Presidential Leadership and Legislative Polarization

ABSTRACT Presidents go public to raise issue salience, but doing so risks polarizing lawmakers. Legislative polarization can manifest in different ways—some harmful and some beneficial to the president. This creates potential risks and rewards for presidential leadership. We consider this trade‐off in a model of policymaking where two pivotal legislators must agree to change policy, and a president can go public to support a policy. Going public activates the parties' bases and ties the president's reelection to policy outcomes. We characterize how and when the polarizing effect of presidential leadership benefits the president. In doing so, we also establish the logic of “defensive appeals,” where presidents go public to tie themselves to a popular partisan issue and enforce co‐partisan loyalty, even while alienating out‐partisans. We provide empirical implications that characterize how the president's beliefs about the popularity of an issue, ideological polarization, and preference uncertainty affect the incentives to go public.