Suchergebnisse

The initial purpose of this article is to assess the enduring power of Richard E. Neustadt's 1960 book, Presidential Power. The book transformed the ways in which subsequent generations of presidential scholars thought and wrote about the presidency. It has continued to be the touchstone for scholarship. However, scholars have also qualified, modified, challenged, reformulated, and rejected Neustadt's theses. One result has been a richer literature on the presidency, which itself requires assessment.

Discusses the lasting influence on later US presidential scholars of Richard E. Neustadt's "Presidential power", first published in 1960, in which he analyzed presidential leadership and policy-making, and the need for an executive partnership with Congress, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his ideal, and subsequent challenges to Neustadt's theses.

An American perspective of the offices of US president & prime minister of the UK focuses on whether executive authority & power varies in ways that account for the successes/failures of administrations, or whether there is a linear trend across the histories of both nations. The US president shares popular sovereignty with Congress, the courts, & the states, & there is nothing in the US comparable to the sovereignty of parliament. Issues examined include the different skills needed by prime ministers & presidents; British government as a model for those who see political parties as the hope for strong national leadership; strengths inherent in American separated institutions; tendencies toward ideological realignment of the two major US parties; & demands in the UK for a more effective national government. Three competing notions of prime ministerial leadership are explored, along with parallel tracks of American & British politics since the late 1970s; the greater ease with which legislation is enacted in the British government; & the relation between the political strength of the president/prime minister & the degree to which electoral politics empowers their governments. 31 References. J. Lindroth

I remember an afternoon graduate seminar in 1958 at Yale when Bob Dahl asked a question: "How would we best go about 'testing' the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America?" Two answers were offered. "Survey research can do it all," many argued. I put my hand up and offered an alternative. We would do well to study American history, the culture of politics, and political sociology, then and now. One does not "test" Tocqueville all at once, and never fully. One continually matches his insights against what one knows and understands about our politics. Dahl accepted both answers and we then went on to other things. I recalled the question when I recently reread Ford.Ford, along with James Bryce, was one of the first political scientists to attempt an analysis of the central dynamics of American political institutions. In The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), he set a model followed by Arthur Bentley, Arthur Holcombe, Wilfred Binkley, Pendleton Herring, D.W. Brogan, and Clinton Rossiter, all leaders in American political science. The art was to write a perceptive book about U.S. politics that was grounded primarily in historical materials and analyzed the connections among society, politics, and government.