| The purpose of the dissertation research is to evaluate presidential leadership strategy---the president's choice of whether to act alone or cooperate with the Congress---and to test for the conditions that encourage unilateral decision-making and those that help set the stage for collaborative foreign policy efforts. The analytical framework for the study is a game theoretic model of the executive-legislative relationship that reflects an interest on the part of both institutions in credit claiming given a foreign policy success, and blame avoidance given a foreign policy failure. The equilibrium solutions to the formal model serve as the foundation for a theory of presidential behavior that suggests that presidential leadership strategy (acting unilaterally or collaborating with the Congress) is largely defined by the president's access to private information, and the relative favorability of the president's political context.; Equilibrium solutions to the game under the conditions of perfect and imperfect information identified several possible patterns of presidential leadership strategy. The results of the formal analysis are empirically tested using data regarding international agreement-making during the 1981--1996 period. Use of the executive agreement is distinguished as an example of unilateral action on the part of the president, and use of the treaty as an example of cooperative behavior. The president's political environment is modeled using data on the president's party support in the Senate, his ideological compatibility with the Senate, his public prestige as measured by Gallup polls, and the risk associated with entering into a particular international commitment.; The empirical analysis of international agreement-making supports the idea of the president as a strategic political actor concerned with credit claiming. All three presidents included in the empirical analysis, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, demonstrated a similar pattern of behavior in the context of international agreement-making and the leadership strategy of all three generally supports the results of the formal analysis. |
