The Puzzle of Presidential Leadership: Persuasion, Bargaining, and Policy Consistency

Abstract

Political science can offer few theoretical generalizations about the exercise of presidential power. From one perspective, this is no disadvantage: there are few presidents, and presidential leadership so intrinsically involves the interplay of ideas and persuasive deliberation that success depends on personal traits and the fit of the president's ideas with the times. Striving for inductive generalizations in such a case would mistake rote scientific method for the pursuit of knowledge. Others argue, however, that the dearth of theoretical generalizations is a temporary weakness, remediable by shifting to a deductive approach. Deductive theorizing can claim insights in other areas once typified by historiographic methods, notably in studies of Congress, and formal models of legislation have been extended to generate hypotheses about transactions between president and Congress.I suggest that neither side of the dilemma offers a satisfactory and complete approach to the puzzle of presidential leadership; it then goes on to specify how the contributions from each side fit together. Rational choice models, based on bargaining as the mode of influence and the repeated game as the image of process, show how institutional structures can produce stable decisions where majority rule tends toward endless cycling. But the cost is that the resulting decisions are typically ad hoc and disjointed. Achieving consistent and coherent policy requires more subtle coordination of individual expectations than legislative organizations can manage, and it is this limitation of bargaining that establishes the potential for presidential leadership. Presidents can attempt to capitalize on this opportunity either by intervening as an additional (but situationally advantaged) bargainer, or by employing persuasion, the explicit appeal to collective goals rather than particularistic trades. I develop the distinction between bargaining and persuasion as alternative strategies of advocacy, and illustrate their use with examples from President Reagan's interactions with Congress over his key economic policy proposals.