The Historical Presidency Presidential Incentives, Bureaucratic Control, and Party Building in the Republican Era

Scholars dating back at least to Neustadt (1960) have distinguished modern presidents from their predecessors. According to Rossiter (1960, 106), the crises posed by two world wars and the Great Depression combined with public demand for energetic leadership to provide the presidency with greater influence over the nation's affairs than ever before. Though scholars disagree somewhat on exactly when the modern presidency was born, considerable research reflects Greenstein's (1982, 3) observation that "the transformation of the office has been so profound that the modern presidencies have more in common with one another in the opportunities they provide and the demands they place on their incumbents than they have with the entire sweep of traditional presidencies from Washington to Hoover." Focusing on modern presidents, scholars have made great headway in understanding a range of presidential behaviors, including exercising veto powers (e.g., Cameron 2000) and unilateral prerogatives (e.g., Howell 2003; Lowande 2014), capitalizing on expertise (e.g., Howell, Jackman, and Rogowski 2013), appealing to the public (e.g., Canes-Wrone 2006), managing executive departments (e.g., Rudalevige 2002), and centralizing and politicizing bureaucratic structures (e.g., Moe 1985). It is not immediately clear, however, whether the insights from the rich theoretical and empirical literature rooted in the study of the modern presidency transfer to the study of presidents who served in earlier years and who were likely to have quite different incentive structures. Enhancing our knowledge about how earlier presidents affected the nation's policy making is consequential not simply because our understanding of the historical presidency is not as richly detailed as it could be. Historical studies provide important opportunities for revealing changes in the office over time and exploring how these changes affected the relationships between the presidency and the other branches of government, and answering these questions has important implications for research programs on political institutions more generally. Important contributions from existing scholarship (e.g., Cohen 1988, 2012; Ellis and Wildavsky 1989; McCarty 2009; Skowronek 1993) underscore the value of probing presidential history to better understand the development of the office and its consequences for American government. In this article I explore how late- nineteenth-century presidents' incentives as party leaders affected the operation of the administrative state. I contend that Republican-era presidents were driven largely by their desire to build and support the party apparatus and that their control over appointments and patronage well positioned them to do so. Using data on the county-level distribution of post offices between 1876 and 1896, I report evidence that the president's strongest geographic bases of support were disproportionate recipients of federal post offices. In a period of decentralized party structures, these findings suggest that presidents used federal resources such as post offices--and the patronage positions they created--to reward their core constituencies and further their party's goals. Importantly, the results also reveal that presidents appeared to be successful in using the bureaucracy to meet these goals. Consistent with research that calls into question periodization schemes that distinguish modern presidents from their predecessors (Adler 2013; Ellis and Walker 2007; Galvin and Shogan 2004; Klinghard 2005, 2010; Skowronek 1993, 2002; Young 2011), the findings presented in this article suggest that nineteenth-century presidents were more central in directing government activity than is generally recognized, though their efforts may have been in service of different goals. The Presidency in the Republican Era The advent of the modern presidency is widely believed to have marked a turning point in American politics. …