Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and Presidential Decision Making: A Theory and Test

Presidency studies have often been maligned during the last three decades, not least by presidency scholars. Compared to subfields such as congressional or elections studies, critics argue, presidency research lacks conceptual parsimony and empirical rigor. Generalizations and prescriptive advice are too often based on limited evidence. Thick description substitutes for theory-driven data gathering. The result is a failure to produce cumulative research findings (Edwards 1981, 146; Edwards, Kessel, and Rockman 1993, 3-7; Heclo 1977, 30; King 1975, 173; King 1993, 388-96; Moe 1993, 376-83; Peterson 1990, ix; Mayer 2001, 1-23). To redress these shortcomings, some scholars advocate a greater reliance on insights from microeconomics-based organization theory. Whether called the "new economics of organizations," "new institutionalist economics," or simply "rational choice new institutionalism," the overarching goal is the same: to deduce general theories of presidential power from core assumptions about individual behavior within specified institutional contexts (Lewis 2003, 16-18; Mayer 2001, 22-31; Moe 1984; Moe 1987, 237; Moe 1993, 352-56; Moe and Wilson 1994, 1-28; Weko 1995, 155). (1) By shifting the analytic focus from the president to the presidency, these new institutionalists argue, scholars can redress the presidency subfield's traditional research bias toward the "man in office"--a bias many associate most closely with Richard Neustadt's seminal Presidential Power. It is time, they claim, for presidency scholars to move beyond the Neustadt paradigm (Moe 1993, 342-43--see also Howell 2003, 10; Moe and Howell 1999, 850-51; Mayer 2001, 1-23; Ragsdale 2000, 37-43; Tulis 1987, 10-12). These assessments, I argue, are misleading, because they are predicated on a fundamental misconception: that Presidential Power has little to say about the institutional basis of presidential power. As this article will suggest, however, Neustadt's bargaining paradigm is crucial for understanding the growth of the institutional presidency, and for explaining why some staff organizations are more effective than others. By ignoring the institutional implications of Neustadt's argument (and relegating Presidential Power to the shelf of "classic period" pieces; Skowronek 1987, 430), new institutionalists are jettisoning a conceptual approach that, properly understood, provides the foundation for a more comprehensive, institution-based model of presidential power. Rather than supersede Neustadt with new institutionalism, then, I offer an alternative theoretical perspective: embedding new institutionalist claims within the larger bargaining framework initially spelled out by Neustadt and subsequently tested through some four decades of empirical work. (2) To illustrate how this might be done, I combine Neustadt's insights on the history of presidential advising with new institutionalist transaction-cost and principal-agent theories to conceptualize and test several hypotheses regarding the relationship between presidential staff and decision making. The findings reaffirm several of Neustadt's suppositions regarding how presidents can most effectively use staff. In so doing, they also cast new light on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current White House-centered "standard model" of presidential staffing. The article begins with a brief restatement of Presidential Power's major postulates. My claim is that new institutionalists have largely missed the import of Neustadt's central concern: how can presidents most effectively acquire and utilize information to protect their sources of bargaining power? In the second section, I build on this insight to argue that the growth of the institutional presidency is partly fueled by presidents' search for sources of information by which to reduce bargaining uncertainty. This explanation differs from that offered by many scholars, who typically adopt a demand-side perspective toward staff institutionalization. …