Politics and the president's agenda: First year agenda setting and implementation from Carter to Clinto

The U.S. President's first year agenda is a prioritized fist of policy goals that emerges from the presidential election campaign, the necessity to respond to the changing state of the nation as well as the on-going governance process. Through his quest to implement his agenda, the new president exercises his national leadership within the policy process.;This dissertation is an in-depth study examining the first year president's domestic agenda setting and implementation from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton. The unit of analysis is the individual agenda item Based on the argument that the president casts his influence primarily at the focal point (i.e. his priorities), rather than across the board (i.e. the great quantity of legislative items over which he takes a position), this research distinguishes among items on a president's agenda in terms of their prioritized rank as well as discriminating the issues that the president promotes repeatedly from those legislative items on which he merely takes a position. A three-step procedure is taken to investigate each president's agenda: (1) locating the items on the president's agenda, (2) tracing the sources of the agenda items, and (3) reviewing the implementation of the agenda.;The general findings of this dissertation are summarized as: (1) There are many factors beyond the president's control that determine or impact a president's agenda. In return, the president's agenda impacts these factors. These factors include: (a) the state of the nation, (b) unexpected events, (c) on-going governance process, (d) the other political elites, and (e) public opinion. (2) The president's discretion as to what issues to address decreases significantly when he deals with short-term issues and crises rather than long-term issues; while the president's influence is greater on the short-term issues than on the long-term ones. (3) Among the four presidents, Reagan's presidential leadership was the most effective. In addition to circumstantial advantages, the strategy President Reagan adopted to control his agenda produced its success. (4) Effective presidential agenda setting and implementation is about "optimization subject to constraints." An Oval Office winning strategy encompasses three basic components: prioritization, consistency and adaptiveness.