The interplay of structure, context, and personal qualities defines the study of leadership. And in contemporary times, no leadership role has been more studied than that of the U.S. presidency. The reasons for that are, in part, obvious, for there are more political scientists in the United States than in any other place, and America has been a dominant power since at least the end of World War II. But some reasons are less obvious, and these have mostly to do with the complex system of government that the constitutional Framers set forth. The president is a uniquely powerful chief executive, but the president is not the head of a government. The president and his or her party colleagues in Congress are elected separately and have distinct constituencies. So, while they may share broad partisan goals, these actors are looking to embellish their standing with their own critical constituencies. Put simply, the American president—both enabled and constrained by a complex system of checks and balances—has one of the more complicated tasks of exercising leadership among the world's leaders.
Each of these three books engages these distinct challenges. Those by Victoria A. Farrar-Myers and Stephen Skowronek explicitly emphasize the importance of historical inquiry as a method for examining the ebbs and flows of presidential authority, though they do so in rather different ways. Farrar-Myers's Scripted for Change emphasizes the evolution of norms, which she views as a script by which presidential and congressional actors over time come to define understandings as to institutional authority. Her method is documentary research, especially of congressional proceedings, in three distinctive areas where she is able to trace an evolutionary change in the understanding of institutional roles to be played by the president and by Congress: the commitment of armed forces abroad, the creation and supervision of new administrative instruments, and presidential discretion with regard to the application of tariffs. She focuses on the period 1881–1920, mainly because this was an era of growing nationalization in politics, growing American presence abroad, and increasing regulation by government in response to economic expansion. And it was a period in which presidential authority grew mainly through normative evolution, rather than by constitutional alteration.
The evolution of norms is difficult to explain outside of experimental settings. Farrar-Myers notes that the institutionalization process is heavily conditional, fluid, and not unidirectional, and that it is often the unintended consequence of short-term compromises. This argument seems quite plausible, but it does not explain theoretically why such norms should emerge. Despite the differences across the cases she examines, the one clear thread is that more authority accrued to the president. This could be the product of a Congress seeking to solve collective-action problems by ceding greater discretion in the presidency. It also could be the result of congressional tendencies to reserve ex post rights of review while delegating much of its ex ante legislative authority to the executive. As the author points out, reversals do occur, although longer-term accretions of presidential authority take place.
How powerful are the developing norms, one might ask, if reversals do occur? What explains them? And, above all, what explains the overall accretion of discretionary authority in the presidency? Obviously, the script that Farrar-Myers uses as a metaphor for developing new understandings of how authority is to be shared sometimes gets edited and revised. Her larger implication, however, is that the negotiated script that leads to greater presidential discretion is apt to be more important than who happens to be onstage during these crucial historical moments. For Farrar-Myers it is the play, and not the players, that is the thing.
In Presidential Leadership in Political Time—a collection of previously published essays ranging over approximately 25 years—Stephen Skowronek envisions political time as a cyclical rather than linear process. Political time is distinct from chronological time. As with Farrar-Myers, Skowronek suggests that the fundamental problem shared by presidents is overcoming the Madisonian constraints upon them. However, some presidents are more fortunate than others in overcoming these constraints. In his classic work, Presidental Power, originally published in 1960, Richard Neustadt suggested that the constraints were largely constant but that presidential skill in overcoming them was variable. Terry Moe, however, in a brilliant essay that appeared about a quarter century after Neustadt's book, argued that all presidents, confronted with substantial obstacles to their governance, were likely to politicize as much of the executive as they could and to preempt Congress from exercising control.
Skowronek's formulation—for those familiar with earlier versions of these essays and the book that elaborates his concept of political time (The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush, 1990)—minimizes both individual variability in the presidency and universal strategies for overcoming the constitutional problem of presidential power. Instead, he emphasizes the critical nature of cycles of presidential authority and corresponding strategies likely to be employed at particular points in this cycle. The main structuring essay of the volume is Chapter 2, “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” which is chronologically the earliest, and the fullest embellishment of his thesis is in Chapter 3, “The Politics of Leadership at the End of the Twentieth Century,” originally published in 2000. Chapters 4 and 5 offer reflections and characterizations of the controversial presidency of George W. Bush while Bush was still in office. Chapter 1 clearly sets forth Skowronek's interpretation of constitutional constraints as subject to the rhythms of political conditions that strengthen or weaken presidential warrants of authority. Neither personality nor constancy of structural constraint is the key to understanding presidential behavior; rather, it is the cycle of political conditions.
Presidential authority is likely to be optimized when a regime that is perceived to have failed is replaced through the politics of repudiation. Repudiation allows for reconstruction and, thus, optimizes a president's leeway. Despite obvious differences in the size and responsibilities of the federal government and the role of the presidency in it, Skowronek's cyclical theory suggests that presidents across time face similar governing problems. Critical to the cycle is the coalition that emerges to govern and to displace a previous governing coalition. When this displacement occurs—usually during a time of considerable national disquiet—the new presidential coalition has a zestful lease on life and is likely to get much of its way. This is when the traditional constraints on presidential power are likely to be weakest. Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and probably Barack Obama appear to have come into office as the previous regime was contracting, collapsing, or otherwise being repudiated. According to Skowronek, such presidencies are defined by the politics of reconstruction.
By contrast, presidents at the end of a regime's warrant are likely to find themselves most hamstrung by the constitutional constraints, as they usually face an emboldened opposition just as their own coalition is dissolving. These are presidents grappling with a politics of disjunction. The litany of such presidents includes John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter. Reform is their palliative but it is insufficient against the larger currents of change.
As is often the case with typologies, Skowronek's middle categories are less clear. One of these, “the politics of pre-emption,” mainly characterizes presidents of the out party who come to office during a time of opposition domination. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon stand out among recent presidents, but Skowronek also includes such presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, and John Tyler. Such presidents typically find themselves seeking an independent and personalized path toward establishing their political identities in the face of party coalitions yet to develop coherence or a clear sense of direction. The “politics of articulation” fills out Skowronek's typology, and is characterized by an effort to bolster the prevailing orthodoxy. George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, and Lyndon Johnson are recent representatives of this type.
The differences of style that characterize presidents facing similar circumstances makes necessary a joint focus on both political context and personality. The final two chapters of the volume bring this point home through their focus on George W. Bush, his personal drive to define himself, and the consequent fears of a resuscitated imperial presidency to which his presidential leadership style had given rise. Skowronek indicates that presidents who fit Bush's historical type are likely to overreach, but he places equal emphasis on Bush's distinct leadership style and personality. His discussion of these dynamics is insightful, and it is illuminated by his comparison of the presidencies of Bush Senior and Bush Junior.
The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush, edited by George Edwards and Desmond King, is one of several collections trying to explain the Bush presidency and to place it in a larger interpretive context. The book is well served by an excellent introductory chapter written by the editors. It brings together an impressive cast of well-established and more junior scholars, and also brings together students of the executive from both the United States and the United Kingdom, though preponderantly from the former. The book is divided into four parts: “Exercising Power,” with contributions from Louis Fisher, Richard Pious, and Will Howell and Douglas Kriner; “Decision-Making,” including chapters by Thomas Langston, John Burke, and James Pfiffner; “Governing by Campaigning,” with analyses by Gary Jacobson, Larry Jacobs, Scott Blinder, and Martha Joynt Kumar; and, finally, “Building Congressional Coalitions,” with chapters by Charles Jones and Fiona Ross.
These contributions are solid, though some of the analyses represent now-familiar assessments of the Bush presidency. The first set of chapters emphasizes the unilateralist tendencies of this presidency. Fisher astutely notes that the Supreme Court case U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright (1936), under which the administration claimed inherent powers, actually had little to do with such claims. Howell and Kriner, in one of the most innovative empirical chapters in the book, argue that presidential unilateralism can be countered by Congress in a number of ways short of actual direct opposition, and that these methods can lead presidents to back off—as they show Bush that actually did in the face of congressional resistance.
The second set of chapters focuses especially on Bush's political personality, the organization of the White House, and the uses to which intelligence was put, especially in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The critiques are familiar—a president of notable certainty in his beliefs and unwillingness to consider second thoughts, a White House organized for action rather than review, and selective uses of intelligence designed to bolster preconceived ideas rather than to reassess them.
Among the third set of chapters, Blinder's stands out as an innovative effort to reexamine the power of presidents to rhetorically frame issues and prime audiences by “going public,” as Bush did so successfully in the run-up to the midterm election of 2002, invoking anxiety among the public and thus pressuring congressional Democrats to vote on a war resolution. Blinder might have noted that such priming by Bush was only partially responsible for the submission of congressional Democrats, many of whom were chastened by their previous opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, and who thus felt compelled to support Bush's Iraq War in order for Democrats to regain credibility as a party “strong” on national security. In a similar vein, Kumar's chapter analyzes the Bush administration's vaunted communications team, arguing that while it was effective in putting out the president's message, it was ill-equipped to play defense and to adjust to adverse situations.
In the final section, Jones invites us to view possibilities for presidential leadership from the vantage point of Congress rather than the president. From this perspective, while Bush no doubt succeeded in mobilizing a compliant Republican Congress to accomplish much during his first term, the Senate's nonmajoritarian rules often impeded Bush's presidential appointments and his policy agenda, as it earlier had that of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. And during his second term, Bush's misreading of his political resources, and his pressing of issues that lacked consensus even within his own party, led to more pronounced congressional constraints on presidential power, culminating in a change of party control in 2006. Ross also highlights the limits of Bush's power. Detailing the fecklessness of his efforts to alter Social Security in the aftermath of his 2004 reelection, Ross claims that Bush had little, if any, chance to make an appreciable dent in a program that had much popular support and indeed represented an entrenched “policy regime.”
Each of these three books, in its own fashion, deals with the interplay of history, political context, and presidential personality. Surely, from the vantage point of political science, the political context of a presidency must be regarded as primary. At the same time, presidential leadership styles interact with these settings and sometimes influence them, rather than merely being determined by them. Leadership styles, among other things, powerfully dictate how presidents decide. And how presidents make decisions is likely the single most important aspect of the presidency. Furthermore, given the role of presidents in U.S. politics and the preeminent role of America in the politics of the world, the question of U.S. presidential leadership styles is sure to remain a topic of great interest far beyond the confines of the study of American politics.
