Thoughts on "The Revolution in Presidential Studies".

Mayer, Kenneth R.

It has become conventional wisdom that the pre-1990s presidency literature was theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. I propose that we look at things from another perspective (although the literature does not look much better from this angle). A former colleague often told graduate students that the key to passing prelims was understanding what key people in a field were fighting about. This was a straightforward process with most subfields (rational choice being especially target rich). But among presidency scholars in the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was far more difficult. I do not have a clear picture of what the key questions or controversies were then, or even whether there were significant disagreements among presidency scholars.

Now, the picture is different; it is possible to rattle off a dozen questions and research agendas, often on issues about which there is real disagreement. Does the president have any influence over public opinion? How much can presidents accomplish through unilateral powers? What are the consequences of divided government on presidential action? Are checks and balances out of equilibrium? How much control do presidents have over executive branch agencies, and how do they attempt to exercise it? Does Congress restrain presidential war powers? Why and under what conditions does Congress delegate policy-making authority to the president? Does the Constitution impose meaningful limits on presidents? We have theories that are useful in analyzing presidential policy making, unilateral action, legislative strategy, and institutional structure. We have hypotheses, data, and tests. We have unanswered questions. And perhaps most importantly, we have challenges to the conventional wisdom, all of which make the subfield a far more interesting place.

Two examples highlight key disagreements or uncertainties in the literature: First, we do not have a good picture of how divided government affects the frequency of unilateral action (Mayer 1999). Theory suggests that presidents should be more aggressively unilateral in the face of party opposition in Congress (what Martin calls the "evasion hypothesis" [2005, 444]; see also Marshall and Pacelle 2005), but that is not what is observed (Gleiber and Shull 1992; Mayer 2001). Most instruments of unilateral action--executive orders, proclamations, executive agreements--become less frequent under divided government. Scholars have offered different explanations for this unexpected pattern, but it is far from clear why presidents seem to steer clear of such an obvious mechanism for implementing their own policy preferences.

Second, as a subfield, we cannot seem to agree on whether the president has any direct influence on public opinion, although presidents certainly behave as if they do. (1) George Edwards (2003) concluded that presidential efforts to shape public opinion fail, usually miserably. Presidents cannot change many minds, or focus the public's attention. Indeed, Edwards identified an internal White House poll that showed about half of the people who had watched a presidential address could not recall, the next day, anything that the president had said (2003, 208). Brandice Canes-Wrone (2006), conversely, finds evidence that presidents can use public opinion to move policy in the direction of majority sentiment.

What is unusual about the literature on going public (Kernell 1997) is not the highly conditional (at best) evidence of presidential leadership of public opinion; rather, it is that presidents devote enormous resources to the effort to shape that opinion, in the face of substantial evidence that it does nothing. Presidents and their advisors are sophisticated actors. Why, then, would they continue a course of action that shows so little evidence of any benefit? Alternatively, if the reason that presidents spend so much time on public relations is that it works, why is not there stronger evidence of any effect?

Theoretical and empirical disputes are a sign of a healthy discipline, as they usually arise out of a challenge to the received knowledge and most widely accepted paradigms. The peacefulness of the presidency subfield was a sign that there was not much worth arguing over.

Terry Moe's work was instrumental in prodding the scholarly presidency literature into its current generation. In a series of scathing critiques published between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s (Moe 1984, 1989, 1990, 1993; Moe and Wilson 1994), he called the subfield a theoretical backwater, destined for continued stagnation as scholars piled on layer after layer of complexity and contingency (other presidency scholars recapitulated many of these themes, but Moe's frontal assault was unusually direct). The decades-long focus on individual presidents, Moe said,

 [p]romote[d] enormous complications in theory and research, opening
 the Pandora's box on individual motivation and cognitive processes
 and orienting the field around untold causal mysteries. Explanation
 cannot center on general issues of organization and structure hut
 must lay bare the behavior of a single person in the full flower of
 his uniqueness. This is the most vexing theoretical problem in all
 of social science, and it now pervades and stifles the study of the
 presidency. (1993, 343).

The more we knew, the less sure we were. (2) The presidency literature, if it continued in this direction, would never make the kind of advances common to most other subfields of American politics.

Moe's signal contribution was his insistence that a reorientation of the basic paradigms of presidency research was the only way to make progress. Rather than continue to add layer upon layer of complexity, he argued for a radical simplification: throw out individual presidents altogether, and focus on the institutional features of the modern presidency. His influence extended through an unusually gifted set of graduate students who have become some of the most productive and innovative scholars in the subfield. If there was a single turning point, it was probably the publication of Researching the Presidency (Edwards, Kessel, and Rockman 1993), in which the contributions by Moe and King made absolutely clear the distinction between old-school work and the kind of theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous research that, they insisted, would advance the discipline. (3)

It was instrumental in my realization that executive orders were an important and poorly understood element of presidential power and that it was possible to study executive orders systematically, combining careful measurement with a coherent theory. Executive orders were an observable behavior that demonstrated commonalities between seemingly unrelated presidents. There was a theoretical framework available for analyzing the role executive orders played in the continued centralization of policy-making authority around the president. The result was a challenge to the prevailing view that executive orders were merely a routine tool of administration, unsuited to major policy innovation.

In his essay, Moe argues that rational choice theory played the central role in the rapid development of the presidency literature, and that it is responsible for nearly every theoretical innovation in the subfield. I think this puts it too strongly. Rather, I see three related approaches as constituting the foundation of the new presidency literature: rational choice, an emphasis on institutions and away from individual presidents, and a concern for constitutional structure.

Rational choice begins with the assumption of individual utility maximizing, and ends with the calculation of equilibria, or the best individual response given the actions of all of the other players involved (not all game theoretic actors are people, to be sure, but the concept requires more complex organizations such as firms to act as single individuals, at least analytically). This seems an odd way to move a literature away from an excessive focus on the individual. But rational actor models are not possible without a clear definition of actions, outcomes, and utilities, and therefore require a careful delineation of causal chains, theoretical relationships, and empirical effects. Rational choice also requires a radical degree of simplification, too much at times.

The effort devoted to constructing formal models can take on a life of its own, in which the goal is less an accurate depiction of the world and more an elegant set of equations that produce well-behaved equilibria (and we will never know how many otherwise plausible models are thrown out because the math just will not work). Most formal models of presidential action are highly specialized, rather than more general constructions that can deal with a variety of circumstances. There is one set of techniques useful in studying vetoes, another in studying regulatory outcomes, another to study delegation, another for appointments, and yet another for agenda influence. Many of these models have little in common other than the basic assumption of purposive action.

The second involves those of us who are not modelers, but who still find the theoretical orientation of "soft" rational choice useful. A focus on interaction and institutions leads directly to an interest in the structure and rules of the game. As Moe has pointed out, the analysis of the presidential organization as a type of "firm" had tremendous payoff, as scholars explored the consequences of institutional processes, transaction costs, and control. Presidency scholars now talk of principals and agents, residual decision rights, signaling, bounded rationality, and monitoring. This was the approach that I took in With the Stroke of a Pen.

And, finally, a focus on rules and structure led scholars directly to the Constitution. Most of the work that Moe cites in his essay as examples of the current generation involves, at least in some degree, issues of constitutional structure. I was surprised that Moe made no mention of this in his essay (the word "Constitution" does not appear), as it is central to his theory of unilateral action: in his 1999 article with William Howell, "The Presidential Power of Unilateral Action," the word appears 53 times (Moe and Howell 1999). Most of the president's advantages over Congress--especially the power of the "first move" (Howell 2003; Mayer 1999)--flow directly from constitutional foundations.

I do not know what research from the current generation of presidency scholarship we will still be reading in 15 years. I do know, though, that presidency scholars will still be working with the theoretical framework and focus that Moe has been instrumental in developing. We should always bear in mind that the most interesting findings often arise out of the realization that what we are sure is true turns out not to be, and what we think cannot be true often is.

References

Canes-Wrone, Brandice. 2006. Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edwards, George C., III. 2003. On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Edwards, George C., III, John H. Kessel, and Bert Rockman, eds. 1993. Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gleiber, Dennis W., and Steven A. Shull. 1992. "Presidential Influence in the Policy Making Process." Western Political Quarterly 45 (June): 441-68.

Howell, William G. 2003. Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kernell, Samuel. 1997. Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

King, Gary. 1993. "The Methodology of Presidential Research." In Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches, eds. George C. Edwards III, John H. Kessel, and Bert Rockman. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Marshall, Brian W., and Richard L. Pacelle. 2005. "Revisiting the Two Presidencies: The Strategic Use of Executive Orders." American Politics Research 33 (January): 81-105.

Martin, Lisa L. 2005. "The President and International Commitments: Treaties as Signaling Devices." Presidential Studies Quarterly 35 (September): 440-65.

Mayer, Kenneth R. 1999. "Executive Orders and Presidential Power." Journal of Politics 61 (May): 445 -66.

--. 2001. With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Moe, Terry M. 1984. "The New Economics of Organization." American Journal of Political Science 28 (November): 739-77.

--. 1989. "The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure." In Can the Government Govern?, eds. John E.

Chubb and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

--. 1990. "Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story." Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6 (Special Issue): 213-54.

--. 1993. "Presidents, Institutions, and Theory." In Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches, eds. George C. Edwards III, John H. Kessel, and Bert Rockman. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Moe, Terry M., and William G. Howell. 1999. "The Presidential Power of Unilateral Action." Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 15 (March): 132-79.

Moe, Terry M., and Scott A. Wilson. 1994. "Presidents and the Politics of Structure." Law and Contemporary Problems 57 (Spring): 1-44.

KENNETH R. MAYER

University of Wisconsin

Kenneth R. Mayer is a professor of political science and affiliate faculty at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power.