Political life is endlessly contingent yet it produces repeatable patterns which result in significant and durable change. This paradox marks the study of the American presidency. Do Presidents make a difference? Fred Greenstein has been working to formulate a systematic answer to this question since the late 1960s. He argues that they can significantly alter the direction of the country through the use of presidential power, a phenomenon he delineates along the five dimensions of organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence.
His current work, the third in a trilogy which began with The Presidential Difference (2009), assesses the difference-making power of the Presidents who led the country in the decades before and during the Civil War. Greenstein is focussed mainly on how presidential power failed to solve the problem of disunion. His tools allow a host of counterfactuals: if only Polk had had vision along with capacity and skill; if only Pierce had lacked an alcoholic's need to please; if only Buchanan had had emotional intelligence, or perhaps a wife, to guide him. The Civil War was not an irrepressible conflict but the result of bungled management and weak character.
Greenstein's analytical exercise borders on a narrow positivism that ignores the constructed nature of political life. The book will likely disappoint scholars of American studies who seek not to measure the impact, but to interpret the meaning, of actions. Nonetheless, the attempt to make sense of political development should not be dismissed as wrongheaded; in fact, explanations of durable patterns in the American political system will have meaning for future actors. Greenstein's focus on the factors of character and contingency would be more useful if it were situated in a larger context. Presidents operate in a power field of ideas, interests, and institutions. Such an approach to the presidency, incorporating both agency and structure, has been pioneered by Stephen Skowronek, whose regime-based theory of political development places Presidents at the center of regime management. With some modification, Skowronek's theory might be expanded to include a broader cultural approach to political interpretation congenial to American studies.
Remarkably, Greenstein ignores Skowronek's model. The book's presentation of Franklin Pierce shows how the regime approach could help convey the sense of contingency that the author seeks to capture. Pierce is the classic case of a President who made a difference, a negative difference. Greenstein argues that Pierce ignored his cabinet's warning that the Kansas–Nebraska Act would be unacceptable to the North and unpopular in the South because he was predisposed to please. But this highly personalized account misses a larger truth: Pierce was operating under a Jacksonian public philosophy that was rapidly losing its grip on the polity. From a regime perspective, Pierce's policy failed because his expansionism was perceived as illegitimate. Similarly, his management of the Democratic Party's factions was competent; his tactics failed not because of a flawed personality but because the party itself lacked a larger persuasive frame for justifying the issue of territorial expansion.
Contingency grows out of a constructed context. Regimes, built of ideas, interests, and institutions, are set in place by elites in order to legitimate power. Regimes construct tests of legitimacy which have the potential to turn presidential power into authority. But regimes decay when interests shift fundamentally or when the public philosophy which justifies government action (or inaction) loses the capacity to compel support. When Presidents fail, it can be because, as Skowronek argues, the regime under which they are operating is failing. In the disjunction between what Presidents do and what their actions mean to the public, a shifting context can make all the difference.
Given its emphasis on structure, is regime theory itself reductionist in the positivist tradition? Not necessarily, especially if the social construction of regimes is emphasized. If the full range of interactions between political culture and interests is taken into consideration, and the institutions that interaction creates are examined for their influence on agents, regime theory can be refashioned as an interpretivist tool.
Greenstein notes that it is wrong to assume that the coming of the Civil War has been so well understood that “no more remains to be said.” He urges, “Nothing could be further from the truth” (1). Agreed.
