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I. Presidential Weakness and the Politicized Presidency
Ironically, the study of presidential power is often the study of weakness. “Presidential
weakness was the underlying theme of Presidential Power,” Richard E. Neustadt wrote of his
classic work thirty years after its original publication, “…. [and] weakness is still what I see:
weakness in the sense of a great gap between what is expected of a man (or someday woman)
and assured capacity to carry through” (1990, ix). Since presidents’ constitutional powers are
normally insufficient to allow them to dictate governmental outcomes, Neustadt argued, they
must bargain over those outcomes by making the most of other resources, such as public
standing and professional reputation.
Still, no one doubts that presidents do exercise power, and that the Constitution gives
them an important vantage for so doing. (Skill in utilizing that institutional position is in fact
Neustadt’s first concern.) Thus, the question comes: how can presidents maximize their power
given the constraints imposed upon them by the Constitution and political system? One
influential work on the presidency, Terry Moe’s take on the “politicized presidency” (1985),
argues that presidents respond to limited formal authority and increased expectations of
presidential power by centralizing and politicizing. Centralization refers to the shift of
functions from the wider executive branch to within the Executive Office of the Presidency
(EOP). Politicization, in turn, describes presidents’ efforts to structure and staff the bureaucracy
in a way that makes bureaus responsive to presidential dictate. Since presidents’ reach is
institutionally truncated, these two strategies allow presidents to build and shape what is
within their grasp: the White House staff and the top layers of the executive bureaucracy.
Both strategies have received extensive scholarly attention, both prior to and flowing
from Moe’s exposition: there are massive literatures on, respectively, the “institutional
Convention