Presidential Power in the Americas since Independence
PRESIDENTIAL POWER
What makes a president ‘great’ and which have been the ‘great’ ones in the Americas? These were the main questions we sought to answer in our book, Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence (Lexington Books, 2016). We sought to extend the work of the US presidential scholar, Stephen Skowronek, who developed the concept of ‘political time’. For Skowronek (1993, 2011), the US political system appears stable on the surface, supported as it is by an unchanging constitution, clear separation of powers and a two-party system. But that doesn’t mean that turbulence has been absent. Since the republic’s foundation in 1789, the US political system has faced periodic periods of upheaval with those presidents best placed to tackle them regarded as the most outstanding.
Skowronek’s institutionalist account of presidential leadership combines both structure (including its opportunities and constraints) and human agency and distinguishes between four types of presidential actor: transformative individuals were those who adeptly exploited a crisis by setting down a new political order that might last generations. Those that succeeded them would be one of two types: either those who supported and consolidated that order (i.e. articulative) or challenged it – but find it too strong to break down (pre-emptive). Over time though, the parameters of the political order and its support base might erode, making it more susceptible to change. In such cases, those who tried to maintain and reconstitute it, but failed to do so were disjunctive; those who succeeded in replacing it with a new order were transformative.
As Latin Americanists, we were curious how ‘political time’ might be applied to our more visibly tumultuous region – and through it to identify those presidents who were transformational, or ‘great’. To identify ‘greatness’ we made use of two approaches. One was to conduct a survey of outstanding leaders in the US and Latin America. We calculated the average number of mentions for political leaders across North and South America based on an analysis of their mentions in a number of commonly used textbooks for the history and politics of the two regions (Skidmore, Smith and Green 2014, Williamson 2009, Eakin 2007, Keen and Hayes 2004, Jenkins 2012, Remini 2009, Sinclair 1999, Schweikart and Allen 2004, Zinn 2005). We were encouraged that our findings for the US case tallied closely with previous efforts to rank US presidents; we were therefore confident that our Latin American findings were similarly accurate although no other surveys have been done.
