Presidential Leverage and the Politics of Policy Formulation

When Terry Moe (1985) threw "The Politicized Presidency," into the alleged backwater of presidency studies, its splash was immediate. Moe argued that the gap between public expectations heaped on the office of the presidency and the inability of individual presidents to meet those expectations (see also Lowi 1985; Huntington 1981) were linked to important developments in the institutional presidency, namely, the tendency for presidents to centralize policy making in the White House so as to more closely control policy content and to politicize the executive branch by placing presidential loyalists deep into the bureaucracy to influence implementation of those policies. Moe focused attention on institutional dynamics in the presidency, arguing that presidents react to the gap between public expectations and their capacity to meet those expectations by taking measures to control policy making and implementation. Many scholars soon evaluated various components of Moe's framework (e.g., Lewis 2008; Ponder 2000; Rudalevige 2002; Rudalevige and Lewis 2005). At the same time, many scholars looked deeply into the public presidency (Edwards 1983; Kernell 2007). Few, however, explicitly linked these two areas of research. (1) Not even Moe stepped in to bridge the gap, though his argument explicitly implicates both the public component (expectations gap) as well as the institutional (centralization and politicization). Recently, Jeffrey Cohen (2009) suggested linking the worlds of public and institutional parts of the presidency as a way to move scholarship forward. I take up Cohen's challenge and focus on the institutional dynamic of the presidency in context of the president's leverage afforded him by the public. In this article I link policy centralization to a concept of the public presidency I call "presidential leverage," developed in a series of papers (e.g., Ponder 1996, 2005). Webster's New World Dictionary (1982) defines leverage as "increased means of accomplishing some purpose" (812), and another as the "power to get things done," such as exerting power over people with an advantage that is not openly referred to (Microsoft Encarta Dictionary 1982). I apply these definitions to resources presidents derive from their public standing, and I discuss them in more detail below. Here, by way of introduction, presidential leverage reflects the public's assessment of the president relative to trust in government and systematizes a state of affairs wherein presidents can derive influence over American politics. This state of affairs reflects the part of the definition that holds leverage is "not referred to openly," as would be the case with presidential approval or constitutional prerogatives (Microsoft Encarta Dictionary 1982). The index of presidential leverage that I develop below signals when conditions are ripe for presidents to act, but it is decidedly not the same or even as obvious as when a president has high approval. (2) The working thesis is that presidential leverage plays a significant role in influencing location of public policy making and that the linkage of this determination is a strategic short-term good for presidents. I argue that as presidential leverage increases, presidents will centralize less because their status in the public mind provides a "warrant" (Skowronek 1993) to reach outside the White House to comfortably take advantage of the policy expertise in the bureaucracy without losing control of that content. (3) For theoretical reasons developed below, these presidents are less likely to centralize, more likely to procure innovative and complex policies, and perhaps more likely to enjoy congressional success (though I do not directly test this final assertion). Additionally, I show that presidents are largely free from their party's internal moorings (though Democrats are more likely to centralize than are Republicans), and instead respond more acutely to public cues of their place in the American system and the resultant authority that conditions their strategic choices. …