The American Presidency:

Studying the Presidency


I. Approaches: Approaches are orientations that guide researchers to ask certain questions and employ certain concepts rather than others.

A. The Legal approach looks at the president's formal, constitutional powers. 1. This includes the president's place in the system of checks and balances, and the historical development of the office.
2. This approach has limitations however; most of what the president does is not in the legal realm such as dealing with the public, the media, bureaucracy, etc. B. The Institutional approach looks at the roles, responsibilities and involvement of the president in governmental structures and processes. 1. Historical development and evaluation of success are included. a. Limitations are that description is emphasized at the expense of explanation, i.e., process over consequences.
b. Second, the approach downplays political skill, ideology and personality. C. The Political Power approach studies people in organizations and their relationships. 1. It deals with the influence of a wide number of variables. a. Problems are the top down approach;
b. viewing the presidency from the perspective of the president. 2. It also exaggerates the confrontational nature of power. D. The Psychological approach says personality is a constant and personality needs may be displaced onto political objects and become unconscious motivations for presidential behavior. 1. That is, why do presidents act as they do? a. The approach looks beyond external factors. 2. Presidents and their advisors view the world through cognitive processes which affect their perceptions of why people, groups and actions act as they do. a. Cognitive processes color the way in which we see things and often simplify or condition the view. (1) Limits are that reductionism tends to explain everything in terms of personality.
(2) Another drawback is to link policy failure with personality flaws. II. Methods are techniques for examining research questions generated by the approaches above. A. Traditional Methods are descriptions of events, behavior and personalities. 1. These are anecdotal, subjective, fragmentary and impressionistic, not analytic.
2. For example insiders proximity to power may hurt or help this method. B. Quantitative Analyses are the careful definition and measurement of concepts, the rigorous specification and testing of propositions, and the use of empirical theory to develop hypotheses and explain things. 1. Constraints of this method are a failure to pose analytic questions. a. Also, there have been a small number of presidents, thus a lack of data. C. Case Studies allow the presentation of a wide range of complex information about individual and collective behavior. 1. Here, narrative is useful in place of a lack of data. a. Drawbacks are case studies are descriptive not analytic, the idiosyncratic nature of the method and the lack of formalized analytic frameworks. III. Themes: There have been a variety of themes dealing with presidential studies: 1. weak v strong;
2. popular v detached;
3. political or neutral administration;
4. rise of presidency v cyclical or ascendant;
5. nature of power v sources of power (consistent variable);
6. time— modern v traditional. A. Power :Possibly the most utilized theme has been power. 1. It is unclear how much power would be in the presidency. a. The inventors of the presidency did not expect it to become the central office; (1) Its enumerated powers are few. b. But the potential for inherent powers is strong. (1) "It is ironic that the presidency has come to play such a central and complex role in national life." B. Politics: A second major theme has been the politics of the presidency. a. There are severe limits on studying the presidency, as described above in approaches. (1) Thus, much of the major analyses of the presidency have followed the political fortunes of individual presidents. C. Chronologically: The 50s and 60s were the era of heroic presidents in presidential studies. 1. Rossiter called the office the most successful office created to ensure liberty.
2. Neustadt emphasized the limitations on presidents resulting from separated institutions sharing power. a. Presidents must persuade people to follow him. 3. In 1965 J. M. Burns celebrated the heroic president by choosing Hamilton as the ideal president. a. "They are heroic leaders who build a loyal personal political organization and expediently use their reputations, prestige, patronage, power and political friendships, as well as tactics of co-opting and disorganizing the opposition party leadership, to achieve the results they want." 4. Thus, scholars agreed on the value of a heroic institution. a. In 1970 T. Cronin labeled this the Textbook president because this was the view taken by text writers who glorified the office. 5. Underlying this view was the implicit belief that the presidency was the only office to lead America into an interdependent world and away from a disadvantaged society. a. Cronin, however, noted that recent presidents were tarnishing the image. D. This led to the Imperial presidency studies. 1. George Reedy in "Twilight of the Presidency" described the office as the American monarchy. a. Reedy claimed that the "office creates an environment in which men cannot function in any kind of decent and human relationship to the people whom they are supposed to lead."
b. At fault is the presidential ‘court' who deny the president peer pressure and people to tell them they are wrong. 2. Schlesinger found the origins of the Imperial Presidency in foreign policy. a. Presidents had arrogated power in war from the Congress and pursued this power into domestic affairs, e.g., Nixon.
b. He also saw the office as becoming plebiscitary. (1) "When a plebiscitary leader is elected, ‘he personifies the majority and all resistance to his will is undemocratic,' at least until the next election." 3. In 1975 Mondale wrote "The Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible Presidency." a. Mondale saw the wholesale decline of institutions in government as a function of Watergate and Vietnam.
b. Congress shared in the decline by authorizing allocations to fight the war. 4. In 1978 Fred Greenstein observed the short tenure of recent presidents and concluded that the office had become one of quick-fixes and short-sightedness. a. Causes were a Congressional leadership which could not institute presidential policy;
b. a weakened party system;
c. an aggressive media;
d. and an executive bureaucracy which hindered rather than helped presidents. 5. Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist, observed in 1980 that modern presidents were isolated from other elements of the American political system which should be used to help him accomplish tasks. a. Also, the tasks before presidents are so complex and insurmountable that there is little chance of real progress.
b. "‘Never has so powerful a leader been so impotent to do what he wants to do, what he is pledged to do, what he is expected to do, and what he knows he must do.'" E. Writers of the 70s were opposite the 50s and 60s; 1. the office which could ameliorate social ills and win W.W.II could fight losing wars and abuse power. a. While Cronin called the office imperiled and Hodgson impotent the Reagan presidency showed a revitalization. 2. Richard Nathan used the term administrative presidency strategy. a. This strategy uses administrative rather than legislative means to accomplish presidential policy objectives. (1) This, however, politicizes the executive branch. 3. Lowi argued that the plebiscitary presidency, "entailing a direct relationship between the president and the American people, had been developing since 1933 and had come to maturity under Reagan." a. The result, Lowi asserted, was a pathological growth of big government and the eclipse of Congress and the party system. F. Recent studies have again followed the politics presidents make. 1. The Symbolic Presidency argues that the reason the presidents powers are potentially great is the symbolism associated with the office. a. Barbara Hinckley claims the presidency has become the symbol of "the public welfare, built-in benevolence, and competence to lead."
b. Hinckley argues that since the constitution was so vague, symbols are the defining characteristics of the office; "presidents become what people want them to be." (1) In speeches over the past forty years presidents have portrayed themselves as "alone in the government, equivalent to the nation, religious and cultural leaders who shun politics and elections."
(2) The self-image presidents portray reinforces what the public wants to believe. (a) Thus, presidents tell the public what it wants to hear. (3) Advances in communication allow the president to display leadership qualities and portray failure as success. 2. Technology led to Sam Kernell's "Going Public." a. He claims the direct relationship allowed by television, between the president and the people allows presidents to circumvent Congress, the bureaucracy, the Courts, etc. and go directly to the public. IV. Development: A third major theme has been the development of the office. A. Individual presidents have altered the office. 1. E.S. Corwin in 1957 said, "Taken by and large, the history of the presidency is a history of aggrandizement, but the story is a highly discontinuous one." B. Much of the expansion has occurred in the silence of the constitution, stretching or using ambiguity. 1. These have turned into precedents for other presidents. a. Corwin focussed on seven who permanently changed the office:
b. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson and FDR. 2. Expansion has also occurred through statute, custom and practice and institutional change. C. Expansion has been helped by presidential culture, 1. "widely held meanings of the presidency, derived from selected episodes on the history of the institution and transmitted from one generation to the next by political socialization." (Bruce Buchanan)
2. The institution has potential to perform extraordinary events and the individual must realize this potential. V. The Dichotomous Presidency The dichotomous presidency is manifested in the apparent contradiction between Rossiter, in the "American Presidency," and Neustadt in "Presidential Power." A. Rossiter argues the president is the most powerful person in the world. 1. This is proper because the president brings social justice to America and democracy to the world.
2. The president acts as a benevolent despot. B. Neustadt argues that the president is powerless because, as a member of the Madisonian system of government he is subject to the limitations of the separation of powers. 1. The only power the president has is the power to persuade. C. Lowi fused the two seemingly opposed theories in "The Personal Presidency." 1. The subtitle, power invested, power unfulfilled, sums up the argument. a. The president lives in a dangerous imbalance because "the expectation of the masses have grown faster than the capacity of presidential government to meet them."
b. Thus, modern presidents resort to illusion to cover failure and quick fixes to support flagging success, usually in foreign endeavors.
c. This pathological behavior, which Lowi sees in the institution not the man, is ultimately self-defeating because it merely raises further expectations which cannot be met. (1) This is unsettling because the public may not be able to tell the difference between policy success and the illusion of success.
(2) Lowi says the public will not be able to tell. D. Another, less intricate example of the dichotomy of the presidency is Jeffrey Tullis. 1. In "Two Presidencies" Tullis argues there are two constitutional presidencies:
2. the traditional of Madison and the modern of Wilson. a. The Traditional is a demagogue, a leader of the people.
b. In the Wilsonian view Separation of Powers is a system in which legislatures dominate, thus, the system must evolve (Darwin).