Lassance 20120920 comparative-presidential-studies-slides

Comparative
Presidential Studies:
the presidency in
historical perspective
Antonio Lassance
Brazilian Institute for Applied Economic
Research & Political Science Institute, University
of Brasilia
antonio.lassance@ipea.gov.br
Brasilia, Brazil, September 2012

Carving of Abraham Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, ca. 1934

10th Annual RedGob Meeting and
I International Conference on Comparative Presidential Studies and Presidentialism

Comparative Presidential Studies: the presidency in historical perspective

1. Presidential Studies are always comparative studies

2. Presidents matter

3. Testing APD’s framework in Brazilian presidencies:

it works



• Presidents are sequentially tied to the legacy of their predecessors.

• People always compare the incumbent president with the others. They have to

do that as voters, at each election.

• Parties also highlight the differences among their presidents to be associated

to some political labels. Presidents are the most familiar face of parties.



President Barack Obama portrayed as (side by side with) Jimmy Carter, Franklin D.

Roosevelt, George Washington; Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln, by magazines

Collected by The New York Times, May 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/weekinreview/15president.html?pagewanted=all




Scholars compare presidents all the time:

• What kind of presidents have they been (in comparison to the others)?

• Could they govern (in comparison to the others)?

• How effective were they (in comparison to the others)?

• Why did they succeed or why did they fail (in comparison to the others)?




• Some studies put presidents on scale

• Others rather work in framing categories




On scale, presidencies go up and down from:

• Ineffective to effective ones (NEUSTADT, 1960),
• Less to more politicized and centralized (MOE, 1985, LEWIS, 2008,
RUDALEVIGE, 2002)
• Less to more presidential bargaining (MAYHEW, 1991)
• Low to high veto rates (CAMERON, 2000; McCARTY, 2000)
• Less to more unilateral action (HOWELL, 2003; COPPER)
• Less to more involvement in influencing public opinion (CANES-WRONE, 2006).




Categories: presidents are arranged in distinct quadrants that vary

according to the characteristics of their behavior or their role (e.g.):

• Active or passive, positive or negative Presidential decisions usually cannot be

(BARBER, 1972) completely reduced to a matter of

presidential temperament, behavioral and
• Self-sufficient, strategic or minimalist
psychological character
(QUIRK, 2010)



Historical institutionalist approach:

• Macro-political analysis

• Comprehensive framework

• Theoretically-driven approach

• Returned to the scene: the rise and fall of political regimes; state building and

state capacity; developmental vision; Institutional innovation, institutional

conversion and incremental change (politics and policy)



APD’s framework

Recurrent structures of presidential authority
Previously
President's political identity
established
commitments Opposed Affiliated
Politics of
Vulnerable Politics of disjunction
reconstruction
Resilient Politics of preemption Politics of articulation
Source: SKOWRONEK, 1983, p.36.



3. Testing APD’s framework in Brazilian presidencies:

it works

Reconstruction the presidencies:
Prudente de Moraes (1894-1898), Campos Salles (1898-1902), Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945;
1951-1954), Castello Branco (1964-1967), Tancredo Neves/José Sarney (1985-1990), Itamar
Franco (1992-1995), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), and Lula da Silva (2003-
2010)

Politics of articulation:
Rodrigues Alves (1902-1906), Affonso Penna/Nilo Peçanha (1906-1910), Wenceslau Braz
(1914-1918), Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), and, up to
now, Dilma Rousseff (elected in 2010).



Politics of disjunction:
Epitácio Pessoa (1918-1922), Arthur Bernardes (1922-1926), Washington Luís (1926-1930),
João Goulart (1961-1964) and João Batista Figueiredo (1979-1985).

Politics of preemption:
Hermes da Fonseca (1910-1914), Gaspar Dutra (1946-1951), Jânio Quadros (1961) and
Fernando Collor (1990-1992).

Special cases:
Presidents of military regime and brief transitional moments: Deodoro da Fonseca e Floriano
Peixoto (1889-1993); Delfim Moreira (15.11.1918 a 28.07.1919); José Linhares (29.10.1945
a 31.01.1946); Costa e Silva (1967 a 1969); Garrastazu Médici (1969 a 1974); Itamar Franco
(02.10.1992 a 01.01.1995).



Presidential action in detail:

The institutional production of five paradigmatic presidents:

• Campos Salles

• Getúlio Vargas

• José Sarney

• Fernando Henrique Cardoso

• Lula da Silva



Focus on unilateral institutional production:
• Executive orders (in Brasil, regulatory decrees)

• Law-Decrees and Provisional Measures

Types of action:

• Institutional innovations

• Incremental changes

• Management orders

• Acts of coordination

• Decisions concerning foreign affairs.



The politics presidents make in Brazil:

• Regime builder presidents also begin trying “to fix the house” and concentrating

institutional policy innovations

• The great innovation is in polity (a new governing coalition)

• Pressured (by crisis or his own coalition), presidents innovate and change policy

incrementally. Then they unfold alternatives that confront the “status quo”

• Confronting the “status quo” provoke opposition, unifying the affected groups to defend

their interests against governmental action



• As a response, the government becomes more politically and ideologically aggressive, in

terms of getting explicit their purposes on policy

• More innovative presidents make use of more coordination acts to formulate policy

• Coordination organisms help presidents to produce innovation

• When presidents innovate, they also increase incremental changes and management.

The greater the number and relevance of institutional innovation, the more it will

require incremental changes and more management acts.



APD is a useful tool for comparative presidential

studies

It works to study Brazilian presidencies

There’s still a lot of work to be done



References:

BARBER, David James. [1972]. 2008. The Presidential Character. 4th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

CANES-WRONE, B. 2006. Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

HOWELL, William G. 2003. Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press. 2003.

LEWIS, David E. 2008. The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

MOE, Terry M. 2003. “The presidency and the bureaucracy: the presidential advantage,” In: NELSON, Michael. The
Presidency and the Political System. 7th. edition. Washington: CQ Press,

NEUSTADT, Richard. [1960]. 1990. Presidential power and the modern presidency: the politics of leadership from
Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.

QUIRK, Paul J. Quirk. 2003. “Presidential Competence”. In: NELSON, Michael. The Presidency and the Political System.
7th. edition. Washington: CQ Press,

RUDALEVIGE, Andrew. 2002. Managing the President’s Program: Presidential Leadership and Legislative Policy
Formulation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

SKOWRONEK, Stephen. 1983. The politics presidents make: leadership from John Adams to George Bush. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1983.



Thanks!


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