During the summer, 2004, I "officially" launched a new NSF-sponsored project investigating the occurrence and impact of presidential veto threats. The research began modestly (and naively) several summers ago as an exploratory investigation into the frequency and settings in which presidents have issued veto threats beginning in 1981 with President Reagan. Expecting to find a couple of hundred, instead an inventory of Lexis Nexis news sources, CQ Weekly online, and more specialized data bases turned up well over a thousand. Then, we stumbled across an altogether and unusually rich source: OMB issued Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs). These formal communications to Congress presenting the president's views on pending floor votes contain numerous explicit veto threats. (Recent Bush SAPs can be found on the OMB web site.)

With the assistance of staff at OMB I have compiled and scanned over 2,000 pages of SAPs containing veto threats. CQ Press is publishing them as a cd rom, Presidential Veto Threats in Statements of Administration Policy: 1985-2004, and distributing it freely to research libraries and interested scholars. If you wish to receive a copy, send me an email at skernell@ucsd.edu.

Undergraduates Nick Chang (left) and Ashoke Chakrabarti (right) have read, reread, pondered, researched, and finally coded onto spreadsheets Statements of Administration Policy for the past six months to identify and track the outcomes of legislative provisions threatened by the president.   

Graduate student Henry Kim’s technical expertise and insights into the subtleties of both data and politics have made him an indispensable contributor to the success of this project.