Andrew Rudalevige
Dept. of Political Science
Dickinson College

A recent c.v. may be found here.


RESEARCH AND WRITING

My dissertation, Managing the President's Program: Centralization and Legislative Policy Formulation, 1949-1996, won Harvard's Toppan Prize in June 2000 as the university's best dissertation in political science.  The revised version (with the subtitle "Presidential Leadership and Legislative Policy Formulation") was published by Princeton University Press in 2002, and won the APSA's Presidency Research Group Richard E. Neustadt Prize for the best book on the presidency that year.  A preview of the introductory chapter is available here; the book is available through the press or other on-line booksellers.  The book develops a theory of "contingent centralization" predicting when presidents will rely on White House staff as opposed to departmental resources.  It traces the formulation of presidential legislative proposals from 1949 to 1996, using a wide array of archival sources, and quantitatively tests the conditions under which presidents follow centralized strategies.  It also shows how different formulation strategies matter to the proposals' reception in Congress.

Related work includes a closer focus on the politicization and centralization strategies of Ronald Reagan (for the 2002 UCSB conference on the Reagan presidency and subsequent edited volume), as well as research with Princton's David E. Lewis exploring the relationship between politicization and centralization as substitute strategies for bureaucratic control.  Our 2005 APSA paper is available through the APSA website.



Book jacket, The New Imperial Presidency (2005) My second book, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate, was published by the University of Michigan Press in fall 2005 in the series on Contemporary Political and Social Issues edited by Alan Wolfe.  The book traces the Constitutional grounding of presidential power and its evolution over time, with particular emphasis on the aftermath of the "imperial presidency" era described in the 1973 book of that name by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  The extensive congressional resurgence against presidential power, I argue, receded almost immediately; the powers claimed by, and delegated to, George W. Bush since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have largely wiped out what elements of the resurgence regime still remained.  Presidential power is a vital part of contemporary governance.  Yet as Justice Robert Jackson wrote, reliance on executive authority holds both "practical advantages and grave dangers."  Congress must reclaim its rightful role as the first branch of the federal government, not to take the place of the president, but to ensure that national policymaking reflects  the priorities set by vigorous debate and rigorous oversight.  You may find the table of contents and selected chapters from the book here. The argument is updated somewhat in the September 2006 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly; the article-length version has been reprinted in various recent readers, including Pfiffner and Davidson's Understanding the Presidency (Pearson) and Jillson and Robertson's Perspectives on American Government (Routledge).


For my commentary on ongoing events relevant to the material in The New Imperial Presidency, please see:


The George W. Bush Legacy, co-edited with Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman, was released by CQ Press in late 2007. It contains thirteen essays by leading scholars in American politics; a full description and table of contents is available here. My chapter, "The Decider," traces the decision-making processes of the Bush executive branch. A series of other chapters in edited volumes sum up aspects of the Bush presidency and its legacy. See, for instance, my essay in Testing the Limits (ed. Rozell and Whitney).


OTHER RESEARCH

As the topics of these books should indicate, I am broadly interested in interbranch relations. I have studied the short but interesting life of the national item veto and its relation to executive-legislative bargaining, the role of contemporary cabinet government, and presidential-congressional relations in general, with regard to the "imperial presidency," and with still more specific regard to the first and second terms of George W. Bush. 

Further, I am interested in exploring the president's relationship with his own executive office staff apparatus: how do presidents devise organizational strategies for maximizing the information available to them for decision making?  "The Structure of Leadership: Information, Organization, and Presidential Decision Making" won the Presidency Research Group award for best paper presented at the American Political Science Association meetings of 2002, and a revised version (with a slightly different title) appeared in the June 2005 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly.  I returned to this topic with the Obama administration's announced "team of rivals" approach in mind in a recent issue of Governance and in a longer paper at the most recent APSA meetings.

A related project involves the study of  the Bureau of Budget (BoB)/Office of Management and Budget's use to presidents in managing the executive branch and the institutional history of the Budget Bureau; an article on the Truman BoB written with Matthew J. Dickinson appeared in the Winter 2004-05 issue of Political Science Quarterly.  A "prequel" on Franklin Roosevelt's BoB appears in the Spring 2007 issue of Congress and the Presidency, and a piece on the bureaucratic entrepreneurialism of early Budget Directors Harold Smith and Jim Webb appears in a recent edited volume entitled Formative Acts (Penn, 2007) after being presented at a Yale University conference on American Political Development. Studies of the 1960s BoB and the Nixon-era shift from the BoB to the Office of Management and Budget, are underway - one version will be presented at the 2010 Midwest Political Science Association meetings in April.

My research on midterm Congressional elections, "Revisiting Midterm Loss: Referendum Theory and State Data," appeared in the January 2001 issue of American Politics Research (formerly American Politics Quarterly).  

Finally, I am interested in the formulation and implementation of national policy, especially in the area of education. A study of the accountability politics of the 2001 education reform law, written under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, appears in the volume No Child Left Behind?, edited by Paul Peterson and Marty West (Brookings, 2003).  Other research examines NCLB's implemenation and interaction with the legal strategies behind state-level "adequacy" lawsuits, and appears in West and Peterson's School Money Trials (Brookings, 2007). An essay analyzing the politics of student aid in higher education policymaking appears in Rick Hess's volume Footing the Tuition Bill (AEI Press, 2007). More recently an essay on "Structure and Science in Education Research," in When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008) traces the way education research has been organized in the federal government, and how this has structured political battles over its functions and findings; this was updated as an assessment of the Institute of Education Sciences in Education Next in 2009.