Jimmy Carter and the Water Wars: Presidential Influence and the P ...

Another offered that the “water projects fight defined congressional relations for the rest of the time that Carter was president.”¹¹

Many students of American politics (and political scientists generally) are uncomfortable with case study methodology. Chief among their concerns is the belief that it is difficult (many would say impossible) to generalize based on a single case. Close attention to case selection, however, improves our ability to generalize from a single case. We contend that the water wars represent acritical case—given the importance of this veto and the vast political resources expended on both sides of the fight, but especially on the part of the White House;if we are unable to uncover evidence for presidential influence in Congress in this case, then it is unlikely that presidential influence is present in lower stakes legislative battles.¹² During the veto battle of 1978, the White House invested significant institutional resources, and President Carter invested his personal prestige, seeking to influence members of Congress. By focusing on a “critical case,” we improve the generalizability of our findings to other presidents in other political contexts.

In examining this case, we adopt a multimethod approach. Multimethod research—which is well-accepted in educational research, but has been slow to gain traction in political science—is premised on the belief that combining qualitative and quantitative data increases the ability of researchers to make inferences that maximize external validity, that is, the likelihood that observations and conclusions from an analysis can be generalized to other situations.¹³