The presidency and the political order: In context

Polity

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 513-531

  Nichols, Curt ^a  

^a BAYLOR UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

George Edwards; political time; presidency; Stephen Skowronek; Walter Dean Burnham

Indexed keywords

EID: 80053417826     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/pol.2011.9     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Henry Jones Ford, The Rise and Growth of American Politics (New York: DaCapo Press, [1898] 1967).
2. Stephen Skowronek coined the distinction between first, second, and third views of the presidency in "The Presidency and American Political Development: A Third Look," Presidential Studies Quarterly 32 (December 2002): 743-53.
3. He presents a revised version of these categories in Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprisal and Reappraisal, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011);
4. see chapter 1.
5. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 1-7.
6. Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
7. The following are prime examples of the "second look" approach: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973);
8. James David Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972);
9. George C. Edwards, The Public Presidency: The Pursuit of Popular Support (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983).
10. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 5.
11. Bessette and Tulis have argued for a "self-consciously systemic approach" to the study of American politics. Joseph M. Bessette and Jeffrey K. Tulis, eds., The Constitutional Presidency (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 2009), 7.
12. Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 192.
13. Curt Nichols and Adam S. Myers, "Exploiting the Reconstructive Opportunity: Presidential Responses to Enervated Political Regimes," American Politics Research 38 (2010): 806-41.
14. Burnham notes that these four eras are "by no means always identical with 'moments' of critical realignment that define the boundaries of historical 'party systems' or 'regime orders' that lie between them," Voting in American Elections, 36.
15. See especially: George C. Edwards': "Presidential Influence in the House: Presidential Prestige as a Source of Presidential Power," American Political Science Review 70 (March 1976): 101-13;
16. "The Quantitative Study of the Presidency," Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (Spring 1981): 146-50;
17. "Explaining Presidential Approval: The Significance of Issue Salience," American Journal of Political Science 39 (February 1995): 108-34;
18. and "Who Influences Whom? The President, Congress, and the Media," American Political Science Review 93 (June 1999): 327-44.
19. Jeffery K. Tulis, "The Presidency in the Political System: In Neustadt's Shadow" in Presidential Power: Forging the Presidency for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert Y. Shapiro, Martha Joynt Kumar, and Lawrence R. Jacobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
20. Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 7.
21. See also George C. Edwards, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
22. Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 9.
23. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1984);
24. Nelson W. Polsby, Political Innovation in America: The Politics of Policy Innovation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
25. See also: Frank Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
26. Here, the growing neo-institutional literature on political entrepreneurship promises to be helpful in clarifying, extending, and (perhaps) challenging aspects of Edwards's concept of facilitation. See especially Adam D. Sheingate, "Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development," Studies in American Political Development 17 (Fall 2003): 185-203. (Pubitemid 39541340)
27. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 51.
28. See Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 9.
29. For example, transformative leadership and outcomes might occur within a critical juncture, even if persuasion was not used to open the juncture. See also footnote 20.
30. Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 59.
31. It still remains an open question whether rhetoric and persuasion might be better thought to operate as a causal force that develops over an extended period of time, akin to what Paul Pierson calls "slow-moving causal processes." Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 82. Perhaps the opportunity for transformative change is preceded by short-term causal processes and circumstances, but rhetoric and persuasion (over time) provide the intellectual framework that establishes both the legitimacy for a particular kind of change and the basis for its continuation. I thank David K. Nichols for his insights on this point.
32. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
33. Edwards, The Strategic Presidency, 188-90.
34. Examples of presidential scholars continuing attention to leadership styles are: Fred Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009);
35. and Fred Greenstein, Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
36. Ruth B. Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement and Regime Dynamic in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
37. Ira Katznelson, "Periodization and Preferences: Reflections on Purposive Action in Comparative Historical Social Science," in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 282.
38. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 4.
39. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1993).
40. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 29.
41. Skowronek often treats political time as an independent variable that helps account for variation in presidential outcomes, and seldom focuses on the political regime as an outcome or dependent variable. Andrew J. Polsky discerningly insists they must also be considered. See Andrew J. Polsky, "A Theory of American Partisan Regimes," presented at the University of Pennsylvania. November 1, 2002.
42. See also Andrew J. Polsky, "The Political Economy of Partisan Regimes: Lessons from Two Republican Eras," Polity 35 (2003): 595-613.
43. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 11. The attribution of the political-time cycle to presidential agency is reflected in the title of Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make. It would need to be re-titled as "The Presidents Political Time Makes" if presidents weren't the ultimate source of the political-time dynamic.
44. Stephen Skowronek. "Presidential Leadership in Political Time," in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984).
45. Nichols and Myers, "Exploiting the Reconstructive Opportunity."
46. See also Stephen Skowronek, "The Setting: Continuity and Change in the Politics of Leadership," in Elections 2000, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2000).
47. On preemptive presidents, see the excellent work of David A. Crockett, The Opposition Presidency: Leadership and the Constraints of History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002);
48. and Running Against the Grain: How Opposition Presidents Win the White House (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008).
49. For an earlier version of chapter four see Stephen Skowronek, "Leadership by Definition: First Term Reflections on George W. Bush's Political Stance," Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 817-31.
50. Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 155, 161.
51. Skowronek still suggests that political time might be waning, but he now intimates that new presidential management tools (associated with party government) might be strong enough to overcome this problem (Presidential Leadership in Political Time, 32, 148-49, 161).
52. It could also be argued that, like Edwards and other second-wave critics, Skowronek does not actually abandon the focus on presidential power. Rather, he reinterprets its essence and brilliantly explains its effectiveness as varying within the broader context of political-regime management. Even though Skowronek continually eschews framing his findings in terms of Neustadt's understanding of the skills/tasks necessary for successful exercise of presidential power (in political time), other scholars have adapted his political-time framework in ways that do so. See: Crockett, The Opposition Presidency and Running Against the Grain;
53. Nichols and Myers , "Exploiting the Reconstructive Opportunity," and Keith Whittington, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
54. Burnham, Voting in American Elections, 31.
55. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).
56. Walter Dean Burnham, "The Changing Shape of the Political Universe," American Political Science Review 59 (1965): 7-28.
57. Burnham, Voting in American Elections, 11.
58. Emphasis in title added. David Mayhew's famous critique is typical of the cursory attention that often gets paid to the origins of the realignment cycle. Out of 165 pages, Mayhew spends only three paragraphs on tension alleviation, which lies at the heart of the mainsprings argument. See David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 62-64.
59. Curt Nichols, "Reconsidering Realignment from a Systemic Perspective," Clio: Newsletter Politics and History 19 (2009): 3, 50-52;
60. Nichols and Myers, "Exploiting the Reconstructive Opportunity." Note that Burnham now uses the terms "party system" and "regime order" interchangeably (see, for example, the quotation in footnote 10).
61. See Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, "Activism and Partisan Realignment in the United States," American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 245-60. (Pubitemid 36737846)
62. Norman Schofield and Gary Miller, "Elections and Activist Coalitions in the United States," American Journal of Political Science 51 (2007): 518-31.
63. Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, "The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.," Perspectives on Politics 6 (2008): 433-50.
64. As Aldrich has, in effect, argued, political competition "rightly understood" includes not only the office-holding goals of elites, but the resolution of fundamental issues due to the instability of majority rule. John Aldrich, Why Parties: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 67.
65. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (New York: Wiley, 1954).
66. Octavio Amorim Neto and Gary W. Cox, "Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties," American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997): 149-74.
67. Keith Whittington's work has already begun to demonstrate this idea nicely;
68. see Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy.
69. See generally Lars Skyttner, General System Theory: Problems, Perspective, Practice (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2006).
70. Presidential scholars could take advantage of the fact that exploitation of policy windows and political-regime reconstruction are recurrent phenomenon. Their determinants can be more readily isolated and studied than those in the highly differentiated case studies that dominate the comparative literature on the subject. For example, see Collier and Collier's excellent work on labor incorporation in eight South American countries, Shaping the Political Arena.
71. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. L. Ricci (New York: American Library, [1532]1980), 121.
72. For excellent examples of this type of scholarship, see James Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
73. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency;
74. Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
75. Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Executive Power (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1994);
76. David K. Nichols, The Myth of the Modern Presidency (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
77. For more on this point, see also George Thomas, "What is Political Development? A Constitutional Perspective," The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 275-94.