One hundred and ten years ago, in the first article in the first issue of the American Political Science Review, A. Maurice Low criticized scholars who had complained of “executive usurpation” of power from Congress for “relying upon their rhetoric rather than their facts” (Low 1906). In fact, he argued, if there had been usurpation, it was on the part of the Senate, not the president. Thus the critics had not gotten their facts straight and completely missed the real pattern of behavior. More than a century later, political scientists are still exploring presidential leadership, yet for most of the decades since Low wrote, the study of the presidency was a backwater of the discipline.
The Revolution Begins
In the fall of 1973, I faced a dilemma. A newly-minted PhD, I was assigned to teach a graduate seminar on the presidency at Tulane. I looked forward to the class, but what readings would I assign the students, aside from Dick Neustadt’s Presidential Power? Edwards Corwin’s magisterial The President: Office and Powers was considerably out of date (Corwin died in 1963), and I wanted to move beyond the formal powers of the presidency anyway. Some scholars in international relations such as Alexander George and Graham Allison were doing interesting work on decision making, and James David Barber was just publishing his wildly successful but deeply flawed The Presidential Character. Yet there was very little work on the presidency by presidential scholars. There was especially a dearth of work with an analytical bent that focused on explaining the causes and consequences of presidential behavior rather than describing that behavior or the development of the institutions of the presidency.
I could not turn to the subfield for advice, as there was no organization of presidency scholars. Indeed, there was nothing that could sensibly be termed a field of presidential studies. I could not review syllabi from the leading departments of political science, as most of them (including the one I attended) did not offer a graduate course on the presidency. The absence of rigorous research on the presidency had encouraged these departments to simply avoid the topic in training graduate students.
It was a frustrating time to be a scholar of the presidency. As I declared, perhaps impertinently, a few years later, the presidency subfield had failed to adopt the basic norms of social science. I argued that research on the presidency too often failed to meet the standards of contemporary political science, including the careful definition and measurement of concepts, the rigorous specification and testing of propositions, the employment of appropriate quantitative methods, and the use of empirical theory to develop hypotheses and explain findings (Edwards Reference Edwards1981, 146).
Scholars needed to think theoretically to develop falsifiable propositions about presidential leadership and test these systematically with relevant data and appropriate econometric techniques. They should seek to discover generalizations about behavior rather than produce discrete, ad hoc analyses, repeat colorful anecdotes from presidential press clippings, or reach facile conclusions about Lyndon Johnson’s skill at swaying members of Congress or Ronald Reagan’s ability to mobilize the public behind his proposals. Thus, the research on the presidency presented a striking irony: The single most important and powerful institution in American politics was the one that political scientists understood the least.
Thus, the research on the presidency presented a striking irony: The single most important and powerful institution in American politics was the one that political scientists understood the least.
This was the context in which I wrote “Presidential Influence in the House: Presidential Prestige as a Source of Presidential Power” (I submitted the piece in the fall of 1973 and it was accepted in May 1974. There was such a long backlog in the APSR that it did not appear in print until March 1976). I knew that scholars had not employed quantitative methods or empirical theory before in writing about presidential leadership, but I did not set out to revolutionize presidential studies. I was just trying to do research as best as I could.
The piece and others I wrote at about the same time made a splash. On the one hand, a number of readers thought that there was little future of quantitative work in the presidency. Much like the old baseball scouts in Moneyball, they did not feel that matters such as leadership could be quantified. They knew it when they saw it, and that was good enough for them. There was a brighter side, however. Many younger scholars responded favorably to my approach and began doing their own work in the more modern vein.
Within a decade, there was an identifiable literature on presidential-congressional relations and one that I called the “public presidency.” Scholars were also making strides in researching other important aspects of the presidency. Before long, we formed a section on presidential studies within APSA. At last there was a real presidency field.
The Revolution Continues
Although we have made great progress in increasing our understanding of the presidency, it is natural that scholars, including myself, have focused on the areas of presidential politics most accessible to research, especially those dimensions most easily lending themselves to quantitative measurement. For example, presidential approval was the hot topic for a while. It offered a long time series and allowed the application of the latest times series techniques. Yet the theory behind these studies was often primitive and the results frequently indecipherable.
I fear that we have often missed the key questions about the presidency. For example, in 1992 I chaired a panel of distinguished scholars that reviewed the presidency of George H. W. Bush at the APSA annual meeting. Dave Barber asked a very good question from the floor: What should we be looking for in a president, aside from policy aspirations? We did not offer insightful answers. Some years later, I commissioned a special issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly, asking leading scholars what questions we should be asking about the presidency. Once again, the effort was not a great success.
I find it convenient to organize presidential studies into four broad areas: 1.) Leading the public. 2.) Leading Congress. 3.) Making decisions. 4.) Implementing policy. These wide categories incorporate agenda setting, media relations, legal issues, and other important topics.
We have learned a lot about leading the public and Congress. There is much more to learn, of course, but I think we have a clear understanding of the basic parameters of the relationships here. It seems to me that we need to focus on the important issues of decision making and implementation. I am not suggesting we know nothing about them or that there has been no useful research on the topics, only that we have made much less progress in these areas. There exists a body of theory about decision making, but we typically ignore it altogether. Similarly, presidency scholars rarely exploit broader work on policy implementation. And just what should we be looking for in a president?
Like scholars in other areas, we tend toward the easy work. For example, it is fine to study signing statements, but what difference do they make for actual policymaking? Similarly, our analyses of presidential decision making are generally no better than those by journalists, and these are not especially astute.
Accessibility to decision making and implementation is always a problem in studying the presidency. Nevertheless, if we do not ask the right questions, we are unlikely to arrive at the right answers. There is nothing more important to study than decision making. Aside from their consequences for the nation, decisions are what make presidents unique.
The field is wide open, and I envy the possibilities available to younger scholars.
