The Revolution in Presidential Studies

Until very recently, the field of presidential studies had long suffered from an inferiority complex--a self-concept that arose not from weaknesses that were imagined, but from weaknesses that were real. The classic criticisms came from presidency scholars themselves, who, as the rest of political science raced ahead during the 1970s, saw their own field falling behind. Anthony King complained that "the existing literature is mainly descriptive and atheoretical: general hypotheses are almost never advanced, and, when advanced, almost never tested" (1975, 173). Hugh Heclo found little in the field to praise, arguing that "beneath the extensive veneer of presidential literature, there are immense gaps and deficiencies" (1977, 5). The criticisms continued into the 1980s, and there was much pressure for making the study of the presidency more quantitative and theoretical (Edwards 1981; Wayne 1983). Yet even with the dawning of the 1990s, leaders in the field were still remarking on its lowly status: Presidency scholars sometimes feel humbled by the company they keep. Like the comedian Groucho Marx, they wonder whether any club (subfield) willing to accept them is not already too inclusive. Many of the currents influencing research in American political science have been perceived by scholars both inside and outside the presidency subfield as having passed it by or, at best, only lightly grazed over it ... [F]rom within the political science community, questions have been raised as to whether there is a legitimate field of presidency research. (Edwards, Kessel, and Rockman 1993, 485) Today, I doubt that anyone who is familiar with the field would characterize it this way. Over the past decade or so, there has been a revolution in the study of the presidency. Part of this revolution is that quantitative studies are much more common than in the past, and there is far greater attention to hypothesis testing, measurement, research design, and other ingredients of scientific methodology. In these respects, the field's internal critics have gotten what they asked for. Yet as important as these developments are, and as integral to the revolution, they are not the essence of it. Quantitative analysis, hypothesis testing, and all the rest have been staples of this literature for some time--in research on presidential success in Congress (Edwards 1989), for example, and on presidential popularity (Mueller 1973; Ostrom and Simon 1985). Now there is more of this kind of work, and it is more sophisticated. But it is also of a different character, owing to a revolution that has occurred on other grounds. Most fundamentally, this has been a revolution in theory. In just a few short years, a field mired in isolation and traditionalism has been catapulted into a new scientific realm through a seismic shift in the scope, power, and analytical rigor of its theories--a shift that has put an end to the era of inferiority, modernized and invigorated the way the presidency is thought about, and integrated the field much more fully and productively into the mainstream of political science. The mechanism of this transformation has been rational choice theory, which has become the dominant (but not the only) analytic approach among the cutting-edge works of greatest influence in the field. The triumph of rational choice, it is fair to say, is not what most critics were asking for. Years earlier, I and a few others (Miller 1993; Moe 1993; Sullivan 1988, 1990) had argued for rational choice theories of the presidency, but without much support or near-term impact. What it took was a new generation of scholars--unwedded to the past, broadly institutional in their perspective, and well trained in rational choice. And when the change came, it came suddenly: as these new talents took on key substantive issues long central to the presidency, turned presidential studies into an exciting arena of innovative theory, and created an edifice of work that connected the field to the rest of the discipline. …