 ambassadors and US state-level exports to 30 major export destinations from 2002 to 2020, we find that the home states of politician ambassadors, compared to other states, on average enjoy a 10 percentage point increase in exports to host countries. The home-state effect is particularly apparent in countries where the US exports the most in dollar values, and in industries that export final goods. The past career path and future career aspirations of ambassadors can shape how the benefits of diplomacy are distributed domestically.

We investigate whether the filibuster stimulates public debate and discussion within Congress, as its advocates argue, or whether, instead, it discourages legislators from devoting time and attention to bills they know will not pass, as its critics attest. To do so, we exploit multiple sources of variation in the filibuster, measures of legislative discussion, and identification strategies. In the preponderance of analyses, we observe null effects. Where significant differences are observed, they nearly always suggest that a strengthening (weakening) of the filibuster coincides with a reduction (increase) in the volume of floor speeches or time devoted to legislative affairs. Whatever benefits the filibuster may confer, they do not appear to include enhanced discussion on the floors of Congress.

The literature on distributive politics reveals that presidents regularly influence federal spending and disproportionately direct federal grants toward their core supporters. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the interpretation of core-supporter targeting. Empirical evidence shows that the underlying patterns of partisan targeting do not accord with standard accounts of party-building activities nor electoral considerations that are evidence of presidential particularism. Instead, this paper argues that presidential policy priority better explains core-state targeting. Presidents use agencies that are ideologically aligned with them or associated with their policy priorities to enhance the largesse they bestow on core constituencies, and this is the consequence of presidents pursuing ideological and policy goals. Collectively, it indicates a less cynical point of view on the orientation of the American presidency.

Presidents make public appeals on behalf of their policy priorities, but they are not the only members of presidential administrations who address the public. First ladies are highly visible presidential surrogates. We argue that first ladies make direct appeals to selectively advance presidents’ policy initiatives, and do so without being overly partisan. To support these claims, we present evidence from the public remarks of the last three first ladies whose husbands have completed their terms: Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. We use topic models to show that the remarks of first ladies are primarily concerned with policy, rather than ceremonial topics. We measure the partisanship of public remarks using a dictionary-based approach with Bayesian shrinkage and regularization to illustrate how the remarks of first ladies are not overly partisan. Our findings on the strategic communication of first ladies advance our understanding of the first ladyship and of the presidency.

Whereas the preponderance of studies on public appeals evaluates their impacts on mass public opinion, we investigate behavioral responses—in particular, the willingness of donors to contribute to candidates for public office. As appeals, we identify and code the online messages from all 2018 candidates for Congress, winners and losers alike, about both Donald Trump himself and his signature policy initiative, immigration reform; and as behavioral responses, we track candidates’ daily itemized fundraising totals. What Republican candidates for Congress say about Trump, we find, bears significantly on their ability to raise money. In the immediate aftermath of complimenting the president, Republicans secured a modest increase in fundraising; when they criticized him, however, they promptly suffered a substantial decline. We do not observe comparable evidence for Democratic candidates. Our findings are robust to a wide variety of measurement and modeling strategies, and exxpand our understanding of the political stakes of public appeals.