This book responds effectively to a theoretical challenge with an empirical analysis. The author addresses the proposition that successive presidents have increasingly centralized policy development in the White House to the detriment of the departments. The linear trend is said to be in response to the political demands on presidents to control their own programs. Andrew Rudalevige qualifies the theory out of existence by so broadening it that it disappears. He supplies a rich, empirical model in which presidents employ centralized, balanced, and decentralized approaches for developing policy as deliberate strategies as they perceive the different kinds of political capital and expertise involved in given cases. He finds no linear trend at all. All presidents since Harry Truman have used the White House to develop policies, but not to an increasing degree. Centralization is contingent.

The author uses the language of bargaining and information costs, which owes more to Richard Neustadt than to rational choice approaches. Knowledge about institutions is crucial to presidential influence with Congress. For example, the evidence reveals that legislation prepared in the White House is less successful in Congress than if decentralized because White House staff members do not read Congress as well as departmental executives and staffs. Of course, some high priorities must be centralized, and a large number of initiatives that cut across departments must be managed by oversight from the White House. Decisions about strategy take a contingent course if presidents understand the politics of institutions.

The centralizing thesis of Managing the President's Program depicts presidents as reactive managers who respond to political incentives for control. Rudalevige sees presidents as potentially creative and flexible managers who may best serve their goals in a variety of ways. This is a refreshing way to depict leadership because some scholarship on the presidency runs the risk of burying the president in institutional processes. However, the author excludes presidential personal style from his analysis because the individuality of style is not evident in the model he develops. He focuses on recurring situational factors. This permits him to develop a model. I would add a caveat here. It is almost as if presidents must respond to the dictates of his model, and yet presidents make mistakes and they vary in strategic skill. Some are more perceptive than others by virtue of who they are. However, it is still the case that presidents almost always find the mean of mixed strategies in time, whether they begin by overcentralization or rely too heavily on decentralization. The imperatives of office educate all presidents.

This insight reveals an important difference between history and political science as disciplines. Historians can easily show that individual presidents have made important differences with major decisions about the selection and timing of policies, as well as choices which only they could make, especially in foreign policy. Political scientists wish to understand how presidents work in relation to institutions, and they discover patterns that are not within the historian's purview. One may generalize about the contributions of presidents to American historical development as either a historian or political scientist, but the analysis of presidents in institutions is best suited to the work of political science.

The author also explicitly excludes public opinion about presidents and the relative size and strength of the president's party in Congress from his model. He sees public opinion as of marginal importance, as suggested by the literature. This is perhaps true across the 400 cases from The Public Papers of the Presidents that he surveys. Again, he does not consider crucially important cases in history. One would presumably leave this to the historian. But there is plenty of empirical evidence that presidents recognize and tap latent or emerging opinion and exploit it effectively with Congress. It is also the case that low presidential approval harms a president with Congress. There may be no one-to-one link between presidential approval and legislative success, but this is not to rule out opinion in indirect and subtle ways. By the same token, he rules out the question of the place of the president's congressional party in getting the president's programs passed. We know better than this. It is also possible that political pressure from Congress may inhibit the strategies chosen by a president for the development of policy. I do not fault the author for not taking these things into account. The difficulty is that the effort to formulate a comprehensive model that would take presidential skill and strategies, public opinion, and the state of Congress into its bosom would collapse back into history. Our models are necessarily incomplete; we just need to recognize that this is so.

The author uses exemplary methods for sampling and reconstructing the legislative history of each case. The patterns reveal presidents to be rational actors but in a more complex field than the pattern of linear centralization hypotheses. It may be the case that political scientists often discover what experienced practitioners in government already know. If confronted with these findings, such people might claim that they understand all that. But they would also make strategic mistakes in terms of the model because the pressures of time and politics and their own shortcomings would mislead them. And certainly, they would not be able to formulate and write it themselves. Political scientists learn from practitioners, but they also tell us far more than they know.