Jeffrey E. Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. He is the author of twelve books, including Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy-Making: The Public and the Policies that Presidents Choose (1997) and Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age (Cambridge University Press, 2010), both of which won the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Presidency Research Group of the American Political Science Association for the best book on the presidency. Going Local also won the Goldsmith Book Prize in 2012.

• Introduction. Two puzzles; 1. The president's legislative policy agenda; 2. Studying agenda building; 3. A theory of presidential legislative policy agenda building; 4. The size of the president's agenda; 5. The substantive content of presidential agenda; 6. Divided government and presidential policy moderation; 7. From the White House to Capitol Hill: presidential agenda success in Congress; 8. Conclusions.

'A real step forward for presidential studies … Cohen's arguments about a president's forethought and capacity for strategy provide considerable traction in explaining his empirical findings. This imaginative, painstaking, and astoundingly large-scale analysis by one of our best presidential scholars will surely stimulate a new wave of empirical work and (one hopes) some tough-minded theorizing about presidential proposal power.' Charles M. Cameron, Princeton University