Alternative Futures: Comment on Terry Moe's "The Revolution in Presidential Studies"

Terry Moe is one of our most influential and well-respected scholars of the presidency. For a long time, he has been a vocal advocate for more a more rigorous and scientific approach to studying the presidency. To further those ends, he has pushed the virtues of rational choice and game theory. His review of the literature in his essay "The Revolution in Presidential Studies" (Moe 2009) details the payoff to presidency scholarship from the adoption of rational choice approaches. Not only have we learned much from his own work, especially his seminal article "The Politicized Presidency" (1985), but also the work of Charles Cameron (2000), Brandice Canes-Wrone (2006), William Howell (2003), David Lewis (2003, 2008), Andrew Rudalevige (2002), and others has left an indelible mark on how we see and understand the presidency. We have all profited handsomely from the contributions of this brand of research. Yet in his essay, Moe argues for another approach to studying the presidency and strongly critiques the rational choice approach. He cites several limitations of rational choice, including the unrealistic assumptions of optimization and information processing, the centrality of equilibrium when many political behaviors and decisions are made out of equilibrium, and the oversimplification of reality. Moe argues that computational and agent-based models, which allow for greater complexity and which are rooted in more realistic assumptions about human behavior, offer a superior alternative to rational choice. As Moe has been quite prescient and thoughtful in his predictions of the payoff rational choice, we need to take his advice on how to study the presidency seriously. But it is important to note that, at this time, we just do not know whether the direction he is pointing us to take will be fruitful. On the one hand, it is pointless to criticize an approach without seeing what it produces. At the same time, two criteria are necessary before a research program should be abandoned. First, there must be obvious limitations. Moe discusses the limitations of the rational choice approach. Second, there need to be findings and results that the reigning approach cannot explain. As the rational choice approach to presidency studies is still in its infancy and has not been applied to many important problems or pushed to its limits in areas where it has been applied (e.g., presidential-congressional relations), we do not yet know the full limitations of rational choice as an approach to studying the presidency. As someone who was trained by students of the Simon-Cyert-March bounded rationality approach, I have a lot of sympathy with Moe's exhortation to move in that direction. While studies in that school have had an immense impact on political science, in particular the public policy subfield (e.g., Kingdon 1984), I am not sure that we can characterize that research program as being progressive. (1) Perhaps the agent- based and computational models will invigorate those studies, lead to testable hypotheses, and increase our store of knowledge. In the remainder of this essay, rather than engage in a fruitless discussion of whether Moe's prescription is correct, I want to touch on some considerations for the future study of the presidency that Moe did not discuss. First, I think we need to incorporate Moe's institutional understanding of the presidency with studies that look at the public presidency. Like the rational choice approach to studying aspects of the institutional presidency, much time and effort has gone into studying the public presidency, and to great benefit, I would argue. Second, I think that presidency scholars are too parochial in their fixation on studying the presidency. We may profit handsomely from expanding our horizons to the comparative study of political executives. Third, despite advances made in the collection of data on the presidency (and other political executives), we are still empirically impoverished, and we need a different approach to collecting data on the presidency than the one we have so much relied on, that is, lone scholars collecting data for one-shot studies. …