Our constitutional republic contains opposing principles of political accountability. Congress is primarily representative of the people, and the courts, of the Constitution. And the presidency is balanced between those two sources of accountability. The Federalist, No. 68 exhibits the office's binary sources. Publius observes, “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.” He continues, “It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation.”

We often attribute a democratized presidency to the Progressive Era. Jeremy Bailey's new book The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History complicates that view, revealing a deeper history of the idea of presidential representation. With close reading of sources from the colonial era and early republic, Bailey traces ideas of executive representation in the creation of the first state constitutions and then in the Philadelphia convention. The idea of a representative president emerged early in the constitutional convention, when James Wilson proposed a popularly elected executive. But Roger Sherman and other delegates dissented, preferring an executive deriving its authority from the legislature. Bailey writes, “For Wilson, popular selection would create presidential representation, but, for Sherman, only Congress could claim to represent the people” (34). The mode of presidential selection adopted by the convention would create its own claims for accountability. As Bailey observes, the Electoral College implanted in presidential selection “two different formulas for representation, formulas that would necessarily constitutionalize two different constituencies” (40).

The rise of political parties in the 1790s changed the presidency, associating presidential representation with party politics and locating “the presidency as the focal point of partisan organization” (43). Bailey describes how party politics staked out opposing positions on popular representation. Jefferson's Republicans sought to normalize the idea of the presidency as representative, and saw the Twelfth Amendment as embedding their view into the Constitution. Federalists vehemently opposed the proposed amendment for the same reason. The Federalist Timothy Pickering charged that through the amendment Republicans were attempting to make the Constitution a “simple democracy” (59).

In the 1820s the idea of presidential popular representation found a powerful advocate in Andrew Jackson. He premised his authority on a plebiscitary claim, and “in his first annual message … Jackson called for a direct election of the president and abolishment of the Electoral College” (68). Until the Civil War, the major parties divided neatly on the question of presidential representation. The Democrats, Jackson's party, saw the presidency as the single nationally elected office representing the people. Against that, the Whigs insisted on presidents’ constitutional accountability.

However, Bailey observes, the actual practice of governance undermines clear divisions of principle. The Republicans in power after 1860 blurred that preexisting neat division over accountability. Lincoln had to justify his enormous expansion of presidential and national powers, claiming first the Constitution as the source of his authority, but, as Bailey notes, wielding power under dire circumstances blurs neat divisions of principle: “Party control of the White House … complicated arguments” (74).

The idea of presidential representation was present from the beginning, but the Progressive Era supercharged it. The period's leading public intellectual, Herbert Croly, celebrated Theodore Roosevelt's activism, and, Bailey writes, proposed that “the Progressive presidency would be representative, and it would have the power and resources to enact the majority will into meaningful policy that would get beyond politics” (83). The nineteenth-century Democrats had linked presidential representation of the people with ideas of small government and states’ rights. The Progressives reversed that linkage, associating presidential representation with greatly expanded national government. Looking forward from Croly, Bailey asks, did the progressives “reject the Constitution altogether, or did some of them believe that the Constitution itself created a president who represents the people?” He treats these questions, in a notably fine chapter, by interrogating the ideas of Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the political scientist Henry Jones Ford, along with responses by conservative Republicans, including William Howard Taft.

Conservative Republicans, defending constitutional tradition, would be forced by events to face the reality of expanded presidential prominence and power. Characterizing what was to come, Bailey observes that “intellectuals would return to the problem of executive accountability” amid economic chaos, the rise of fascism, and war. “Constitutional dictatorship would become the new venue for debates about presidential representation” (125). Croly's critique of the Constitution and celebration of executive power led, in the midst of economic crisis three decades later, to Franklin Roosevelt's Brownlow Committee with its call for strengthening the presidency so as to act effectively as the representative of the nation.

In their response to the modern Democrats uniting presidential representation and power, Republicans were left in the postwar years singing from the same hymnal they had used against the Progressives. They wielded strict constitutionalist arguments against New Deal and Fair Deal leadership and, briefly holding legislative power after the war, they imposed some limits on presidents, passing the National Security Act and the 22nd Amendment.

By way of conclusion, Bailey considers recent examples of each party wrestling with popular representation and its limits: the Democratic Party's McGovern-Fraser reforms and the Republican Party's doctrine of the unitary executive. The former was an effort to rationalize the Democrats’ presidential nomination process, creating a system totally dependent on popular participation. In the latter case, Republican lawyers in the Reagan administration assembled a doctrine that the presidency's power is unitary and its Article II powers are not subject to limitation by the other branches. With this conception of presidential power, Republicans built a rationale to justify presidential action in the face of legislative opposition. In effect, the doctrine of the unitary presidency is an ideal tool for a party holding the White House in divided government. While superficially appearing to ground presidential authority in the Constitution, the doctrine was in fact made politically relevant by Ronald Reagan's own plebiscitary appeal.

Jeremy Bailey's excellent book is an important contribution to political science and history. Through its conceptual lens we recognize how the parties have used representational and constitutional arguments. The latest cycle of presidential election and politics demonstrates the continuing applicability of Bailey's arguments. Democrats still insist their candidate won the popular vote in 2016, while Republicans counter that the Constitution's mechanism elected Donald Trump. But now, with President Trump impeached, Republicans disparage a constitutional mechanism and express horror that Trump's removal would negate the roughly sixty-three million votes he won in 2016. As with earlier presidents, political circumstances and convenience, as well as party principles, determine presidents’ claims of authority.