Presidential Reform Research Articles

Public support for vice presidential reform

This analysis explores public support for reforming both the selection of vice presidents and the institution itself. Survey data show some evidence that those who favorably view the concepts of political moderation and bipartisanship support vice presidential reform, while partisans and ideologues (broadly defined) seem to oppose it. In addition, there is a negative association between job approval ratings for Vice President Mike Pence and support for vice presidential reform. The only demographic factor that was significant in the analysis was gender, with females more likely than males to support reform.

What are the Drivers of Constitutional Change in Turkey?


 
 
 This paper explores the reasons for the last constitutional reform in Turkey. This paper argues that the strong Presidency in the 1982 constitution and 2007 amendments paved the way for the presidential reform in Turkey and the internal fragmentation and weakening tutelage of the military opened a window for institutional change. The power of Erdogan for mobilization of masses and the strong personalization of power around him provided a resource for the last constitutional reform. The failed coup attempt on 15 July 2016 triggered the regime change. The study was conducted by employing the method of causal process tracing and the theory of windows of opportunity as well as different approaches of path-dependence. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the reasons for the institutional change by considering its historical and political context.
 
 

Mandating Party Development in the Russian Federation: Effects of the 2001 Party Law

For the first 10 years of competitive elections, Russian party development remained behind party development in many Central and East European states, let alone the rest of Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly then, one of President Putin’s first reforms entailed requiring political parties to register regional branches in a majority of Russia’s 89 regions. While the declared intent of the law was to spur the development of a national party system, the requirement – 100 registered members in at least 45 regions – appeared more like a formality than either a carrot or a stick motivating parties to develop regional organization. Moreover, the Putin administration has pursued various other reforms widely considered undemocratic. Given the ambiguity of Putin’s actions while president of the Russian Federation, this paper takes a closer look at one of the most commonly overlooked presidential reforms – the 2001 law on political parties – to determine whether the legislation correlated with greater party organization during the 2003 Duma election.

Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911

'In 1880, the California woman safeguarded the Republic by maintaining a morally sound home. Scarcely forty years later, women in the Pacific state won full-fledged citizenship and voting rights of their own. Becoming Citizens shows how this enormous transformation came about. Gayle Gullett demonstrates how women's search for a larger public life in the late nineteenth century led to a flourishing women's movement in California. Women's radical demand for citizenship, however, was rejected by state voters along with the presidential reform candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in the tumultuous election year of 1896'.'Gullett shows how women rebuilt the movement in the early years of the twentieth century and forged a critical alliance between activist women and the men involved in the urban Good Government movement. This alliance formed the basis of progressivism, with male Progressives helping to legitimize women's new public work by supporting their civic campaigns, appointing women to public office, and placing a suffrage referendum before the male electorate in 1911. Placing local developments in a national context, Becoming Citizens illuminates the links between these two major social movements: the western women's suffrage movement and progressivism'.

The Presidency, the Bureaucracy, and Reinvention: A Gentle Plea for Chaos1

The relative influences of the unique and traditional elements of the Clinton‐Gore National Performance Review (NPR) episode of bureaucratic reform are examined here as a means of exploring the underlying dynamics of executive‐bureaucratic relationships. The first section of the article outlines the reinvention theory underlying NPR. This is followed by an analysis of how NPR deviated from that theory. The third section of the article considers what reforms might have been proposed by NPR had it taken reinvention theory more seriously. And fourth, the author discusses the deeper problems of presidential implementation of any reform not founded on enhanced hierarchical control of the bureaucracy by the White House. Finally, a unidirectional cycle of presidential reform is described, a cycle that seems impervious to and unconnected with scholarly work on management.

Role of the "Reinventing Government" Movement in Federal Management Reform

Vice President Al Gore (1995a; 12) often tells an anecdote about a taxidermist and a veterinarian who went into business together - outside their establishment hangs a sign that guarantees either way you get your dog back. This story serves as a metaphor for the political struggles surrounding the balanced budget debate and the role of the federal government in American life. Should the federal government be stuffed and hung on the wall as a trophy, or should it be nursed back to health? This was not what the Brownlow Committee (President's Committee, 1937; 4) faced in its work back in 1937, when the goal of government reform seemed more clear. That committee declared: There is but one grand purpose, namely, to make democracy work today in our National Government; that is, to make our Government an up-to-date, efficient, and effective instrument for carrying out the will of the Nation. It is for this purpose that the Government needs thoroughly modern tools of management. Today, the path is murkier as reformers set out to recast many of the principles relied upon by the Brownlow Committee so long ago. Only weeks into his new administration, President Clinton (1993a) asked Vice President Gore to take on the challenge of nursing the institution of the federal government back to health: Not by making it bigger but by making it work better and cost less. Gore (1993c; 7) understood from the beginning that such an effort had to have not only a clear and compelling vision to be successful but that it had to have a solid set of principles and assumptions. He also knew that reinventing the federal government was not a one-time effort and that implementation would be more difficult than developing the initial set of recommendations (Gore, 1993a; 9). Unlike the previous ten presidential reform initiatives of this century (Moe, 1992), Gore recruited his staff from career civil servants (see gray box for details of the approach used). He faced a six-month deadline for presenting a set of recommendations to the President, who believed most of the problems in the federal government had already been well documented and that the most important thing was to develop quickly an agenda, then spend much of his first term in office focusing on implementing it. As Clinton put it, Here's the most important reason why this report is different from earlier ones on government reform. When Herbert Hoover finished the Hoover Commission, he went back to Stanford. When Peter Grace finished the Grace Commission, he went back to New York City. But when the Vice President finished his report, he had to go back to his office - 20 feet from mine - and go back to working to turn the recommendations into reality (Gore, 1994b; 8). Another characteristic that made this review different was that the focus is on changing the internal culture of government agencies by changing the incentives employees face in doing their work, rather than investing the administration's political capital in restructuring the missions and organization of the government. As Gore (1993c; ii) noted in his first NPR report: National Performance Review focused primarily on how government should work, not on what it should do. Our job was to improve performance in areas where policy makers had already decided government should provide a role.(1) Osborne (1993; 264), an advisor to NPR, elaborated on this when he said: To change behavior within the federal government, we must change the basic incentives that shape that behavior. We much create a new set of dynamics - through the use of competition, the measurement of results, the decentralization of authority, and the creation of real consequences for success and failure. Conventional wisdom has long suggested that governmental reform is undertaken largely as a political symbol. But there is a difference between reinvention and the traditional restructuring approach to reform. The former focuses on incentives, the latter on structure. …

Reforming the Presidency: Nonproblems and Problems

Riddle: Why is political reform like a clear mountain lake? Answer: When we look into both we see ourselves.The Means and Ends of ReformsWhat should be the ends of presidential reform? Obviously, such a question assumes that something is wrong and can be remedied through reform, which I define here as an intentional act (or acts) of institutional engineering to restructure incentives in the political system. Naturally, any effort to engage in reform, therefore, raises numerous issues. What are the purposes of reform? What are the problems a reform proposal or package of proposals presumes to address and to remedy? What are the feasibilities for implementation? What are the consequences and implications of reform? Will its purported benefits be larger than the costs incurred? To what extent does thinking about reform help lead to or clarify a theory of the presidency and, more generally, a theory of government? To what extent, above all, when thinking about reform can we escape the time warp in which our present preferences or momentary dissatisfactions lie? A would-be reformer must struggle to disassociate short-term preferences and judgments about an incumbent from longer-term conceptions as to how institutions should operate. In this regard, a would-be reformer must think like a constitution-maker. Is this the system one would prefer under worst case conditions?

Reforming the Presidency: Nonproblems and Problems

Riddle: Why is political reform like a clear mountain lake? Answer: When we look into both we see ourselves.The Means and Ends of ReformsWhat should be the ends of presidential reform? Obviously, such a question assumes that something is wrong and can be remedied through reform, which I define here as an intentional act (or acts) of institutional engineering to restructure incentives in the political system. Naturally, any effort to engage in reform, therefore, raises numerous issues. What are the purposes of reform? What are the problems a reform proposal or package of proposals presumes to address and to remedy? What are the feasibilities for implementation? What are the consequences and implications of reform? Will its purported benefits be larger than the costs incurred? To what extent does thinking about reform help lead to or clarify a theory of the presidency and, more generally, a theory of government? To what extent, above all, when thinking about reform can we escape the time warp in which our present preferences or momentary dissatisfactions lie? A would-be reformer must struggle to disassociate short-term preferences and judgments about an incumbent from longer-term conceptions as to how institutions should operate. In this regard, a would-be reformer must think like a constitution-maker. Is this the system one would prefer under worst case conditions?

Reforming the Presidency: Nonproblems and Problems

Riddle: Why is political reform like a clear mountain lake? Answer: When we look into both we see ourselves.The Means and Ends of ReformsWhat should be the ends of presidential reform? Obviously, such a question assumes that something is wrong and can be remedied through reform, which I define here as an intentional act (or acts) of institutional engineering to restructure incentives in the political system. Naturally, any effort to engage in reform, therefore, raises numerous issues. What are the purposes of reform? What are the problems a reform proposal or package of proposals presumes to address and to remedy? What are the feasibilities for implementation? What are the consequences and implications of reform? Will its purported benefits be larger than the costs incurred? To what extent does thinking about reform help lead to or clarify a theory of the presidency and, more generally, a theory of government? To what extent, above all, when thinking about reform can we escape the time warp in which our present preferences or momentary dissatisfactions lie? A would-be reformer must struggle to disassociate short-term preferences and judgments about an incumbent from longer-term conceptions as to how institutions should operate. In this regard, a would-be reformer must think like a constitution-maker. Is this the system one would prefer under worst case conditions?