As Congress and the president battle out the federal deficit, foreign involvements, health care, and other policies of grave national import, the underlying constitutional issue is always the separation of powers doctrine. In "The Politics of Shared Power, " a classic text in the field of executive-legislative relations, Louis Fisher explains clearly and perceptively the points at which congressional and presidential interests converge and diverge, the institutional patterns that persist from one administration and one Congress to another, and the partisan dimensions resulting from the...

National security strategies are vitally important in international politics because they integrate a nation's broad foreign political goals with the means to achieve those goals, thus helping to shape specific policies. In "Shaping and Signaling Presidential Policy: The National Security Decision Making of Eisenhower and Kennedy, " Meena Bose compares how Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy developed their Cold War strategies, focusing on how each president's decision-making process shaped his policy. The study also compares how the presidents communicated their strategies, with...

As the scope and size of the U.S. government has expanded, the importance of good management to the success of a presidency has also increased. Although good management cannot guarantee political or policy success, poor management can certainly undermine good policy and political efforts.
In this second edition of "The Managerial Presidency" James P. Pfiffner brings together both classic analyses and more recent treatments of managerial issues that affect the presidency. Some of the foremost presidency scholars have contributed to this volume, including Richard Neustadt, Charles O. Jones,...

What happens when presidential advisors, in Machiavellian terms, think more of themselves than of the prince and seek their own profit more than the goals of the president or the "good of the realm"? In "Games Advisors Play, " Jean A. Garrison examines case studies of foreign policy in the Nixon and Carter administrations and addresses how and why advisors manipulate the group process, under what conditions advisors engage in power games, and in what situations they are most effective in influencing presidential policy choices.
Given the high stakes, policy advocates employ various...

The U.S. president has to make difficult, important, and very public decisions every day. We don't expect one person to be an expert in all the areas in which the president has to make decisions. So how do presidents do it? They rely on their staffs to give information and advice.
"Good Advice" is a systematic study of Jimmy Carter's reign and those who advised him. Daniel E. Ponder discusses the president's policies, the advisors behind each, and how much of that advice ultimately became incorporated into the president's official proposals.
The book's central thesis is that although...

The balance of powers among the branches of government is the defining structure of American democracy. The Founders assumed each branch would jealously guard its own prerogatives to prevent tyrannical power. Were they wrong? In recent years Congress has progressively abdicated its role in two crucial areas: war powers and the budget process. The result is a chief executive with too few constraints and too little restraint, to the detriment of national policy and democratic processes. How has this come about, and what are the implications of this changing balance of powers?
Louis Fisher...

American presidents enter office ready to enact a policy-making agenda that will satisfy partisan interests and facilitate reelection to a second term. Economic circumstances, however, may catch presidents in a vicious cycle of economic growth and inflation versus recession and unemployment. Faced with a public that assigns to the chief executive responsibility for the nation's economic health, presidents are often forced by the dynamics of this cycle to make tradeoffs between pursuit of political objectives and stabilization of the economy. Vicious Cycle: Presidential Decision Making in the...

When a president's governing philosophy is out of step with the dominant ideology of the culture, his options for leadership are much different FROM those of a leader more in sync with the times. Such opposition leaders face distinctive challenges and opportunities for effectiveness. They should be judged by different standards, argues political scientist David Crockett.
Crockett has analyzed presidents from Whig times through the Clinton presidency to develop a model for understanding presidential success and the strategies that are appropriate to the circumstances. Focusing on the terms...

When the American president cannot get his way with Congress on something of great importance to him, he often appeals "over the heads" of Congress, directly to the American people. This kind of appeal and the frequent use of the media to generate support for presidential policies face criticism (especially from policy critics) as an unconstitutional means of subverting the executive-legislative power balance intended by the Constitution. Melvin C. Laracey, in this fascinating historical interpretation of presidential efforts to marshal public opinion in support of policy positions,...

Can presidents hope to be effective in policy making when Congress is ruled by the other party? Political scientist Richard Conley brings to this crucial discussion a fresh perspective. He argues persuasively that the conditions of divided government have changed in recent years, and he applies a rigorous methodology that allows the testing of a number of important assumptions about party control of the legislative process and the role of the president.
Conley demonstrates that recent administrations have faced a very different playing field than those in the earlier post-war years...