ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, American political studies have described the concept of ‘going public’ as a predominant strategy of leadership for contemporary U.S. presidents. In an era in which the standing of the president with the American people has come to have a political life of its own (Brody 1991), scholars have documented a signifi cant rise in the “activities that U.S. presidents engage in as they promote themselves and their policies before the mass public” (Kernell 1997), highlighting their incompatibility with the “bargaining president” presented in Neustadt’s landmark study Presidential Power (1960, 1991). Presidents would be described as preferring public relations to negotiation with other institutional elites, either members of Congress or their party’s members.
