The Contemporary Presidency: Managing White House-Congressional Relations: Observations from Inside the Process.

The complex dance between the president and Congress is perhaps one of the most misunderstood relationships in American government. Translating citizen preference into law and policy is at the very core of American representative democracy. The interaction between the White House and Capitol Hill is where much of this "translating" occurs. However, rivalry between the president and Congress fundamentally affects the linkage between voters and government. A variety of factors, such as our constitutional design, a variety of constituencies, varying terms of office, weak political parties, divided party control of government, pluralism, and political individualism have a direct impact on the capacity of a president to work with Congress (Thurber 1991, 1996b).

We attempt to improve the understanding of executive-legislative working relationships by suggesting alternative ways to analyze the conduct between these two institutions by combining our firsthand experiences while working on the staffs of Presidents Bush and Clinton and as longtime academic observers of the rivalry.

Much of the research to date, as well as conventional wisdom among reporters and pundits, suffers from a common flaw: analyzing the relationship between Congress and the president, principally from the standpoint of the president (Peterson [1990] and Collier [1997] make similar arguments). This is not surprising since most who study executive-legislative relations are presidential scholars (Laski 1940; Corwin 1957; Rossiter 1960; Burn 1963, 1973; Cronin 1980; Neustadt 1980; Bond, Fleisher, and Kurtz 1996). Peterson (1990) calls this approach "presidency centered" (see Pfiffner [1996] and Thurber [1991, 1996a, 1996b] for balance of presidential and congressional viewpoints on the relationship). Most of ...

If you are already a vLex customer, Access Here