Research Agenda
Stewart is interested in how American institutions use their powers and how the public and other branches react to such power. By viewing politics through a separation of powers lens, he believes we can learn important things on how institutions interact with each other in the American system. He has also researched presidential elections and how the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene has changed our expectations of elections. Published research of his looks at Trump’s effect on the 2022 Midterm Elections. Overall, Stewart's research agenda is motivated by a lifelong fascination with the American presidency and government institutions more broadly, hoping to help explain how and why these actors use their powers and what the public thinks of such use.
Published Work
Carson, Jamie L. and Stewart Ulrich. 2024. “In the Shadow of Trump: The 2022 Midterm Elections.” Journal of Political Marketing. DOI: 10.1080/15377857.2024.2359241
Carson, Jamie L. and Stewart Ulrich. Forthcoming. “Disrupting the Norm: Redefining Presidential Nominations in Modern Politics.” In Divided Nation: Analyzing Policy, Behavior, and Institutional Challenges in Modern American Democracy. Jamie L. Carson and Ryan D. Williamson editors. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Carson, Jamie L. and Stewart Ulrich. Forthcoming. 2025. "Getting Off the Roller Coaster: Reflections on the 2024 Elections" Questions in Politics.
Current Projects
Dissertation : "Not So Fast Mr. President: Constraints on Unilateral Presidential Power"
First essay: Looking at the relationship between a president’s public standing and their use of the clemency power, this section utilizes presidential approval and clemency statistics, from Richard Nixon through Donald Trump. The theory here is that public opinion is the only thing that checks unilateral power, and the pardon power is no different. When their approval is high, presidents will feel emboldened to use their power and issue clemency. When their approval is low, presidents will not want to rock the boat with a grant of clemency and potentially squander their already low reserve of political capital. In all but one instance, these results were not significant, but rather the timing of when acts of clemency are granted. Significant were grants of clemency after an election when the president is leaving office. This suggests that presidents care more about election accountability and legacy effects than their day-to-day popularity. This finding helps us understand the motivations to use their constitutionally-sanctioned clemency power.
Second essay: Analyzing the effect partisanship has on the public’s view of unilateral power and willingness to hold the president accountable for abuse of power. Here an original survey experiment is employed by asking respondents to react to vignettes on four presidential unilateral powers: pardons, executive orders, signing statements, and executive appointments. This experiment varies the party of the president and examine the effect it has on respondents by party. As expected, Democrats were more approving of Biden using a power and very disapproving of Trump using that power. The same is true of Republicans in the opposite directions. This finding helps us show that citizens do not care much about the underlying unilateral power, but rather which party’s president is utilizing the power. It also shows that partisans struggle to hold their in-party president accountable for the same behavior they would for an out-party president. This helps us understand how citizens view unilateral presidential power through the lens of partisanship and has implications for democratic accountabilty.
Third essay: Looks at the relationship between presidential unilateral power and the Supreme Court. What happens when presidents criticize the Court for ruling against their unilateral actions? How would the public react to that rhetoric? Here another original survey experiment is utilized to test the public’s tolerance of a president publicly calling out the Supreme Court and if they approve of such criticism. Given that the expectation of the separation of powers holds that presidents respect the Court’s ruling, what happens when the president crosses that line? Survey results have yet to be analyzed, but expect the results to show the public to not support presidential condemnations of the Court, but that result could be moderated by partisanship. This will further our understanding of the public’s reactions to crossing of norms established by the separation of powers.
Working Projects
"Justice or Distrust: Unraveling Racial Divides Between Death Penalty Support and Government Trust" with Tabitha Lamberth. Presented at the 2025 MPSA meeting. Looking at how trust in government differs from support for the death penalty by racial identity.
“Pardon Who? Understanding Citizen Awareness of the Clemency Power”. Survey experiment to better get at awareness and political knowledge of the president's clemency power, and whether any demographic factors mediate any level of awareness.
"How the 2024 Presidential Election was Determined by Level of Education, Not Gender" with Megan Wall. Analyzing the voting patterns of the election and showing how education, not gender, was the major factor in Trump's victory.