Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions

Abstract:     
We investigate the extent to which possessions of the veto allows the president to influence congressional decisions regaurding regular annual appropriations legislation. The most important implication of our analysis is that the influence the veto conveys is asymmetrical: it allows the president to restrain Congress when he prefers to appropriate less to an agency than Congress does; it does not provide him an effective means of extracting higher appropriations from Congress when he prefers to spend more than it does. This asymmetry derives from constitutional limitations veto, in combination with the presence of a de facto reversionary expenditure level contained appropriations process (fenno, 1966). We find strong support for this proposition in a regression presidential requests upon congressional appropriations decisions.

working papers series