Power play: The agenda dynamics of the United States president, House of Representatives, and Senate
2025-06-04
Scholars of agenda setting have tried to untangle the relationship between the president and Congress. However, many studies treat Congress as if the House of Representatives and the Senate had one unified agenda. In this study, we examine the agenda‐setting relationship between the president and the House and Senate as separate institutions with their own agenda‐setting mechanisms to examine whether attention in one institution acts as a signal about policy problems for the other institutions. Examining the period of 1956 to 2017, we use Vector Autoregression to find the president dominates the agenda‐setting space, though the precise inter‐institutional agenda‐setting dynamics differ across issues and are not the same between the president and the House and Senate. Consequently, scholarly understandings of the congressional–presidential relationship must consider the independent relationships that presidents have with each chamber to understand the agenda‐setting power of the president.