Uncover the intricacies of American politics with our meticulously crafted notes from Warwick's PAIS Department's module, "Politics of the U.S.A. (PO207)." Delve into every facet of American political life, from the workings of Congress to the dynamics of the media and gender's role in shaping the ...
‘President and Leaderships’ in ‘New Directions in the American Presidency’
Justin S. Vaughan
What is Presidential Leadership?
Greenstein [2005: 235], defined presidential leadership as ‘the capacity of the president to
make a difference’. However, what kind of difference makes all the difference. Edwards &
Wayne [2006: 1] focus on this subject:
‘Within the presidency, the president is clearly the chief. Executive officials look to the
office for direction, coordination, and general guidance in the implementation of
policy; members of Congress look to it for establishing priorities, exerting influence,
and providing services; the leaders of foreign diplomatic governments look to it for
articulating positions, conducting diplomacy, and flexing muscle; the general public
looks to it for enhancing security, solving problems, and exercising symbolic and
moral leadership – a big order, to be sure’.
Edwards & Wayne [2006: 19&20] also refine the concept of leadership to two contrasting
perspectives; the role of director and the role of facilitator.
‘In the role of director, the president is out in front, establishing goals and
encouraging others inside and outside of the government to follow. Accordingly, the
president is the moving force of the system and the initiator of change’.
‘In the role of facilitator, the president reflects, and perhaps intensifies, widely held
views and uses available resources to achieve his constituency’s aspirations. Thus,
the president prods and pushes the government, in which roles, responsibilities, and
powers are shared’.
Essential Leadership Qualities:
Greenstein [2005: 217-223] identified six criteria for determining whether president will be
an effective or ineffective leader:
1) Effectiveness as a public communicator: as communication outlets continue to
become more popular and part of daily life, this skill is vital. However, many recent
presidents have been poor at communicating. In fact, of the modern presidents, only
Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and Obama would be branded good communicators.
2) Organisation capacity: without being able to build and manage a team, a president
will find it difficult to steer the ship of state and make informed decisions.
3) Political skill: without the ability to build relationships and influence others at a
higher level, presidential agendas are doomed to fail. Vision is needed to develop
this agenda.
4) Vision: presidents need to understand the links between the policies they advocate,
and the goals they wish to achieve. This is linked to cognitive style.
5) Cognitive style: this refers to the way in which presidents think and perceive
information, how they process information and how well they process it. For
, PO207: Week Seven: The Presidency
example, Carter was an engineer who tackled problem solving by reducing issues to
their component parts, whilst Clints was a great thinker who brought together
numerous sources of information. Despite their differences, both processed
information at a high level.
6) Emotional intelligence: this is defined as the ability to identify and manage one’s
own emotions and the emotions of others. It regards how to connect with people
meaningfully.
Leadership Expectations:
Genovese [2008: 147] identifies a range of expectations facing a president. These
include effectiveness, toughness, skill, authority and agenda setting. Ray Price, told his
boss Richard Nixon on 1968 that:
‘People identify with a President in a way they do no other public figure. Potential
presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God,
father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging furies thrown in.
They want him to be larger than life, a living legend, and yet quintessentially human;
someone to be held up to their children as a model; someone to be cherished by
themselves as a revered member of the family…’ [in Novak, 1974: 44]
Only in the last century has this level of expectation been placed on the president. This is a
result of industrialisation, urbanisation, technological proliferation, and the US’s expanding
role in global politics:
‘These new realities called for energetic national leadership, and the vague and
elastic contour of Article II of the U.S. Constitution provided a source of new federal
authority for those executive seeking it – in turn raising expectations for future
presidential performance as the challenges facing the nation – and its leadership –
grew in both scope and severity’. [Vaughan & Villalobos, 2015: 23-24].
The expectation gap is a thesis which dictates that there is a gap which exists between what
presidents can feasibly accomplish, and what the public expects from them.
Leadership Obstacles and Forces of Constraint:
Whether a president is a director or a facilitator, a president engaging in leadership is all
about the art of influence. Edwards [2016: 1] wrote that:
‘Influencing others is central to most people’s conception of leadership, including
those most focussed on politics. In a democracy, we are particularly attuned to
efforts to persuade, especially when most potentially significant policy changes
require the assent of multiple power holders’.
However, many obstacles stand in the president’s path to influence. The core obstacles are:
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