American Presidency and the Social Agenda

PREFACE This book brings together two relatively recent areas of academic interest, namely,presidential researchandsocial policy research.It may surprise many students of politics to realize that scholarship in both fields is quite recent.Presidential research,the earlier of the two fields, looks to 1960 as its origin, the same year that Richard Neustadt wrote his now classicPresidential Power: The Politics of Leadership.The American Political Science Association, however, did not sanction presidential studies until 1981, when it first established the Presidency Research Group as an organized section. Since that time, American presidency research has enjoyed a rapid growth and diversification into multiple speciality foci. Social policy reserachlikewise remained obscure during the years that scholars preferred to study economic policy Moreover, when they did begin taking social policy seriously, none could agree on how to separate this subject from other public policy areas, nor could they agree on what term to use to refer to it. Thus, social policy has been calledemotive symbolization,it has been collapsed in withregulatory policy,it has been examined as a special type of regulatory policy--social regulatory policy--and it has more recently been christenedmorality policy,a term that designates a category for these social policies. All those researchers who contributed their insightful pioneering studies were in essence writing about the same phenomenon--namely, policies that consistently elicit vigorous responses based on strongly held beliefs. Now, while it is true that elite responses and public concerns toward social policies have long had political and social consequences in society, only recently have they been recognized as important in presidential politics. Yet most of the studies looking at the interaction between the two phenomena have either focused on one or two social issues or have dealt so briefly with them that it has been difficult to see patterns of response in the American executive and develop useful generalizations. Hence it was our belief that the time was right to examine extensively the modern American presidency as our most visible federal institution, determining how the occupants of this office have dealt with the type of policy that frequently challenges our policymakers, often creates serious conflict in society, and remains an issue with great staying power on decision-making agendas. The six issues examined in this book share a similar characteristic found in previous research about social policy by Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes--namely, that they continually evade "compromise and resolution." Our next challenge was how to organize this volume. We have relied onpresidential rolesas an integrating framework to examine how presidents respond to social issues and build their agendas. We have organized the book into chapters based on five presidential roles:commander in chief, chief diplomat, chief executive, legislative leader,andopinion/party leader.We discuss the two most important roles,--commander in chiefandchief diplomat--in one chapter that reflects the similar characteristics within each role. Theopinion/party leaderis a combined role suggesting a linkage between the president and the public because the president tries to build support among Americans not only for the office of the presidency but also for the particular president occupying the office, for those policies advocated by that president, and for the president's own party. Most social policy will fall within the domestic sector under the jurisdiction of the three roles that deal with that sector:chief executive, legislative leader,andopinion/party leader.We will discuss those few social policies thatdohave international sDaynes, Byron W. is the author of 'American Presidency and the Social Agenda', published 2000 under ISBN 9780130826329 and ISBN 0130826324.