Capturing the evasive President: Disaggregating Senate-executive interactions in foreign affairs.

摘要

This work examines whether and to what extent Presidents use executive agreements in lieu of treaties to evade the constitutionally required Senate advice and consent. An analysis of the scholarly treatment of international agreements reveals that prior analyses were based upon biased data. It is further determined that prior analyses neglect qualitative considerations amongst each of these types of international agreements, fundamentally skewing their results. This analysis also reveals that prior analyses of international agreements relied upon insufficient statistical methods.;In order to remedy the deficiencies found in the literature, this work presents the most complete and thorough dataset of international agreements conducted between 1949 and 2004, including a total of 13019 executive agreements and 1063 treaties. Qualitative categorization of this data allows for the isolation of very specific types of executive agreements and treaties in order to analyze the evasive action question. This work expounds upon the prior scholarly literature to provide president-centered, presidency-centered and environment-centered theoretical determinants of presidential decisions to evade. In accordance with a thorough investigation of the data this work tests these theories utilizing difference of means tests, negative binomial regression estimation and rare events logit regression estimation.;This work finds that Congress retains general influence in the conduct of international agreements. The findings also reveal that the statistical evidence contradicts prior scholarly conceptions regarding the impact of divided government upon presidential decisions to conduct executive agreements. Additionally, this work identifies predictors of evasive use of executive agreements, calling into question some of the discipline's long-held thoughts about presidential-congressional relations and the presidency. Finally, this work identifies the Presidents most likely to evade.