Modern Reconstructive Presidential Leadership: Reordering Institutions in a Constrained Environment

Modern “reconstructive” presidents face an institutional environment that affords strong veto possibilities to defenders of the status quo, making today’s politics resistant to the “order shattering” and “order creating” style of change most frequently associated with the leadership type. This project responds to the possibility that the rise of these conditions suggests the end of such reconstructive politics. It applies fresh insights gleaned from historical-institutionalist scholarship to investigate the full range of options that are available to presidents inheriting the opportunity to reorder politics. Mathematical simulation, via Polya’s urn model, is used to demonstrate how institutional displacement, layering, conversion, and drift can be used – independently and together – to recalibrate the equilibrium of a “path-dependent” system and thus alter developmental pathways. This not only suggests that modern presidents can still reorder and rejuvenate politics in a constrained environment; it updates expectations and warns of potential dangers. DOI 10.1515/for-2014-5004 Revitalizing Politics Throughout American history, presidents have periodically played a critical role in rejuvenating the nation’s politics by reordering the political landscape. Indeed, many of the “great” presidents made their mark through such efforts (Landy and Milkis 2000; Nichols 2012). The significance of these revitalizing presidents, who lock in the dominance of new coalitional partisan majorities and recalibrate the parameters of governing possibility that persist for decades, cannot be overstated. Without the leadership that these presidents supply, the US may not be able to respond effectively to the bouts of enervation that party-system and regime-theory scholars argue to be recurrent – leaving the country’s politics *Corresponding author: Curt Nichols, Political Science Department, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA, e-mail: [email protected] Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM 282 Curt Nichols permanently impaired (Burnham 1970; Skowronek 1997). It is the core claim of this study that presidents can continue to reinvigorate politics, especially if they take advantage of their environment and use a variety of strategies to accomplish the tasks necessary for success. Yet some suggest that this is literally not possible – that presidents are losing the capacity to revitalize. More specifically, it is argued that it is becoming increasingly difficult in the modern context for “reconstructive” presidents to practice their traditional style of “order shattering/order creating” politics (Skowronek 1997, 2011). The growth of the welfare state has (it is argued) created an environment that affords the myriad defenders of the status quo strong “veto possibilities” – that is, the potential to block change. This development makes it especially hard for presidents to tear out old institutions and replace them with new ones. A case in point for many has been Barack Obama’s failure to seize what appeared to be a transformative moment in 2008 and “change the basic assumptions of national politics” (Eberly 2010; Balkin 2012, p. 1, 2014). Indeed, scholars have generally not chosen to recognize the president’s signature accomplishment, the expansion of publicly funded healthcare (the Affordable Health Care for America Act), as the achievement of a successful reconstructive president – one who in inheriting “a great opportunity for presidential action” is able to “remake the government wholesale” (Skowronek 1997, p. 37, 2014; Schier 2011; Crockett 2012). Yet, as historical-institutionalist scholars James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen persuasively argue, so-called “change agents” have more means available to them than just ripping out and replacing – or “displacing” – institutions in order to affect change (2010). As they note, it is also possible to “layer” institutions or allow them to “drift.” In fact, these two strategies can flourish within an institutional environment that affords strong veto possibilities to opponents defending the status quo. Furthermore, when discretion to exploit ambiguities in interpretation or enforcement of rules is high, another change strategy – institutional “conversion” – is possible. Thus, even under today’s constrained conditions, it should be possible for presidents to succeed in reordering political institutions via the application of various and multiple change modalities. This article provides evidence for this claim through mathematical simulation. In doing so, the article updates expectations and brings to light new dangers. The “reconstructive” politics of presidents may need to be practiced somewhat differently in the modern context. Success may now require reliance on means other than those typically associated with the reconstructive archetype. In fact, it may require the resourceful application of “multiple modalities of change” to the task of reordering institutions. In which case, presidents may find greater scope for the practice of creative agency as context forces them to rely on their ingenuity to get things done. The development of new means has the potential to enable Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM Modern Reconstructive Presidential Leadership 283 presidents to continue to rejuvenate politics periodically, but it also threatens to undermine the norms that support democratic governance by depending on modalities that leverage deception and rule-bending to succeed. Accordingly, simulation results not only suggest a new rubric of analysis for guiding future evaluation of reconstructive presidential efforts, but also provide a warning against the worst tendencies of its evolving practice. My investigation proceeds in four stages. First, I present the concept of the reconstructive president in greater detail. Here, I focus on these chiefexecutive’s revitalizing efforts to alter the institutional order, while contemplating the additional difficulties that come from operating in a modern constrained environment. Second, I review historical-institutionalist insights and discuss four different change modalities. Third, I introduce mathematical simulation methods and run Polya’s urn model under a variety of test conditions to calculate the effect that the change modalities have. Fourth, I conclude that results suggest it should still be possible for a modern reconstructive president to rejuvenate politics by exploiting the opportunities for change that exist in a constrained environment, even as this practice raises significant new concerns. The Reconstructive Presidency and the Institutionalization of a New Political Regime The concept of the reconstructive president comes from Stephen Skowronek’s path-breaking study of presidential leadership in The Politics that Presidents Make (1997). His main insight is that presidential leadership is affected not only by the unique problems each president faces, but more fundamentally by the recurrent context of “political time” that each individual encounters while in office. This is to say that not only does context matter, but the context that matters the most is cyclical in character. Cyclically recurring political time affects multiple presidents similarly across different points in history. While Skowronek is somewhat unclear about how political time’s mechanism of recurrence works, he effectively describes the turning of the cycle in terms of the ebb and flow of “regime resilience.” Early in the cycle, when the “political regime” – consisting of the governing philosophies, coalitional interests, and institutional arrangements that dominate public life in the US for long stretches of time – is vibrant and strong, it is resilient to displacement. Eventually, however, the political regime becomes enervated and vulnerable to displacement. Within this cycle, each president finds himself either affiliated with or opposed to the prevailing political regime. This results in the creation of a two-by-two typology, Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM 284 Curt Nichols within which a president winning office while in opposition to a vulnerable regime inherits the most fortuitous of four possible leadership contexts. At these times, when established commitments of ideology and interest have been called into question as “failed or irrelevant responses to the problems of the day,” the order-shattering and order-creating inclinations of the presidential office can be best harmonized and most fully exploited to reorder, or as Skowronek puts it, “reconstruct,” politics (1997, p. 36). According to second-wave regime theory scholars,1 reconstructive efforts center on the accomplishment of three tasks (Nichols and Myers 2010, p. 808; Laing 2012; McCaffrie 2013): 1. Shifting the main axis of partisan cleavage 2. Assembling a new majority partisan coalition 3. Institutionalizing a new political regime. The first task – shifting the main axis of partisan cleavage – entails raising the salience of certain conflicts within the social structure over others by taking a stand on cross-cleaving issues and linking them to a “broader, more fundamental, but also more nebulous political worldview.” Disputes over this worldview become the main axis of partisan cleavage. This first task is closely related to the second – assembly of a new majority partisan coalition. However, the second is less ideational or what Polsky might call “discursive” in nature (2012). Instead of focusing on changing what politics is about, the second task concentrates on the myriad practical considerations necessary to bring together different groups to form a new governing majority. Finally, the third task – institutionalizing a new political regime – entails “reordering political structures in a way that enables a new partisan majority to promote the policy priorities and political advantage of the social coalition underpinning it” (Nichols and Myers 2010, p. 815, 816). In other words, this task entails taking the institutional steps necessary to lock in the dominance of the new majority and its axis of partisan cleavage. The third task is the exclusive focus of this investigation. Its study, in isolation from the other tasks, can be justified on two grounds. First, accomplishment of this task is critical in altering developmental trajectories by reordering institutional foundations and generating what are referred to as self-reinforcing, “path-dependent,” processes (North 1990; Arthur 1994; Pierson 2004). This is to say that history can be redirected by reformulating the institutional environment, changing the rules and norms that structure political behavior, and creating 1 For other examples of second-wave “regime theory” scholarship (see: Polsky 1997; Crockett 2002; Cook and Polsky 2005; Whittington 2007; Zinman 2011; McCaffrie 2012; Bridge 2014; Johansson 2014). Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM Modern Reconstructive Presidential Leadership 285 positive feedback effects. Therefore, institutionalization contributes to the revitalization of the path-dependent system that we call the political regime, and it helps lock in the long periods of stability that exist between reconstructive presidents. As such, it has allowed the reconstructive presidents of history – Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, F. Roosevelt, and Reagan – to rejuvenate politics, consolidate earlier gains, and to perpetuate their influence long after they have left office.2 Additionally, and perhaps most importantly today, this study focuses on the third task because Skowronek locates the problem of reconstruction for the modern era within the institutional domain. In fact, he suggests that political time may now be “waning” because the modern proliferation of institutions, organized interests, and independent authorities makes resistance to reconstructive efforts more formidable (1997, p. 31). This is to say that the growth and thickening of the welfare state has created an institutional environment that affords defenders of the status quo strong veto possibilities, making it hard to alter the political regime’s path-dependent course of development. Indeed, Skowronek argues that were it not for the fact that the scope of presidential power has also been expanding over time, increasing the formal and informal resources the chief executive possesses (e.g., signing statements and communication technologies), successful reconstructive leadership might have already become impossible (2011, p. 48, 161). Ultimately, this study’s focus on institutional reordering is driven by the need to understand more fully the challenges of today and the desire to explore possible solutions. Both of these motivations compel a turn to the latest “historicalinstitutionalist” scholarship, which in wrestling with similar issues suggests that political actors have more options to seek change than just through the order shattering/order creating, “insurrectionary” style that Skowronek stresses. Institutional Change Historical-institutionalist scholarship is one of three variants of new institutional thought (Pierson and Skocpol 2002) that seeks to “elucidate the role that institutions play in the determination of social political outcomes” (Hall and Taylor 1996, p. 936). While the other two variants, rational choice-institutionalism (Weingast 2 Nichols and Myers make the case that because McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (together) also responded to enervated conditions and rejuvenated politics through the accomplishment of the three reconstructive tasks – “albeit with complex and attenuated results” – these presidents should be considered reconstructive as well (2010, p. 829). Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM 286 Curt Nichols 2002) and sociological-institutionalism (March and Olsen 1984), tend to concentrate on how institutions contribute to stability and continuity, a growing body of work within the historical-institutional variant focuses on explaining institutional change (Schickler 2001; Skoronek and Glassman 2007; Galvin 2010; DiSalvo 2012; Sheingate 2014). James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen have recently unified and extended leading thought on the topic (2010). It is important to engage their arguments and describe their categories in some detail so that the different change modalities can be accurately simulated via mathematical modeling. Mahoney and Thelen suggest that institutional context not only provides openings for change agents to act, but also helps structure their behavior when they do. More specifically, they argue that different change modalities emerge, based on two dimensions of context: (1) the varying amount of discretion available to change agents in interpreting and/or implementing rules (“low” versus “high”); and (2) the varying ability of defenders to protect the status quo (“weak” versus “strong”). A two-by-two typology emerges, such that there are four particular contexts, each of which encourages application of a different modality of change: insurrectionary displacement, subversive layering, opportunistic conversion, and symbiotic drift. As factors can vary widely from one particular institutional micro-environment to another, a single political actor can encounter more than one context across an array of different domains and should be able to employ multiple modalities of change. Insurrectionary Displacement Insurrectionary displacement is practiced by change agents with low discretionary powers facing an environment that affords defenders of the status quo weak veto opportunities. In this context, institutionally structured rules are not ambiguous. As such, they do not provide change agents the opportunity to exploit discretionary powers in interpretation or implementation. Change agents facing institutions that do not afford them much room for agency will not seek to preserve these institutions. When these actors simultaneously find that the political context does not give “veto players” (Krehbiel 1998; Cameron 2001) the ability to prevent alteration of these institutions, they actively seek to “displace” institutions by eliminating those that exist and replacing them with new ones. Like the actions of the stereotypical order-shattering/order-creating reconstructive president, the rapid removal and replacement of institutions by the insurrectionary change agent should produce an abrupt kind of change that significantly shifts the status quo – as formally occurred with slavery in the aftermath of the 13th Amendment. Brought to you by | University of Missouri-Columbia Authenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/13/14 11:09 PM Modern Reconstructive Presidential Leadership 287