Presidents and Prime Ministers: Conviction Politics in the Anglo-American Tradition.

Peters, B. Guy

Presidents and Prime Ministers: Conviction Politics in the Anglo-American Tradition. By Patricia Lee Sykes. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. 399 pp.

Many institutional features of Anglo-American democracies are designed to limit the capacity of political leaders, especially political executives, to impose their will on public policies. Those formal constraints are most obvious in the United States with the complexities created by the separation of powers and presidentialism, but Westminster leaders also are constrained by conventions if not always by formal institutional devices. This liberal tradition, as identified in Patricia Lee Sykes's very interesting book, challenges the capacity of political leaders to develop a set of policy priorities and put them into effect.

Many leaders in Anglo-American democracies have been content to accept these constraints in order to make modest demands for policy change and to focus on building political consensus. Indeed much policy making in at least the United States can be described very easily as incremental. On the other hand, there have been a number of presidents and prime ministers who have felt a greater need to impose their own agendas on government and to attempt to utilize the political system to achieve clearly defined goals. Successful "conviction politicians" have been capable of altering the direction of their governments and of establishing entirely new presumptions about appropriate approaches to public policies.

Sykes is interested in the impact that pairs of American and British politicians, in office at roughly the same times, have been able to exert over those two governments. Two of these pairs--Reagan and Thatcher, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd-George--are obvious; the other two--Andrew Jackson and Robert Peel, William Gladstone and Grover Cleveland--are perhaps less so and provide even more useful lenses for viewing the development of executive politics in the two countries. In all these cases, the political leaders being considered attempted to make fundamental shifts in the way in which their governments work and in the role of government in society.

The basic conception of conviction politics in liberal politics is an appealing one, and this book has a number of interesting insights into the political history of these two governments that are alike in some respects, yet have crucial differences. In particular, Presidents and Prime Ministers does an excellent job of locating the changes in government pressed by these leaders within the intellectual debates of their time and demonstrates how the leaders were able to have at least a part of their agendas implemented while in office. The four substantive chapters are very useful capsule summaries of the political and policy debates of the time and help to explain the course of development of governance in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Nonetheless, there are several extremely disappointing aspects of this book. Most basic is the absence of a clear definition of what a conviction politician is or, perhaps better, how much conviction is needed to fall into this category. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dismissed as a consensus monger rather than a conviction politician. How do we know? If this analysis is to be anything other than one person's casual selection of a few leaders that she believes are important for shaping governments, then there should be some means of specifying clearly what is meant by the term.

The role of comparative analysis in this book is also somewhat disturbing. The author treats the United Kingdom and the United States as "most similar systems," both being in her terms carriers of a common liberal tradition. While it is difficult to dispute that there are some important common strands of political culture and political ideas in the two countries, the institutional differences and even the interpretation of the "liberal tradition" are markedly different. Although Sykes does mention the differing constraints facing leaders, this appears to be a minor point in the emphasis on the ideas of the politicians and the underlying ideologies of the two systems. This appears to squander an opportunity for an interesting comparative analysis that might have been of particular interest to the readers of this journal.

Finally, these are four cases in which the conviction politicians were in the main successful in implementing their ideas. Another crucial point of comparison is between those leaders who succeed and those who fail. One might assume from this book that conviction politicians have a relatively easy time of it, but that almost certainly is not true. Rather, the success of these leaders may be a function of any number of factors in addition to the ideas that they are advocating. Even if we could identify some common factors among these cases of relative success, we could not know whether they were important if there were no cases of failure. Again, this appears to be a real opportunity for analysis that the author squandered.

In summary, this is an interesting book, but it appears to have more success in raising questions than in answering them. The central concentration on conviction politics, and its role in political systems that otherwise tend to favor compromise and incrementalism, is an interesting one and potentially an important one. It is perhaps especially important in the United States, given the apparent increase of ideological fervor in American politics. Unfortunately, however, this basic idea is not addressed in a sufficiently analytic and comparative manner to advance our understanding of these important issues.

--B. Guy Peters
University of Pittsburgh