The Case for Agency: Evaluating Discretion in Presidential Agenda Construction

• In Event: (Re)Evaluating Presidential Power

Abstract

When scholars address presidential agenda setting, they focus on how presidents go about getting what they want. We know far less about the prior step: how presidents decide what they want (agenda construction). Moreover, prior work that has dealt with this topic has been focused on the external constraints imposed on presidential choice by Congress and public opinion. I contend, by contrast, that presidents have considerable agency in determining their domestic policy priorities. They rely on it to establish who they are and where they want to take the nation, putting their own “political projects” (Skowronek 1997) forward. I situate this agency in the selection of agenda items and the manner and sequence in which presidents pursue them. Reversing field, this approach credits action which operates on the system and seeks to change it, rather than action that merely fits into preset parameters of possibility. External constraints remain relevant, but they are not determinative. Instead, the agenda-construction process reveals how presidents (to borrow language from the pragmatist William James) tap into the “ambiguous potentialities of development” as they attempt to lead the nation on their own terms and furnish individualized legacies. Failing to account for this “power of initiative and origination” (James 1880) leaves us with an underspecified understanding of presidential decisionmaking, and the legislative process more broadly, that obscures the consequentiality of political leadership in driving important policy outcomes. I develop this argument through an exploration of three modern presidential administrations that pose a hard test for my agency thesis: Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. These case studies draw from archival records obtained at the associated presidential libraries (including through Freedom of Information Act requests) and interviews with senior administration personnel.

Author

• Jack Greenberg, Yale University