Presidential Policymaking at the State Level: Revision through Waivers.

Abstract

Presidents in the modern era face daunting institutional hurdles to accomplishing their policy goals. In this environment, presidents often rely on innovative policymaking strategies to implement their agendas. This dissertation explores an avenue of presidential power that has received scant attention in existing scholarship. I examine how and when presidents use a waiver strategy to pursue policy reform at the subnational level. Presidents have approved hundreds of waivers in welfare, Medicaid, and education, yet we lack a theory that examines the incentives that shape how presidents exercise waiver authority. I propose a theory of presidential policymaking through waivers in which I examine the horizontal and vertical relationships that motivate (and constrain) the president's use of this strategy.

I argue that the president is initially motivated to use a waiver strategy when it is difficult for him to implement policy reforms through legislation. If the president seeks a route that circumvents Congress in order to implement national-scale reform, a waiver strategy is only viable if enough governors participate. While the president enjoys broad waiver authority in welfare, Medicaid, and K-12 education, he cannot force states to adopt reforms via waivers. Ultimately, I propose that the president pursues a waiver strategy when he is ideologically far from Congress, contingent on the share of the nation's governors in his party. I assess the core theoretical propositions using an original dataset of submitted and approved waivers in welfare, Medicaid, and K-12 education from 1984 through 2012.

The results here suggest that the president can indeed use a waiver strategy to bypass Congress, although he faces a vertical constraint from the nation's governors. This analysis provides insight into the paradox of presidential power in the modern era. The president enjoys broad authority, but the system of checks and balances often frustrates the president's efforts to exercise this authority. A waiver strategy provides the president with a policymaking avenue where otherwise one might not be available given the horizontal constraint imposed by Congress. In turn, the federal system's distribution of authority between levels of government forms a vertical constraint on the president's exercise of power.