The recent usage of presidential directives by President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump initiated debates around limits of presidential power. Research on the presidential power has shown lack of focus on the presidential directives, misinterpretation and wrong terminology which resulted in false accusations of presidential overreach and abuse of power. This thesis argues that the political gridlock and increasing passivity of Congress have contributed to a shift between the executive and legislative power of government. This thesis will trace the extent to which Congress has become resistant to pass two of the key priorities of President Obama's political agenda - immigration reform and gun regulation, after which the President had to act on the issues unilaterally. The main aim of the thesis is to show that presidential directives of President Obama were not issued in a vacuum and that there were debates, persuasion and negotiations preceding the executive actions in an attempt to advance President's agenda in a form of bipartisan legislation rather than unilateral presidential directive.

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Studies on Presidential-Executive relations fails to empirically analyze whether or not modern presidential scandal can impact presidential-congressional relations. Meinke and Anderson (2001) find that presidential scandal impacts House of Representatives voting behavior on key votes cited by Congressional Quarterly. A slight revision and replication of Meinke and Anderson's research finds presidential scandal impacts Senate aggregate key votes reported by Congressional Quarterly. In addition, political party plays a more important role than scandal in determining the logged odds of Senate key votes and presidential agreement. / Master of Arts

The 2014 Indonesian presidential election was the first election in the world's largest Muslim democracy where social media played an important role. Social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, became a public forum where Indonesians debated about and framed the presidential candidates - Prabowo Subianto and Joko Widodo - in what was said to be the closest and most polarizing election in the nation's history. A content analysis of two partisan newspapers, two independent newspapers, and tweets showed that both legacy media and social media focused on the personality frame when describing the candidates. In legacy media the second most prevalent frame was experience, while on Twitter it was integrity. Religion remained an important factor in the election, as reflected in both media platforms, while ethnicity was considered less important. Social media became an integral part of Indonesia's nascent democracy, with the public examining the candidates' leadership qualities and integrity on Twitter. The independent newspapers were not neutral in covering the candidates, thus making social media even more relevant as a relatively free and impartial marketplace of ideas during the election. This study discusses how legacy media - both partisan and independent - and social media portrayed the candidates, where and why these platforms differed, and what it means for the future of journalism in Indonesia.

While addiction narratives have been a feature of American culture at least since the early 19th century’s temperance tales, the creation of the Johnson Intervention in the late 1960s and the corresponding advent of the War on Drugs waged by U.S. Presidents have wrought significant changes in the stories told about addiction and recovery. These changes reflect broader changes in conceptions of agency and the relationship of subject to culture in the postmodern era. In the way that it iterates the imperatives of the War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon, the rhetoric of successive U.S. Presidents provides a compelling heuristic for analyzing popular and literary texts as reflective of the changing shape of addiction and recovery narratives over the last half century. Johnson, by defining addiction, not intoxication, as a break with reality, argued that confronting addicts with narratives of the potential crises could convince them to seek treatment before they hit bottom. Johnson’s version of “reality therapy” thus presented threatened or simulated crises, rather than real ones. Examining presidential rhetoric and popular culture representations of addiction—in horror movies, “very special episodes,” and reality television—this dissertation identifies features of the postmodern Intervention and recovery narrative in fiction by William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, David Foster Wallace, and Jess Walter. I demonstrate how the Intervention is key to understanding the cultural products of the War on Drugs and its continued salience in American culture.

This thesis explores the function and limitations of presidential immigration rhetoric, using Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as examples to show the development of rhetoric across their presidencies. Reagan and Clinton are theoretically ideologically juxtaposed, though examples found in their public speech on immigration politics show patterned language that contributed to harmful discourses, kept legislation ineffective, and promoted anti-immigration sentiment. Most persistent since Reagan’s response to the fourth and current wave of immigration to the U.S. was the description of the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” Reference to the “nation of immigrants” was often conflictingly coupled with rhetoric that promoted restrictive sentiments. Contradictory and ambiguous presidential immigration rhetoric used to appeal to multiple constituencies has left immigration legislation unproductive and has had harmful consequences for immigrant communities.

More and more, elections around the world seem to be won or lost on the basis of the candidates’ personal qualities rather than their policies. Despite its prevalence and consequences, we still know very little about what explains such candidate-centered voting, particularly in new democratic contexts. I argue that variation in candidate-centered voting is largely a function of political sophistication: voters with higher levels of political sophistication are better able to process information relating to policy and performance, which tends to be more cognitively demanding than information relating to candidate’s personalities. To test this argument, I estimate models of vote choice and electoral utility using survey data from the 2002 presidential election in Brazil. The results largely support my contention that political sophistication conditions the weight of candidate considerations relative to policy and performance considerations. / text

This thesis examines interactional dimensions of the 2008 U.S. presidential debates based on the conversation analytic concepts of sequence organization and turn management. Drawing on the video recordings of the three 2008 presidential debates, I investigate features of turn design and interactional strategies that candidates employ during the debates and compare stylistic differences between John McCain and Barack Obama. I first examine how candidates design their first-turn responses to the moderator’s question in terms of placement of two different actions, answer and attack. Secondly, I focus on design of the second-turn responses and examine how candidates show responsiveness to both the moderator’s question and the opponent’s prior turn by incorporating multiple actions (e.g., attack, defense, and answer) in their second turns. I also examine direct exchanges between McCain and Obama, particularly concerning their strategic use of the record and their interactional practices in claiming turns and managing overlapping talk in confrontation sequences. My analysis shows that some stylistic differences exist between McCain’s and Obama’s turns. I provide detailed description of how Obama makes a systematic transition from answer to attack in his first-turn responses, which is distinguished from McCain’s first turns in which attacks are inserted in his answer as relevant topics are brought up. My analysis of the second-turn responses shows that McCain frequently produces an attack at turn beginning or responds to an attack with a reciprocal attack before producing a defense, while Obama tends to produce a defense first and then move to an attack. Lastly, I discuss how both Obama and McCain manage their turns and use turn-taking techniques to avoid direct references to their own record and shift the focus of the talk to the opponent’s stance on a related issue. / text