Governing the States and the Nation: The Intergovernmental Policy ...

be involved in national policy discussions, and they routinely attempt to influence federal policy in order to ensure that those policies are favorable to them and to the states they represent.

But even though the role of the contemporary governor includes such important intergovernmental responsibilities and activities, research on governors and their place in the federal system has been slow in providing a full account of the American governorship in this capacity. Indeed, researchers such as Beyle (1988) have provided brief discussions of this role (usually as a side note to other topics of interest), but most gubernatorial research has been limited to examining the increased executive powers within states that have resulted both from internal reforms explicitly designed to increase these powers (Sabato 1983) and from the commitment to New Federalism in the 1980s and 1990s (Cammisa 1995). For example, political scientists have developed a considerable body of work studying the formal and informal roles of governors (Barrilleaux and Berkman 2003; Bernick 1979; Beyle 1968; Mueller 1985 and 1987), the professionalization of the gubernatorial office (Sabato 1983), governors’ roles within state governments and as party leaders (Morehouse 1998), the factors that drive the electoral success of governors (Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001; Carsey and Wright 1998; Leyden and Borrelli 1995), and the factors that impact gubernatorial approval ratings (Cohen and King 2004). Other scholars, such as Beyle and Lyn Muchmore (1983), John Kincaid (1984), and Schlesinger (1970), have also conducted relatively broad macro-analyses of the office, but these works, too, focus primarily on governors’ efforts to shape policy within the states separately. Simply put, the literature on the power and policy influence of governors in recent decades has primarily been devoted to measuring their intra-state powers, with very little research focused on their roles as federal policy advocates and entrepreneurs. Consequently, researchers have