Suchergebnisse

Every president bestows upon his successors a "legacy" that will have an impact on both policy issues and institutional operations. Although attention is commonly focused on the president's role as a policymaker, he serves as an institution builder, as well, leaving a legacy that is manifested in long‐term developments, in technical details of managing the job, and in patterns of interaction with other actors in the political environment. Reagan's institutional legacy has been the subject of intense debate and is addressed here in relation to five vantage points as they were employed during his eight years in office: personnel, structure, standard operating procedures, modes of exercising influence, and norms. These dimensions are examined in relation to the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the judiciary.Reagan's departures in the selection and management of executive and judicial branch personnel were the most distinctive features of his legacy. Important changes were also made in the regulatory review and budgetary processes. Politicization and centralization, two long‐term developments in the presidential office, gained renewed vigor, and Reagan elaborated a judicial strategy for achieving policy goals while refining the administrative strategy pioneered earlier by Nixon. Serious damage may well have been done to the norms of public service and justice under the rule of law. The framework introduced here promises to help scholars deal more systematically with the institutional impacts of both past and future presidents.

There is widespread agreement among scholars that Franklin D. Roosevelt created the modern presidency, and he serves as their paradigm of successful presidential leadership. James MacGregor Burns, Richard Neustadt, Clinton Rossiter, and others who took their cues from them found in FDR the ideal heroic president. He combined extensive and sustained popularity, partisan support, skillful power-sensitive bargaining and persuasion, adept use of the prerogatives of the office, and consummate performance of the multiple roles of the president to make the American constitutional system work.