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This article explores how Speakers of the House act as foreign policy entrepreneurs. I examine the conditions under which speakers may successfully achieve their foreign policy goals using Henry Cl...

Much of the literature on the war on terror overstates the power of the presidency and overlooks the respective roles of Congress, the courts, and the bureaucracy. The creation and development of military commissions in the war on terror demonstrates that our system of separation of powers and checks and balances has in fact worked in complex and surprising ways to constrain the presidency during wartime, with consequences both positive and negative. In this article, two insights loom largest. First, internal executive branch divisions often interact with the separation of powers in ways that limit presidential dominance. Second, national security policy is now a heavily legalized area, with important consequences for the separation of powers.

During the 2008 presidential election, and briefly following it, researchers and pundits wondered whether the election of America’s first African-American President could create a post-racial America. But while political scientists have done much to analyze the election itself, we remain largely uninformed about the potential long-term effects of the Obama presidency on racial attitudes in America. This paper addresses the effects of the Obama presidency using multiple original surveys of the electoral battleground states conducted from 2008 through 2012. Using a measure of racial antagonism, the analysis tests the rally and presidential-popularity cycle theories of public opinion. It demonstrates that racial sentiments rallied positively behind Obama after his 2008 election but then spiked to unprecedentedly antagonistic levels during his first term. At the same time, racial antagonism polarized dramatically by party from 2008 to 2012.

Beyond the formal powers and duties laid down in the Constitution, the presidency is a cultural institution meant to represent—in a very literal sense—the American people. Presidents act as identificatory figures—symbolizing what their supporters hold sacred about the nation. Presidents’ own bodies come to matter particularly at political moments when a new or counter-interpretation of national identity challenges prevailing assumptions. Supporters often interpret their national identity in the figure of the president. As a black candidate in a historically white-ruled nation, Barack Obama’s narration of his background as representatively American has been a critical task both as candidate and as president. Both Obama’s biography and his visual presence have come to play a part in how political issues, from health care to foreign policy, get framed by both supporters and opponents. But does race stand alone in this dynamic of life story and looks? I analyze the challenges faced and opportunities afforded the Obama presidency by comparing him to earlier presidents who were politically associated with moments of broad change in American politics: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom depended heavily on biography and physical embodiment to authorize their vision of national identity. Presidential embodiment ultimately diminishes democratic politics because of the strong fixation on a singular political institution it produces.

In January 2007, the Left won the elections for the Nicaraguan Presidency for the first time since the Sandinista Revolution ended in 1990. President Daniel Ortega proclaimed himself a champion of the poor and spent millions on subsidized housing, food, livestock, and low-interest loans for women. To distribute these goods and services, he created popularly elected neighborhood and municipal councils called Citizen Power Councils (CPCs). To determine the extent to which the CPCs empowered the poor, this article examines ethnographic data collected during ten months of fieldwork in six Nicaraguan municipalities. The study concludes that despite the intrinsic value of citizen participation, systems of participatory governance pose risks due to possibilities for corruption and the intensity of partisan rivalries. These risks are especially pronounced in highly polarized, low-income countries with weak state capacity.

To assess President Obama's deracialized agenda-setting strategy, this article draws from two Gallup Organization polls and a 2010 survey of political behaviors and racial attitudes by the University of Arkansas Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society and the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. We extend the debate about deracialization by focusing on two of Obama's most important policy initiatives: the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also referred to as the Affordable Care Act). The debates over ARRA and the Affordable Care Act placed Obama in an unenviable position. The study will show that many African Americans supported these policies despite Obama's use of deracialized rhetoric. This support was not necessarily due to blind faith or racial loyalty. African Americans believed these laws would improve their own vulnerable situations and reinforce the federal government's commitment to remedying racial inequities.

This article examines the degree to which President Obama's public positions are congruent with mass opinion, and compares his position-taking behavior with that of recent administrations. We consider the impact of congressional agenda setting and the electoral cycle on the degree of congruence between Obama's positions and public opinion. Additionally, we investigate whether positions that were only marginally popular early in the term have retained support. The findings indicate that Obama's presidency resembles other recent administrations in terms of policy congruence. First, blame-game politics between the president and opposition party have significantly reduced policy congruence. Second, for recurring issues, electoral proximity appears to be correlated with higher congruence. Finally, as in other recent administrations, the overall level of responsiveness is not significantly greater than one would expect by chance.

This essay answers the question, “How well did President Obama choose from among the available means of persuasion in the early years of his presidency?” by probing the ways in which his pre-inaugural speech at the Lincoln Memorial blurred the rhetorical roles of nominee and president-elect; the absence of a digestive statement in his inaugural; the failure of his nationally telecast BP oil spill address to respond to the expectations created by his campaign rhetoric and by the speech itself; the ways in which the setting of his speech after the Tucson tragedy sabotaged an otherwise powerful speech; and the insurmountable challenges posed by the decision to address the nation as the DOW tumbled in the wake of the S and P downgrade.

In his landmark work The Politics Presidents Make, Stephen Skowronek concludes that an earlier cycle of presidential politics in America is fading. Calling this phenomenon the “waning of political time,” he predicts the declining importance of the president as a source of political change in American politics, and makes the conjecture that in the future, presidents will act more pragmatically and will more frequently clash with office holders in other political institutions. Applying hypotheses recently advanced by Curt Nichols and Adam Myers, this article considers some additional challenges to presidential authority that complement Skowronek's original thesis. Through a comparison of the presidencies of Obama and Ronald Reagan, the article also illustrates the relevance of the waning-of-political-time thesis to politics today.

George C. Edwards. The Strategic Presidency: Persuasion and Opportunity inPresidential Leadership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.Stephen Skowronek. Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprisal andReappraisal, 2nd ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011.Walter Dean Burnham. Voting in American Elections: The Shaping of the PoliticalUniverse Since 1788, ed. Thomas Ferguson and Louis Ferleger. Palo Alto, CA:Academica Press, 2010.Curt Nichols

Republican party government during the presidency of George W. Bush prompted liberal academics and intellectuals to reconsider the theory of responsible party government (RPG). While liberal thinkers traditionally had viewed party government positively, the onset of robust conservative government led some to question its desirability. This article examines this momentary turn in liberal thought and argues that it misconstrues the arguments for RPG, overstates the extent to which contemporary conditions constitute a fulfillment of the model, and exaggerates the degree to which Bush-era Republicans were able to shift policy to the right. Most important, recent critics misunderstand the ways that stronger parties help organized labor and favor a left-liberal political agenda.

The 2008 presidential election can be said to suffer from an audacity of analysis, a rush to place the Barack Obama presidency in historical perspective before the Obama presidency actually makes history. Some historical facts are irrefutable, such as the election of the first African-American president and the smashing of campaign finance records. But other aspects of the 2008 election remain to be proven, such as whether a permanent Democratic majority has emerged and an electoral realignment has taken place. Another audacious aspect of the discussion of this election has been the crediting of a permanent shift in electoral and governing coalitions to the strategic efforts of a presidential candidate, that is, to link the presidency to structural changes in the vote and the formation of a new Democratic Party coalition. This paper identifies the questions that must be answered to prove such conclusions, and cautiously tenders some answers. First, what indications are there that the Obama coalition is a sustainable coalition or a permanent shift in the vote? Second, what might be the role of a presidential candidate and a sitting president in building and maintaining a majority party coalition?

It was called the most important election since the Great Depression. The policies of the Bush administration established the storyline for the presidential election and determined its outcome. This could be seen in three areas: a failing economy, the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the expansion of executive powers. In particular, the collapse of the financial industry in the fall of 2008 correlated with the increases in the Democratic vote. The Bush presidency should be considered transformative, a highly significant period in American history. Not only did it set the agenda for the election, pitting an advocate for change (Barack Obama) against a candidate committed to continuing the Bush policies (John McCain), it also dictated the problems the in-coming administration would have to deal with.

Political mobilization of business forces in the post-communist world has crucial implications for economic development and civil society. The emergence of strong cross-sectoral business associations during Putin's presidency challenges the prevailing view of Russia's political economy as an informal, particularistic state–business exchange. At the theoretical level, collective action by socio-economic groups is linked to severe principal-agent dilemmas common to many ex-socialist bureaucracies. Given institutionally incoherent state structures, the state as principal facilitates collective action by business actors to create a parallel, non-state platform for policy formation and implementation. Such a dynamic of “debilitated dirigisme” should be understood in the comparative contexts of business mobilization in Latin America, Asia, and the advanced industrialized world. The argument developed here stands in contrast to two conventional approaches to business mobilization, “threat theory,” in which firms organize to resist various anti-capitalist forces, and “political entrepreneurship theory,” which holds that business is the passive object of mobilization by the state.

In Woodrow Wilson's writings on presidential leadership, crisis serves as a solution to the grinding gears of institutional gridlock. This notion of crisis leadership is closely tied to Wilson's vision of the organic state, which posited a deep underlying and even mystical popular unity, brought to the surface by the spur of crisis and knit together by a prophetic, interpretive leader. This link between crisis leadership and the organic state undergirded Wilson's famous break with the American Founding. This article argues that the struggles with inadequacy experienced by most modern U.S. presidents come into sharper focus through the lens of Wilson's leadership theories. Since Wilson's critique of the Founding involves a rejection of Lockean limits, such a refocusing might begin by reconsidering those limits, including the limits of consensus and the limits of leadership.

Conventional wisdom describes the "modern presidency" as an institution with more political authority and autonomy than its "traditional" nineteenth-century predecessor. A central claim is that since the rise of the modern executive establishment, presidents have had an incentive to "politicize" and "centralize" their authority within the executive branch. Examining three lesser-known pre-modern presidents, we argue that the tendency for presidents to politicize and centralize is neither distinctly modern nor particularly extraordinary. Rather, it is a fundamental presidential impulse that finds its roots in the ambiguous form of executive power in America.

This article examines the decline of political parties in post-Civil War America and analyzes the impact of this decline on the presidency and presidential leadership. Drawing on primary documents from nineteenth-century presidential elections, I argue that parties began to decline significantly in the late nineteenth century. This research suggests, contrary to conventional wisdom, that post-Civil War America was no monolithic "Golden Age" for the political parties and that, in fact, their power began to erode substantially during this period, at least at the presidential level. Further, the study provides additional support for the argument that the decline of parties was a major factor in the rise of modern, plebiscitary presidential leadership.

Any author attempting a history of the 1930s stands at the end of a rich historiographical lineage that effectively dates from the mid-1950s. Its "founding fathers"-James MacGregor Bums, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and William E. Leuchtenburg-established a scholarly baseline that remains visible despite various efforts to redraw it. Reaching a wide audience beyond the academy, they also laid down a popular view that is still hegemonic.' All three shared a common perspective: they had matured politically during the Roosevelt presidency, had been powerfully affected by it, and possessed a deeply felt allegiance to the liberal wing of the Democratic party. All also shared an intellectual commitment to the "progressive interpretation" of American history, pioneered earlier in this century by Charles A. Beard-albeit without Beard's cranky isolationism. Progressive history depicted politics as a series of dualistic struggles between the forces of progress and those of reaction, generally defined as "the people v. the interests," or "the producing classes v. the barons of big capitalism."2 The founding fathers of New Deal historiography developed a common narrative of Manichean politics in which the New Deal represented the forces of enlightment and progressive reform enmeshed in a desperate battle with backward-looking representatives of oppressive greed. Reflecting both their own emotional attraction to Franklin Roosevelt and the deeper truth that American political reform-like significant movements for political transformation in most of human history-has been highly dependent upon charismatic lead

The writing of speeches for the President is inevitably connected to public policy. Speeches provide opportunities to articulate policy, and their preparation often forces the setting of agendas and the determination or clarification of policy positions. This makes the growing disjunction between presidential speeches and the clear, accurate expression of administration goals and policy initiatives noted by observers of the contemporary presidency all the more arresting. We locate the beginning of this trend in the Johnson White House and compare the organizational responses of Presidents Johnson and Nixon to the challenge of creating a viable writing operation linked to policymaking. Of the two, Nixon was more effective, particularly during his first term, and his experience suggests lessons that his successors have largely failed to follow.

This research extends an earlier study of the bipartisan and political perspectives for evaluating congressional-executive relations on foreign policy to cover the Bush administration and the first Clinton term. As expected, the end of the Cold War accelerated the decline of bipartisanship and accentuated the continuing relevance of the political perspective. The level of bipartisan accord was relatively low during both administrations, particularly compared with other administrations since 1947. Ideological and partisan divisions occurred during both presidencies, with the former more pronounced under Bush and the latter under Clinton. Whether control of the presidency and Congress was divided or unified also bears on our findings, as each eroded bipartisanship in different ways. Divided government undermined bipartisanship by heightening ideological differences, while unified government contributed to its erosion by fostering partisan divisions.

Long a favorite of political scientists who worried about the limitations of the Constitution and looked to the presidency to meet the governing challenges of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson ...

This essay challenges the common assumption that Woodrow Wilson's exaltation of presidential political power carried with it an affirmation of executive power, by recovering his novel conception of opinion-leadership. Wilson sought to transform the presidential office by emphasizing opinion leadership and downplaying executive power. He thought that reshaping the presidency into an office for opinion leadership would raise the United States toward a new, more advanced stage of representative government. Overlooking Wilson's attempt to demote executive action has led political scientists to underestimate his originality, misunderstand his conception of progress, and narrow the scope of his reform project.

Stephen Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make takes the whole of the historical presidency as the proper concern of political science. To understand the modern presidency, Skowronek explains, we must understand the way it parallels, as well as differs from, the historical presidency. His formulation of recurring roles within successive presidential leadership regimes reveals the logic of that parallel. The result is a learned and powerful book that offers a new framework for understanding presidential politics and uses it to illuminate representative presidents in the course of American political history. Skowronek's model of recurrent cycles implies a deterministic reading of presidential leadership. Recurring cycles of leadership duplicate each other and contain the same sequence of leadership roles. The implication is that incumbents are captives of the force of the cycle and leadership is a product of the cycle's roles. In these comments, I shall briefly characterize Skowronek's argument and then take issue with some deterministic aspects of it.

American immigration politics produced two major laws in the 1980s, overcoming formidable obstacles to policy change and unleashing new forces for increased migration when new restrictions seemed likely. This article examines the ideologically mixed coalition behind these changes and the ambiguous, often conflicting policy that was the result. Subsequent struggles within the courts and the administrative presidency to interpret and apply these reforms, the author concludes, have resulted in greater public antipathy toward immigration and also enervated participatory citizenship in the United States.

Through most of the last year, one of the favorite pastimes of candidates, consultants, and commentators was to speculate about which past election campaign presented the most compelling analogy to that of 1992. George Bush and his advisors had originally hoped, of course, that 1992 would be a replay of 1988, and that they could win the presidency by portraying their opponent as an unvarnished and unrepentant liberal. When that did not seem to work, Bush decided that the proper comparison was actually with 1948, when an embattled incumbent had somehow managed to pull off a late surge and an upset victory. The Democrats, for their part, saw a much closer parallel with 1932, with YouKnow-Who in the role of Herbert Hoover. At last September's American Political Science Association convention, I heard someone draw an extended comparison between 1992 and 1912, a suggestion that struck me as far-fetched at the time, but now seems a good deal more plausible. After eight years in office, the analogy went, a highly popular Republican president steps down and turns the White House over to a vastly more ineffective successor, a man of considerable experience who seems, nonetheless, remarkably out of place in the office he has now come to occupy. The result is that, four years later, there is a three-candidate race for the presidency and a Democrat gets elected with only a bit more than 40 percent of the popular vote. No election, of course, is ever simply a replay of the past. Every presidential campaign has important elements of continuity and tradition, but

Was Ronald Reagan a great President? How do we know? This essay examines the standards of presidential greatness used by historians and political scientists over the years, measuring Reagan's presidency against them and them against the Reagan presidency.

The Reagan presidency posed more than the usual number of explanatory challenges for political science. How could an ideologue win the White House in a political system as relentlessly centrist as ours? How was he able to give policy direction to a divided government? And how was he able to maintain his popularity through eight years that substantially recast the politics of the nation? This essay seeks to link certain aspects of the Reagan presidency to the literature of political science. The author looks at both Reagan the candidate and Reagan the President and concludes that, as a profession, political science is richer in data than theory and rather myopic in its incrementalist view of change.

Tubbesing brings together two vigorous contemporary modes of analyzing American politics. Policy analysis (Lowi et al.) is brought to party realignment theory (Burnham et al.) to permit formulation of a view concerning realigning elections and the likely shape of our political parties and perhaps our policies. Party realignments in the past involved demands for redistributive policies, but actually were met largely by compromise and thus subsequent crises. The periodic character of past critical elections may not be true of the present period, for expectations of the (strong) presidency are now great, and groups hurt by the president's policies may switch to his opponent, so that the balance between parties is markedly unstable. In place of periodic durable realignments, Tubbesing sees a series of intense elections with substantial switches-a consequence of our having a more integrated decisional structure in the new presidency.

The author explores the efforts of various executive reorganization plans in this century, especially those predating the Brownlow Committee of 1936-37, to deal with the issue of augmenting the managerial capacity of the presidency. He examines the relationship between apolitical organization theory and the growth of presidential power. The primary function of the several executive reorganization schemes, the author suggests, is to reduce and mask conflict over the changing relationship of the president to Congress and to administration. Reorganization led to a more expansive presidency claiming growing powers over the administrative state.

The Watergate syndrome and the underlying social pathology have been the subject of numerous scholarly analyses; however, the argument is far from being settled. In a recent issue of Polity (Summer 1977) it was argued that a value-neutral political science was responsible for the intellectual climate banishing moral concerns from the domain of political action. Paul Kress, too, sees the fundamental cause in the lack of moral purpose but attributes the political malpractice to theoretical and structural flaws inherent in modern liberalism in general and American constitutionalism in particular. He concludes with a speculation concerning the future prospects of liberal society and raises questions concerning the effect of its inadequacies on the problem of distributive justice in a no-growth economy.

Political scientists have recently devoted considerable attention to the broad issue of whether the presidency is possible.' They seek to explain why recent presidencies have been seen as disappointing or as outright failures. Some argue that the central problem arises from the inability of Presidents to meet their responsibilities competently.2 The focus is on individual failings, rather than broader systemic problems. A second view contends that the public expects far too much from the occupant of the Oval Office, and no individual will ever be able to meet these heightened expectations.' Finally, some presidential scholars place the blame for "the impossible presidency" on the Madisonian system of shared powers and checks and balances that has worked to foster institutional paralysis and deadlock in the nuclear age." This third view has gained currency in recent years as political scientists have examined "whether

This note examines the composition of Democratic Party electoral coalitions in three states for various levels-president, governor, and senator -and the implications of interstate variations. Although all elections, except for the presidency, are waged at state and local levels, the research in the field has focused almost exclusively on national electoral coalitions and their stability.1 Actually, electoral coalitions at state and local levels are of considerable interest because (1) it is on these levels that most elections are contested; (2) party organizations are more active here; and (3) presidential elections require a plurality of votes within key states. Robert Axelrod has shown that the national Democratic Party's loose coalition forged by the New Deal remained rather stable between 1952 and 1972.2 There were some sharp short-term shifts (for example, by Catholics in 1960), but the coalition of overlapping minorities held together. His study raises some important questions. Does the support of Democratic candidates by the diverse minorities hold for elections across offices? Are there substantial variations between states? Is the Demo

Firm tradition precludes military men from contending for the Mexican presidency and expects aspirants to have held cabinet posts. The "precandidates" have usually been educated at the National University. In the following study of the background and other qualifications of "precandidates" from 1945 through 1981, Professor Camp notes that an increasing number of them has attended foreign universities, received specialized training, and pursued bureaucratic and/or technocratic careers. They come from a small, homogeneous group of politically influential families. These tendencies may have significant consequences for Mexico's political system.

The process of selecting the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968 and 1972 revealed a deep cleavage between factions with divergent political characteristics. One faction had the reputation of being supported by the party regulars, that is, individuals who held party offices and who had responsibilities in the party. The regulars were challenged in 1968 by Eugene McCarthy and his supporters and in 1972 by George McGovern and his enthusiasts. Typically the McCarthy and McGovern supporters were characterized as lacking solid support among party officeholders and lacking experience in the party. By virtue of their lack of party experience the McCarthy and McGovern supporters were considered to be "amateurs" and "insurgents." 1 McCarthy supporters were thought to have refrained from assisting Humphrey, a regular and the party standard-bearer, in his bid for the presidency. They were considered sore losers and disloyal to the party. In 1972 the circumstances and outcomes that prevailed in 1968 were reversed. The faction led by McGovern, without substantial ties to the Democratic party, controlled the convention. Experienced party regulars in 1972 were supporting candidates who lost, and their loyalty to the party's effort to elect the national ticket was severely tested. This study focuses upon the party loyalty of delegates supporting winning and losing candidates at the 1972 Democratic presidential nominating convention. Attention will be directed in particular to the effect of winning and losing upon delegates who are party regulars and those who are not party regulars. The various sections will deal with: (1) literature review, (2) data, (3) findings, and (4) conclusions.

The Nixon foreign policy has been subject to varying interpretations. In a recent issue of Polity (Spring 1976) it was analyzed in terms of overriding foreign-policy objectives, such as changes in ...

The above quip refers to Burlington, Vermont, where two months before Socialist Francois Mitterrand captured the French Presidency, Socialist Bernard Sanders was elected mayor. Sanders, a professed Socialist running as an independent, defeated five-term Democratic Mayor Gordon Pauquette by a mere ten votes in March 1981.1 In a period of conservative political gains elsewhere across the country, this victory shocked many in the long-time Democratic city of 37,000, and attracted nationwide press attention.2 Many observers saw Sanders' victory not as an endorsement of the new mayor or his progressive policies, but as a vote against his opponent, who had been accused of turning his back on traditional Democratic constituencies in favor of the city's business leaders. However, the 1983 election seemed to put this theory to rest. Sanders won a second term by a wide margin, polling 52.8 percent of the vote, compared to 30.7 percent for Democrat Judith Stephany and 16.5 percent for Republican James Gilson. Any time a Socialist wins an election in the United States it is an anomaly. To be sure, various Socialist parties have enjoyed periods of

Interest in the policy-making processes of the national government grows steadily and encouragingly. Building on the earlier work of men like Charles Lindblom, Robert Dahl, Bertram Gross and Stephen K. Bailey, another generation of political scientists has produced during the past decade a number of studies which, while differing greatly in scope, concept and methodology, has nonetheless contributed enormously to our understanding of the decision-making processes of government. Richard Fenno's monumental study of the appropriations committees, James A. Robinson's helpful introduction to the House Rules Committee, Lewis Anthony Dexter's highly suggestive study of the Armed Services Committees as they functioned in the 1950S and his more recent analysis of the role of the Congressman, and the still more recent and impressive study of the House Ways and Means Committee and its notable chairman, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, by John F. Manley, constitute significant increases in the body of knowledge about the influential shaping of public policy. It will be noted, however, that the process which has engaged the attention of these scholars is the legislative process, as we used to think of it. The model for most of these studies remains Bailey's pioneering case-study, Congress Makes a Law, in the sense that the political analyst's view is limited to the Congressional portion of the policy-making process. Yet, with the exception of a few scholars, led principally by Richard Neustadt and Aaron Wildavsky, who has done comparable studies of the policy-making process within the executive branch in the age of the institutionalized Presidency? Samuel Huntington's admirable analysis of defense decision-making takes us only to the end of the Eisenhower era. There are, of course, the writings of the HitchEnthoven group, but their writers are not political scientists. Hence, their contributions to either the theory or the practice of defense decision-making in McNamara's regime leave virtually unexamined most of the interesting political questions. They tell us little or nothing, for example, about what the McNamara administrative revolution meant in terms of the continuing power base of the Congressional defense barons, Mendel Rivers, Richard Russell, John Stennis, et al. The point is exaggerated, no doubt, as I have put it, but it seems to me to have considerable validity. American political science as it ap

Professor Sullivan here presents an interesting study of the ways in which a President can influence policy making at the lower levels of the bureaucracy. Direct intervention at these levels, he feels, is dangerous because the political payoff is not worth the risk to presidential prestige. There is no substitute, then, for a strong President who is expert in the methods of politics and can succeed in creating a "policy ethos" which will pervade the decisions made at all levels.

Political science grew up with the New Deal. Its disciplinary origins, true enough, are to be found in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and the first decades of this century were a time of intellectual rooting and growth as the study of government and politics struggled with scholarly traditions of citizenship education, civic reform, and social scientism and tried to find itself from among the academic fields of philosophy, law, administration, and political history. By the time Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House, political science was a half century old and had even given the nation one of its Presidents. But Roosevelt and the New Deal shaped political science, and in particular the study of American politics, as nothing before or since. FDR became the model President and his years the model presidency. Like the partisan politics which followed, so too political science was and continues to be shaped by the questions and issues posed by his remarkable tenure. Roosevelt remade the presidency, and with it most of the questions which have since occupied the interests of political science: the place of the Executive in our constitutional system; the proper relationship of the President to the Congress, administration, and courts; the proper powers of the President in intergovernmental and international relations; the role of the President as political leader in shaping public opinion and directing his party; the role of the national government in public policy and the protection of liberties; and ultimately the meaning of political democracy itself. Since Roosevelt, we have had the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, a multitude of other movements, Vietnam, Watergate, and more New Federalisms than I can remember, but none has had an impact on political science like that of the New Deal. None, that is, until the presidency of an ex-baseball announcer, ex-movie star, ex-TV salesman, ex-union organizer, and exNew Dealer reborn in the 1960s as the principled champion of conservatism in American politics. For political science, the presidency of Ronald Reagan has been an anomaly. It was born in denial, as a bad joke for which the curious presidency of Jimmy Carter was somehow to blame, but ended in a certain reexamination, hesitant and halting to be sure, of the discipline's New Deal legacy. In this issue, Bert Rockman measures the Reagan presidency against some of what political science has had to say about the nation's highest office of the last half century. He concludes that, while some adjust