The Presidency for Nihilists - Kenneth Lowande July 28, 2021
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The Presidency for Nihilists
Kenneth Lowande∗
July 28, 2021†
Abstract
I develop a theory of the presidency based on the idea that what presidents ac-
tually accomplish does not matter. Most scholarship on the American presidency
argues that presidents must care about what the government they lead accom-
plishes in terms of policy. I argue contemporary presidents’ ability to put on a
compelling show of governance for some critical audience is often more important
than their substantive impacts on policy—and that this structures their behavior in
under-appreciated ways. Presidential initiatives often masquerade as policymak-
ing intended to alter the status quo—yet leave that status quo untouched. This is
because the degree to which either the “eyes of history” or their accountability rela-
tionship with the public motivates presidents to be effectual is typically overstated.
Presidential actions are mostly useful ideological signaling and credit claiming de-
vices that are well suited to helping them retain office and be well-remembered. As
a result, the constitutional and legal barriers to action enforced by the separation
of powers are less important for explaining presidents’ behavior than previously
thought.
∗ Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, lowande@umich.edu.
† Forhelpful comments and suggestions, I thank Deborah Beim, Charlotte Cavaille, Christian Fong, Harrison
Frye, Benjamin Goehring, Rick Hall, Mai Hassan, Will Howell, Ken Kollman, Barb Koremenos, George Krause,
Ken Meier, Terry Moe, Noah Nathan, Brendan Nyhan, Rachel Potter, Adam Rauh, Andrew Roberts, Jon Rogowski,
Chuck Shipan, Liz Suhay, George Tsebelis, and seminar audiences at the Institute of Social Research and American
University. I am responsible for all errors.Every year around the last Thursday in November, the sitting president convenes a collection
of supporters, staff, and press to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey. This exercise of the president’s
unlimited pardon power for holiday cheer became tradition during the Reagan administration,
and has since reliably attracted positive press coverage. What the public likely does not know
is that these turkeys are bred to be slaughtered and have terminal health conditions caused by
their enormous size (Greger 2011). All die within months of being pardoned.
The idea that presidents care most about what the government they lead actually accom-
plishes is central to most scholarship on the American presidency (e.g., Moe 1985; Moe and
Howell 1999; Cameron 2000; Lewis 2008; Beckmann 2010; Cohen 2012; Chiou and Rothenberg
2017; Christenson and Kriner 2020; Reeves and Rogowski 2021). In the words of William
Howell (2013), presidents want the ability to “alter the doings of government” (13). This is
supposed to be an implication of their underlying motivations. They want to be re-elected
and to leave a legacy. People expect them to solve huge problems in American life. But the
political system mostly ties their hands, so they are locked in a constant struggle to change the
status quo. They leverage all their authority (and then some) to get what they can done. This
is how political science teaches us to think about presidential power. Presidents are, first and
foremost, policymakers.
In this essay, I am going to argue something different. I will argue that presidents are
powerful because their office is uniquely suited to putting on policymaking demonstrations
for some audience, and that actual policymaking is often secondary. A shorter version of
this claim (and closer to Neustadt’s prose) would be: presidential power is the power to
perform. By “perform” —I do not mean moving the value of some objective measure of policy
impact like the net trend of a stock index, unemployment, unlawful immigrant entries, or the
proportion of uninsured persons. I mean performance in the Shakespearean sense: the ability
to put on a compelling show for some audience (e.g., Alexander 2010, 2011; Ding 2020). At the
very least, this means arguing that performances and substantive policymaking jointly serve
the president’s interests. But the most extreme version of this argument is that performance
is the only thing that matters in this way. Or, put differently, what matters most is not that the
1president is the chief executive of the federal government—but that they play the character
known as the American president on social media and television.
Key to this, of course, is that the American president is the most famous politician in the
world. Their ability to change the subject, set the agenda, and attract press coverage is second
to none. Even their typos are headline news.1 Every action they take—whether it changes
what the government does, impacts some real world outcome, or does nothing at all—is an
act of credit claiming that can serve their electoral interests or build their legacy. When faced
with all the expectations and challenges rightly identified by past research, I argue that they
often eschew the hard task of governing in favor of inch-deep actions that leave the status quo
untouched. They form feckless blue ribbon commissions. They declare waterways protected
that remain vulnerable. They close detention camps that remain open. They pose next to
non-contiguous border walls. They pardon damned turkeys.
In short, this perspective means taking seriously the uncomfortable possibility that the
American political system cannot be counted on to motivate presidents to invest in effective
and durable policy change. There are good reasons to consider this. Presidents might care
about outcomes and the actual doings of government because it matters for voters’ decisions.
But research on public opinion and political behavior highlights the tenuous relationship
between retrospective evaluations and the ballot box.2 Put differently, this conventional view
of presidential behavior rests on an accountability relationship that has limited purchase on
observable reality. Others argue presidents want to be remembered well by future generations,
and that this motivates them to pursue policymaking accomplishments. But the “eyes of
history” are as subjective and imperfect as the individuals who construct it. I do not deny
that presidents want to serve their personal and partisan electoral interests or with the idea
that they care about how they are remembered. The critical claim of this essay is that neither
1According to ProQuest’s News & Current Events database, President Trump’s “covfefe” tweet from May of 2017
generated over 1,800 news articles. Trump’s emergency declaration for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in
August of 2017 generated about one-sixth of the coverage.
2This essay takes a titular cue from Achen & Bartels’ Democracy for Realists (2016), which is central to this literature.
2of those underlying goals imply on their own that presidents pursue policy accomplishment.
Presidential actions that are utterly vacuous in terms of policy impact can be perfectly well
suited to serve both of those goals.
These distinctions are neither merely semantic nor inherently normative. In other words,
if performances can be useful substitutes for actual governance, this has implications for
presidential behavior. Presidents may make different strategic choices based on the knowledge
that they will be judged by how their actions appear (mostly in the short term). They sign
different directives, delegate to different subordinates, foster different bureaucracies, and
expend scarce time and resources differently. This has real world consequences, as it implies
presidents may leave some policy change on the table in pursuit of actions that are purely
symbolic. Relatedly, the institutions that structure their behavior differ based on your view
of how their underlying goals impact their available strategies. With the idea that presidents
want to change policy in hand, the conventional perspective sees a long list of potential
legal and political obstacles. Constitutionally empowered veto players like Congress and the
Judiciary may halt their initiatives. Bureaucrats may not carry out their directives. The public
may throw them out of office or answer surveys differently. Academics might rank them near
James Buchanan.
But the institutional constraints on mere demonstrations can be categorically different.
They can exclude the Madisonian checks and balances that are so critical to the standard
perspective. Actions that do not result in authoritative changes to the status quo may not be
not challenged (successfully) in court because no party can demonstrate injury that requires
some legal remedy. The challenges to these performances that come from Congress are
similarly rhetorical or symbolic. Career civil servants may totally ignore (or even humor)
the president for their remaining time in office. The standard explanation for this (in)action
for other political players is that they face collective action problems or are concerned about
enforcement. It is a supposed to be a sign of their institutional weakness. But a lack of formal
response can be a sign of the formal weakness of the president’s action.
The core idea of this essay is not a judgement about the moral qualities of presidents or their
3advisors, it is grounds for a new positive theory of presidential behavior. I have no interest in
deciding whether public officials are intentionally deceptive or bad people. Their intentions
and goodness are orthogonal to my argument, and if you ask them about actions that result
in little actual policy change, they become defensive and remark that they did their best given
the circumstances. That is the point. In this essay, at least, I will make no determination about
whether unmooring presidential actions from meaningful changes in governance is good or
bad, only that the American system generates circumstances that incentivize it as a political
strategy. So like more conventional understandings of the presidency, my argument adopts
institutionalism as a methodology and shares the same underlying behavioral postulates of
utility maximization in light of rule-based constraints—though I argue the “institutions in
effect” differ markedly (Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003).
Put differently, I am trying to explain how presidents behave with a different ideas about
how their goals and the political system structures what they do.3 I will claim that these
ideas are more consistent with the structure of the presidency and the behavior we can
actually observe from contemporary presidents, relative to the ideas dominant in writing on
the presidency. Because this argument is ambitious and any single essay is limited, my claims
will mostly be supported by accessible anecdotes, and aspects of the argument will need to
be elaborated on in other work. My objective is to point out aspects of the contemporary
presidency that go under-appreciated, and argue a lot can be gained by reconsidering core
ideas in the study of the presidency.
3I use the term “nihilism” in the title of this essay because this theory begins with the claim that a lot of what
presidents do has no higher meaning or value. This usage of the term is closest to Stegenga’s (2018) “medical
nihilism,” which argues many diseases are untreatable, and that most interventions are ineffective or harmful.
So my conception of the presidency is for nihilists because it asserts that many of the policy problems in
American life cannot be overcome by presidential initiatives, that much of what presidents do is ineffectual or
performative, and that this suits their interests just fine.
4The President as a Policymaker
Scholarship on the presidency over the previous three decades could be characterized as
the study of presidents “picking a preferred policy among relevant alternatives” (Beckmann
2010). Analyses of presidents’ legislative initiatives, veto threats, unilateral directives, political
appointments, judicial nominations, and more, proceed from the same essential foundation
rooted in rational choice institutionalism. The president cares “about policy outcomes”(Lewis
2008). For the love of Occam, this is most often the only thing presidents are assumed to
care about. This is directly related to a broader conception of presidential power. Chiou and
Rothenberg (2017), for example, define presidential power as “the ability to move policy toward
one’s own preference regardless of whether other political actors are opposed, indifferent, or
supportive”(23). Presidents want to maximize their influence over policy, and they are called
powerful when they do so despite the will of others.
There is, of course, a glut of examples motivating this conception. It is not controversial
to assert that presidents care about public policies as diverse as greenhouse gas regulation,
immigration reform, healthcare subsidies, drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, and almost
anything else. Many of these apparently disconnected cases can be explained simply by
assuming the president is a policymaker playing by the rules of a game. And though this
describes research that emphasizes the “institutional” president, the underlying focus on
what presidents accomplish in terms of policy is shared with “personal” or “psychological”
accounts (e.g., Neustadt 1960; Greenstein 1987). With notable exceptions, presidents certainly
have preferences about public policy and care about what they get done. At issue is whether
the actual impact they have on those policies directly serves their underlying goals, and more
broadly, whether the American political system incentivizes the single-minded pursuit of
policy accomplishments.
At the same time, there is no shortage of examples of presidential initiatives that result in
little such accomplishment. President Trump signed an executive order in August 2020 ban-
ning TikTok from operating in the United States, ostensibly over concerns about data sharing
5with the Chinese government. After the announcement of an administration-negotiated deal
that did not address this issue, the administration repeatedly delayed its enforcement until the
end of the term, when it was reversed entirely by President Biden (Elegant 2021). As of this
writing, a video of a person pouring milk while wearing coffee cups for shoes has been viewed
one-quarter billion times and counting by U.S. users. In 2017, the Trump administration lifted
restrictions on transfers of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies. The new
policy had almost no impact on the distribution of that equipment (Lowande 2021a). This
emptiness is not confined to contemporary issues or to President Trump. In 2015, the Obama
administration imposed the initial restrictions on the military transfers program, but they left
95% of the participating policy departments, and over 99% of the equipment untouched. In
January of 2013, President Obama held a signing ceremony for 23 new directives on gun control
after the murder of 20 children and 6 teachers in Newtown, CT. But even some of the modestly
ambitious orders—like funding gun violence research and appointing a new head of the Bu-
reau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—were not implemented (Lowande 2018). During the
2004 presidential election, President Bush signed an order requiring emergency preparedness
plans incorporate the needs of individuals with disabilities. The first such government-wide
plan issued following the election ignored them (Waterstone and Stein 2006). In July of 1998,
the Clinton administration rolled out an initiative that promised to protect and conserve rivers
(Clinton 1997). Though the project was promoted by the Gore campaign, and featured nu-
merous public designation events in then-swing states (e.g., Oregon, Florida, and Michigan)
with the Vice President, it offered no new legal protections or financial resources, and was
essentially inactive after 1999. In July of 1995, after years of criticism from the religious or-
ganizations demanding formal protections of prayer in schools, President Clinton signed a
directive ordering the Attorney General and Secretary of Education to outline guidelines for
such protections (Clinton 1995). Though the memorandum was published in the New York
Times and received considerable press coverage, the guidelines themselves did not change any
policy (e.g., Holmes 1995). President Theodore Roosevelt authored the first military physical
fitness test—the ability to ride 90 miles on horseback, 50 miles on foot, or 100 miles by bicycle
6over a three day period. Neither the order itself, nor the fact that Roosevelt himself passed the
test, prevented the military from ignoring it (Dodds 2013). These examples of clear and direct
orders, of course, exclude the hundreds of special task forces and commissions convened by
presidents that did little but pad the resumes of those appointed to them. If policy change
constitutes a “win,” then presidents fail frequently. Moreover, their time seems to be filled
with activities and initiatives that have little chance of impacting the doings of government.4
Of course, few would dispute the idea that president’s initiatives do not always work out or
are sometimes toothless, and some even acknowledge that different intentions might be built
into underlying models of spatial policy change.5 But there is remarkably little theorizing or
systematic evidence about the (in)efficacy of presidential initiatives.6 The fact that presidential
actions often do not have an impact is generally thought of as unimportant for understanding
their power and strategic incentives. It may be, for example, that these are simply exceptions
in a larger scheme of generally successful presidential initiatives. The outright failures may
simply be unforeseeable (but understandable) mistakes that are all part of the messy task of
governing. Alternatively, actions that are apparently free of substance are sometimes labeled
“messaging” actions, or thought of as the way some relevant audience is informed that the
president is doing something. Yet another possibility is that these actions are intended to
contribute to some future effectual policymaking—or perhaps “put pressure” on members
of Congress to act. Any or none of these explanations may be true, but these seemingly
exceptional cases are far too frequent to escape more complete explanation. Understanding
why presidents engage in largely ineffectual governance is as important as the prototypical
examples of dramatic policy change enacted with the president’s signature.
Beyond these anecdotes of failed or empty policies, it is also worth re-examining the
4Notably, most of the examples listed in this section would appear in lists of “significant” executive orders,
because they received coverage by the New York Times and other national news outlets.
5Cameron (2000), for example, notes that presidents may intend to “send a message” by vetoing legislation (71).
6Lewis (2008) argues that presidents balance the objective performance of bureaucracies against their ideological
goals—and so, is an exception to the general lack of emphasis on the effectiveness of presidents’ initiatives. In
addition, Kennedy (2015) examines compliance with rule-making prescribed by executive orders.
7underlying reasoning for using spatial policy change as the guiding analytical concept in
presidential studies. Howell summarizes this reasoning by writing that “today’s public” and
“tomorrow’s historians” are the two audiences that matter most to presidents (Howell 2013).
This implies two kinds of motivations. The first is based on classic political agency models
that suppose presidents are held accountable for their behavior in office by the public. The
second is sometimes thought of as presidents’ pursuit of a policymaking “legacy” or their
desire to be remembered well. These motivations are not mutually exclusive and there are,
of course, disagreements about which motivation is more important. The aim of reviewing
them is to point out that while both assumptions may provide a reasonable approximation of
president’s central motives, neither is sufficient to ensure the president will pursue effective
governance.
Policymaking and Accountability
Many argue that a public accountability link motivates the president to pursue real policy
change. For example, near the outset of the “institutional” revolution in presidential studies,
Moe and Wilson (1994) wrote that
“Unlike legislators, presidents are held responsible by the public for virtually every
aspect of national performance. When the economy declines, an agency falters, or
a social problem goes unaddressed, it is the president who gets the blame, and
whose popularity and historical legacy are on the line. All presidents are aware
of this, and they respond by trying to build an institutional capacity for effective
governance”(11).
More recently, Reeves and Rogowski (2021) and Christenson and Kriner (2020) provide rigor-
ous investigations of this accountability link by examining public support for unilateral action.
Christenson and Kriner argue that presidents “rationally defer taking executive action [...] if
they believe that the long-term political costs of pursuing an unpopular policy exceed the
benefits”(2020: 7). Reeves and Rogowski write that “Americans hold presidents accountable
not only for what they accomplish but also for how they wield power”(2021: 21). In short,
presidents pursue policy change because they are rewarded and punished for it.
8These are applications of political agency models (e.g., Besley 2006; Ashworth 2012; Canes-
Wrone 2015), and they might imply one of several different accountability relationships. Presi-
dents are held accountable by a public that reacts to the conditions seen during the incumbents
term—or, more stringently, presidents are held accountable by a public that observes the poli-
cymaking actions of the president and makes some judgement about their performance. These
seemingly straightforward ideas are based on assumptions that are difficult to sustain. Some
only weakly supported, others are likely false. Decades of research on public opinion and
political psychology point this out.
It cannot be taken as given that the public views the decisions of presidents and engages in
alternative political expressions as a result. This is because, first, the public may not have accu-
rate information about the the decisions of presidents. As Converse showed, “where political
information is concerned, the mean level is very low but the variance is very high” (2000: 331).
This conclusion has been remarkably stable, with Kinder and Kalmoe (2017) recently noting
that despite all the impressive changes in American life that could lead to a more informed
public (e.g., increased education, mass communication technology), “equally impressive is
how little visible effect they have had on how the American electorate understands politics.”
The strongest response to this point is that presidents are very famous and as a result, what
they do is so widely known that the informational problems are mitigated (e.g., Reeves and
Rogowski 2021).
But there are reasons the informational demands of the public accountability link are
especially difficult to sustain in the context of presidential action. News stories often make
unclear attributions for new policies (e.g., Ruder 2014, 2015). For presidential directives, in
particular, Cooper (2001) notes that stories sometimes misreport the document signed. There
is some evidence that news coverage is a function of both political context and news congestion
(e.g., Nyhan 2015). Indeed, the unifying concept of the “expectations gap,” is built on the idea
that the public does not generally properly attribute particular actions to particular politicians
(Lowi 1985; Waterman, Silva and Jenkins-Smith 2016).7
7This concept goes back at least as far as Louis Brownlow, who wrote: “Whatever else a President newly come to
9Moreover, there are less condescending reasons to suspect the public does not have ac-
curate information about the consequences of presidential decisions. Often, the implications
of the president’s decision are unclear or just unobservable. Even specialists find the impli-
cations of presidential policymaking difficult to understand. In September 2020, the Trump
administration ostensibly banned diversity training among government employees and fed-
eral contractors (Trump 2020). Though met with lawsuits from consultants that develop the
training, the order was mostly met with confusion because of its vague prohibitions (Safdar
and Weber 2020). What effect did it have on the presence of diversity training among federal
contractors? What mechanisms for compliance would allow the executive branch to enforce
such a prohibition? Would government agencies become less diverse, equitable, and inclusive
as a result? All unclear. It would take a dissertation of data collection and analysis to the
faintest idea, and now the questions are mostly academic after the Biden administration’s
revocation of the order (Biden 2021). For forty years, every change in partisan control of the
presidency has resulted in a reversal of whether foreign aid can be given to organizations
that provide abortions. Yet, a program evaluation of this policy suggests that prohibiting
abortion funding actually increases the number of abortions in the impacted countries (Brooks,
Bendavid and Miller 2019). Put differently, we need not rely on the low political information
as an explanation—even those with high political information are often uncertain about the
president’s impact on policy, or only have limited information available.
Second, it cannot be taken as given that the public will update their opinions about a
president, conditional on receiving new information. Much of this information has no objective
interpretation and is likely to be filtered through partisan identification (e.g., Campbell et al.
1960; Wilcox and Wlezien 1993; Bisgaard 2015). Worse still for this requirement, there is
evidence that partisanship biases perceptions of factual information (for relevant reviews, see
Bullock and Lenz 2019; Jerit and Zhao 2020). Partisans may hold sincerely different beliefs
about the “objective” consequences of presidents actions, or even whether the president has
the White House may look forward to, he will [...] realize from the first moment that he is certain to disappoint
the hopes of many...”(1949: 52).
10taken an action at all.
It also cannot be taken as given that the public makes re-election decisions based on some
overall assessment of the circumstances their administration presided over, which has been
thought of as a proxy for presidential competence (e.g., Fiorina 1977). While there is some
evidence of retrospective economic voting, there is also evidence that these public assessments
are subject to severe recency bias (Huber, Hill and Lenz 2012; Achen and Bartels 2016). To
modify Moe and Wilson’s (1994) words, if “the economy declines, an agency falters, or a social
problem goes unaddressed” very recently “the president [...] gets the blame.” At the very
least, this suggests that the public accountability link will be much weaker without the (rare)
close proximity to incumbent re-election—as Canes-Wrone (2006) has argued.
Institutionalist scholarship on presidential behavior and policymaking has mostly set aside
these points—for good reason. Understanding how institutions structure the policymaking
behavior of presidents is complex enough without continuously re-evaluating the president’s
electoral incentives. But the breakdown of the basic assumptions of the accountability model
has important implications for president’s incentives. Presidential actions and outcomes aside,
people tend to support politicians who they view as aligned with the groups they identify with.
Even when people are informed of the new actions of presidents, most will likely be interpreted
through strong partisan priors. This all culminates is a few basic points. When actions are
effectual, incumbent presidents should be able to get away with a lot without ruffling any
(new) feathers. When actions are ineffectual, the public will not know the difference. One
response to these arguments is that the public accountability link may be broken or fictional,
but for theories based on it to work, it is sufficient for presidents to behave “as if” it is
real (e.g., Friedman 1953). This may well be the case. There are plenty of choice quotes of
presidents espousing beliefs that sound a lot like the standard political agency model. But,
as Canes-Wrone, Herron and Shotts (2001) demonstrate, even these beliefs can lead to sub-
optimal policies if they run counter to the public’s priors. If the public rewards actions that are
ineffectual, the agency relationship can undermine public welfare.
Again, I do not dispute the idea that presidents care about what voters want and worry
11about their own re-election or the re-election of their co-partisans. At issue, though, is whether
caring about that implies that they pursue effectual changes to the status quo. It need not. The
president and their sophisticated political advisors do not need political science degrees to
intuit that voters have real limitations on their knowledge and perceptions, and it seems flatly
implausible that this would not impact the way they do their jobs. In other words, presidents
know the public does not have the information or time they would need to accurately evaluate
their objective performance.
Political Legacies
Most research on the American presidency consistently argues that presidents care about their
historical legacy—or are otherwise drawn to some higher purpose like the national interest.
This is important because it can provide a justification for assuming presidents seek pure
policy accomplishments. If they have internalized the idea that history will judge them, and
that this history is a function of what they actually accomplish, then no election or other
enforcement mechanism is necessary. Together, I will call this assumption and implication the
“policy legacy” argument. It is best articulated in a recent book by Howell and Moe (2020):
“To their core, presidents care about their legacies. They play to the ages. And
because of this they are predisposed to seek coherent, durable policy solutions
that will succeed in addressing the nations key problems and enhancing social
welfare. More than anything else, presidents ultimately want to be regarded as
great leaders. They want future generations to exalt them [...] they seek to marshal
the capacity of government to make their mark and leave policy achievements that
succeed and endure”(161-162).
This is a beautiful depiction of presidents and their motives. Being elected president causes
presidents to desire, “not only to be loved, but to be lovely” (Smith 1976: 113), and the way
they do that is to make good policy. As an idea, it is romantic and morally attractive. But what
evidence do we have that presidents are this unique, or that the American political system
somehow incentivizes this kind of behavior as a result? Claims like these are pervasive and
important enough to subject to additional scrutiny.
12The idea that institutionally-minded presidents care about their legacy is, oddly enough,
partly a claim about their personality and psychology. Surprisingly, among studies of presi-
dential psychology and leadership style, “legacy-mindedness” is mostly absent (Walker 2009).
Of course, all talk of legacy-mindedness presupposes there is such a thing as an objective
historical legacy that all presidents aim for. Their view of their own legacy will be informed by
their policy preferences—but also all the normal cognitive biases that tend to give most people
favorable views of their past. Presidential autobiographies as a genre demonstrate this.8 No
one will be surprised that Barack Obama thinks President Obama was a good president. But
the policy legacy argument seems to suggest there was a risk he would think otherwise.
The argument also seems to suggest that historians have some kind of objective view of
policy accomplishment. An honest evaluation of the academy will admit that because of
its contemporary partisan composition, if a president would like a boost in the presidential
rankings of historians (and political scientists), the most straightforward thing to do is: be a
Democrat. Again, the key question is whether the connection between what they accomplish
and how they are remembered is muddied by each of these issues.
Before turning to principal evidence for the policy legacy argument, it is worth pointing
out that whether the persons who occupy the office of the presidency are (genetically) imbued
with the desire to leave a legacy is itself contestable. To validate this initial assumption, we
could turn to evidence from social psychology, where researchers examine the desire to leave a
legacy (or “intergenerational allocation decisions”) in lab experiments. This area of research is
often connected to environmental policy decisions, as researchers investigate the basic moral
hazard problem inherent in conservation (e.g., Kempton, Boster and Hartley 1995; Hershfield,
Bang and Weber 2014; Zaval, Markowitz and Weber 2015). As Wade-Benzoni (2019) summa-
rizes, legacy-mindedness is positively associated with power asymmetry, proximity to death,
uncertainty about the future, and affinity with future generations—all regularities that should
would work toward bolstering the case for presidents’ legacy motive. But there are obvious
8Presidential libraries also illustrate this. The gravesite overlooking the coastal hills of Southern California is
hardly the place to look for an accurate description of President Reagan’s time in office.
13problems with applying this work to the presidency. This evidence is based mostly on lab
experiments with small numbers of graduate students in MBA programs (e.g., Wade-Benzoni
2002; Sligte, Nijstad and De Dreu 2013). This may be an inappropriate animal model for Amer-
ican presidents. Notably, Kertzer (2020) shows that studies of representation demonstrate the
most significant elite-public gaps in behavior. In addition, most of the aforementioned evi-
dence is based on language-based priming interventions. Though these studies have not been
subject to re-examination, this category of treatment effects has consistently failed to replicate
(Doyen et al. 2012; Open Science Collaboration 2015).
Of course, the ideal source of evidence for the policy legacy argument would be repeated
observations of presidents or other executives engaging in legacy-minded decision-making.
Howell and Moe (2016, 2020) provide several examples in the interstate highway system,
healthcare reform, and energy independence. As compelling as they are, there are equally
dismaying counter-examples of behavior that does not favor future generations. Few would
dispute that legacy was not front-of-mind when President Clinton pardoned his brother and
a donor to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, or when President Trump spent 1 out of every
5 days in office at a golf course he owned.9 Anecdotes are illustrative, but they cannot be the
only evidence supporting something as important as the policy legacy argument.
There is, however, systematic evidence on that the policymaking behavior of elected exec-
utives departs from what a long term policy legacy seemingly requires. The president’s legacy
motive is most important when they are term limited. Yet, the most significant public corrup-
tion scandals tend to occur in presidents’ second terms (Nyhan 2015), and most abuses of the
unconditional pardon power occur during lame-duck periods. Numerous studies in public
economics suggest term limits lead to allocation decisions unfavorable to future generations.
Ferraz and Finan (2011), for example, find that Mayors in Brazil misappropriate more funds in
their final terms. Lopez-Videla (2020) finds that capped political time horizons reduced long
term community investments by Mayors in Mexico. A recent study found that the psycholog-
ical aversion to lying was damaging for re-election prospects in a sample of elected executives
9Data backing up this statistic can be found at https://trumpgolfcount.com/.
14in Spain (Janezic and Gallego 2020). While normally taken as evidence that accountability
links work well, it also implies that the policy legacy motive does not necessarily enforce the
same kind of boundaries against misbehavior. Policy legacy arguments seem to dismiss the
idea that presidents could be as imperfect as executives outside the United States.
There are also empirical regularities in presidential decision-making that suggest legacy
or the national interest are less important than demanded by the conventional view. A line of
work argues that presidents strategically allocate government spending to favor their electoral
interests (e.g., Berry, Burden and Howell 2010; Kriner and Reeves 2015; Rogowski 2016).
This uneven allocation of federal grants does not preclude legacy-mindedness, but studies of
political allocations in other areas make a stronger case against it. Reeves (2011), for example,
argues that presidents strategically allocate government responses to natural disasters. In an
examination of the location of military installations, Kriner and Reeves (2015) write the “case
plainly shows the danger of delegating additional authority to the executive branch under the
belief that doing so will lead to normatively positive policy outcomes based solely, or even
primarily, on the grounds of maximizing efficiency” (81).
In summary, there is important counter-evidence that suggests the eyes of history do not
constrain presidential behavior the way some suggest. Of course, my point here is not to
argue that presidents do not care about the legacy they leave. They would not have books
ghostwritten for them or attempt to influence other biographies if they did not. The point is
that a historical legacy itself is only loosely connected to the pursuit of real and lasting policy
accomplishment. If presidents do care about the legacy they leave, then it is important to
remember that legacy is a human artifact subject to all the same informational deficiencies
and biases that are highlighted in public opinion research. Presidents are certainly capable
of convincing themselves that all kinds of behavior is conducive to leaving a legacy. Plenty
of chief executives steal, lie, or engage in other kinds of policymaking that has suboptimal
intergenerational impacts. These strategies need not be constrained by having an impact on
policy. The interesting theoretical question, then, is what will a president (partially) free of
the need to make a difference do?
15Presidential Power as a False Front
The implications of these disparate but important phenomena are relatively simple. The causal
connections between what presidents actually accomplish, what they get credit for, whether
they are re-elected, and how they remembered by history, are all very loose and uncertain.
The basic question, then, is how can we expect these weak connections to produce tightly
structured incentives for the pursuit of pure policy? I argue that we cannot, and that any
theory of presidential behavior should take this notion seriously. I attempt to do that in the
remainder of this essay. The motivating observable behavior is the frequency of presidential
actions that amount to almost no policy change, along with the continued embrace of the
president as a first-mover in politics. The former point of emphasis diverges significantly
from the conventional view of presidential power.
Nonetheless, this conception shares some of the same stylized facts about the presidency
and American politics. First, in general, the public expects presidents to address huge prob-
lems. Waterman, Silva and Jenkins-Smith (2016) argue the public “expects action on an
increasingly broad and escalating range of issues” (3). Historian Jeremy Suri (2017) writes
that “every modern president has struggled with [the] gap between promise and possibility”
(xv). Lowande and Shipan (Forthcoming) demonstrate there is variation in (mis)perceptions
of presidents’ discretion by policy area. Importantly, an outsized view of the presidents role in
public life does not imply the kind of accountability link that motivates the desire for substan-
tive policymaking. That is, the expectations gap does not imply that the public expects some
problem to be solved—and when it is not, then rushes to punish the incumbent for failing.
Instead, the expectations gap is about what the public thinks is the president’s job. It poses a
question that is more similar to “Does a mechanic fix cars?” than it is to “Did my mechanic
fix my car?”
Second, despite the vast authority delegated to them by Congress, handed them by the
Courts, and explicit or implicit in the Constitution, presidents do not have the power needed
to address most problems in American life. They are not autocrats, as any examination the
16list of Gallup’s Most Important Problem (MIP) poll makes this clear. Climate change and im-
migration provide two notable examples.10 Following a Supreme Court ruling that mandated
greenhouse gases be regulated as pollutants, the Obama White House spent considerable time
and effort developing its “Clean Power Plan.” Lawsuits delayed its implementation until a
partisan transition finally slated it for repeal. But had the regulations gone into effect, the
actual reductions in harm from climate change—by the plan’s own estimates—were marginal.
With perfect implementation and compliance, the total estimated economic benefit of the 71%
reduction in power plant emissions was $30 billion by 2030, while the annual economic harms
of climate change without action are expected to grow to about 6 times that figure by 2050
(United States Environmental Protection Agency 2015; United States Enivronmental Protec-
tion Agency 2017). Likewise, both major parties agree the immigration system is broken, and
both of their constituencies say it should be fixed. President Obama shielded nearly one mil-
lion people from deportation through the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program. Even in the case of DACA, which is an exceptionally good case for conventional
views of presidential power, there is a basic counter-factual that’s often unconsidered. Absent
DACA, how many of those roughly 700,000 people have been removed from the U.S. during
that time period? Because of the age, educational attainment, and lack of criminal history
required to qualify, the answer is likely very few. President Trump attempted to reverse the
program, built a border wall, halted asylum seekers, and separated immigrant mothers from
their infant children. Both climate change and immigration remain fixtures of the MIP list.
These cases illustrates several important distinctions. I argue that presidents cannot gen-
erally solve major problems in American life alone. This does not mean they can do nothing,
or that their actions are not important and do not have dramatic impacts on people. In the
broader scope of these policy problems, they can make only limited changes. What they
cannot do is permanently reform or address any of the fundamental issues that contribute
to a broken immigration system or the effects of climate change. The rub is that whatever
initiatives they spend time on—even those that are successfully executed—the underlying
10In the December 2020 poll, these topics were in the top 15 (Gallup 2020).
17problem will outlive their time in office. Failure is all but certain.
Third, congressional dysfunction means that real “wins” will be few and far between. By
dysfunction, I do not mean polarization or gridlock, though they are related. I mean what
contemporary research describes as a decline in the institution’s “capacity” to legislate (e.g.,
Clarke 2020; LaPira, Drutman and Kosar 2021; Crosson et al. N.d.). This trend has numerous
symptoms. Congressional staff tend to be younger, less experienced, poorly paid, and turnover
quickly. The non-partisan instrumentalities of Congress lack resources. The resources that
members do have are increasingly allocated toward messaging and communications (Lee
2016). The process of legislating has shifted toward large omnibus bills (Krutz 2001), and is
centralized within leadership (Curry 2015). Bills signed into law are more likely to contain
errors (Lewallen 2016). Its members are inexperienced and know less about policy than
their predecessors (Hansen and Treul 2019). Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist and advisor
to retiring Senator Rob Portman recently provided an apt summary of the contemporary
Congress:
“If you want to spend all your time going on Fox [...] be[ing] an asshole, there’s
never been a better time to serve [...] But if you want to spend all your time being
thoughtful and getting shit done, there’s never been a worse time to serve” (quoted
in Kraushaar 2021).
It is no surprise that the Congresses of the contemporary era—with some notable exceptions
(e.g., Rothenberg 2018)—do not address major policy questions (Howell and Moe 2016).
This political context presents an obvious challenge for presidents, who I assume as others
do care about re-election, the election of co-partisans, and their historical legacy. I embrace
these assumptions because they plausibly subsumes many underlying motivations for pres-
idents, including normatively appealing ones like policy impact and legacy, along with less
appealing ones like enjoying the food served at the White House and pardoning criminal
friends. To partake in the meal, you have to stay in office—or otherwise help favored suc-
cessors get elected. The question is, then, can the machinery of government be leveraged to
serve these goals? I have argued that having a real impact on policy or policy outcomes is
wholly necessary. But this does not mean that the office of the presidency provides no useful
18resources for promoting the incumbent’s interests.
I instead argue that the office of the presidency gives presidents the opportunity to produce
policymaking demonstrations for relevant audiences. By “policymaking demonstration,” I
mean an action that shows the president has changed some status quo policy. This generic
definition encompasses public pushes for legislation in Congress, negotiating and signing
international agreements, signing presidential directives, releasing disaster aid, and more.
The key feature of this behavior, as I have argued, is that it allows presidents to credit claim—
that is, attribute policy change to their own effort (Mayhew 1974: 53). These demonstrations
can, of course, include things that “alter the doings of government.” Classic examples of
presidentially-driven initiatives like the DACA program both change government policy and
impact citizens’ lives while serving as a credit claiming device. Again, nothing precludes
substantively important policy changes from having symbolic value (a la Edelman 1964). I
refer to actions have the latter without the former as false fronts (Lowande 2021b). A false front
is a presidential initiative with ideological content but little or no policy impact. Again, this
does not mean that no actions they take will have policy impact. The key point for presidents
is that this kind of demonstration is functionally indistinguishable (for the audience) from real
policy accomplishments.
Relevant audiences, of course, are as varied in size and character as the president’s con-
stituency. They depend on the demonstration itself because the action is tailored for their
approval. They include narrow interest groups, attentive single-issue voters, Congress, and
even the typical, inattentive voter. None of these audiences is likely to be pivotal on their
own, so no particular action or demonstration is likely to be. This is not a model of presi-
dents attempting to persuade the median voter. The scale and diversity of their portfolio of
performative acts must match public expectations of the office.
The idea of performative or symbolic political action is not itself novel or unique to this
essay. Murray Edelman (1964) wrote famously that “the most conspicuously democratic
institutions are largely symbolic and expressive in function”(19). For Edelman, political actors
are motivated by the need to give a sense meaing among mass audiences. Among cultural
19sociologists like Alexander (2010, 2011), it is a favored way of describing the behavior of the
political actors. According to Alexander, presidents succeed or fail based on their ability to
become “collective representations” of the public by putting on “compelling performances
of civil competence to citizen audiences” (2010: 9). As he goes on to write, “Nothing is
more practical than a good performance” (272). Left unanswered in these interpretivist
accounts, however, is what kind of performances are likely to work, why they work, and
ultimately, when the president will deploy them. Moreover, Alexander sees performative
actions as useful during political campaigns, and focuses mostly on media relations, rhetoric,
advertisements, and position-taking. But for incumbents, the levers of government can provide
more compelling performances, which makes understanding presidents’ strategic incentives
to be “figurative” as opposed to “substantive” all the more important.
More recently, the strategic use of symbolic actions has been used to understand the
authoritarian state in China (e.g., Gilley 2008; Zhao 2009; Zhu 2011). Ding (2020) argues
performative governance helps lower-level bureaucratic actors maintain regime legitimacy
when their actual capacity to address societal problems is low. Like Alexander (2010), this
behavior is defined as the “theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures to
foster an impression of good governance among citizens” (529-530). My application differs
in several important respects because the obvious differences in regime type and office. In
autocratic regimes, the general impression of good governance is proposed as a minimum
basic requirement to thwart replacement—or at the most extreme, some kind of rebellion.
In democratic regimes, citizens think of politics as a contest for expressions of their group
loyalties. Likewise, a chief executive like the president can almost always do better than
gestures and speeches. It may even be that the typical symbols and gestures would be
ineffective coming from an office so many expect to be Herculean. Thus, policymaking
demonstrations by a president often have an ideological dimension, involve actual levers of
government, and are not always mere gestures.11
11This conception of presidential action also differs from Judd (2017), who studies a formal model of unilat-
eral action in which an executive makes suboptimal policy choices to demonstrate their skill. Policymaking
20This naturally leads to strategic decisions about how this portfolio is constructed. Thus far,
this account has been entirely descriptive. But while a complete positive theory of presidential
power as a false front is beyond this essay, there are a few basic patterns that likely follow from
this perspective. The first has to do with how these demonstrations are carried out. Like other
studies, I consider two potential avenues for producing policymaking demonstrations: legis-
lating and acting unilaterally. Legislating means lobbying Congress, while acting unilaterally
means producing orders to subordinates.
Unilateral action is typically a more effective policymaking demonstration. The first and
most important reason is that—as Moe and Howell (1999) showed—it confers first mover
advantages and, for the most part, eliminates collective action problems (but see Rudalevige
N.d.). The president ultimately decides whether to initiate most of these actions. The president
is the median and the pivotal voter, so there is no gridlock in the Oval Office. In contrast,
the first mover advantages for policymaking demonstrations are more general than those
explored in versions of the classic setter models of spatial policy change. In theories of
spatial policy change, the first mover advantage exists because the president has the authority
to give Congress a take-it-or-leave-it offer (e.g., Romer and Rosenthal 1978). They secure
wins because they set up choices for pivotal members of Congress that ultimately favor the
president’s interests (Howell 2003). Again, this kind of advantage presupposes that one party
wins or loses on policy.
Presidential policymaking demonstrations confer first-mover advantages for the same rea-
son journalists go for scoops: getting there first matters. Being the first to act is most conducive
to producing effective credit-claiming opportunities. Any public performance is likely to have
a short-term effect on public attention and the public agenda (Franco, Grimmer and Lim 2017;
Howell, Porter and Wood 2020). Moving first forces other politicians to react—often in ways
that reinforce and amplify the strength of the demonstration. When President Obama signed
gun violence directives in response to mass shootings, the reaction from the opposition was
not that they were toothless and symbolic. Instead, then-prominent Republicans like Rick
demonstrations may have no implications for voter welfare.
21Perry said that the Second Amendment “cannot be...abridged by the executive power of this
or any other president.”12 Others used this as an opportunity to point out the frequency of
executive order use by the President.13 The same concerns have followed the incoming Biden
administration. It took less than two weeks for Senator Marco Rubio to argue that the new
president was “governing from the radical left” by executive “fiat.”14 This kind of criticism,
oddly enough, reinforces the president’s credit-claiming. This is because they typically cede
the president’s basic claim to being responsible for a change in the status quo. Members of the
opposition, of course, have an incentive to distinguish themselves from the sitting president.
They have a shared interest in partisan combat induced by the president’s actions.
This, of course, assumes that the arguments made by the opposition do not work—that is,
the procedural arguments do not persuade anyone who would not have already been opposed
to Obama and gun control. Though there is some evidence the public rewards executives for
action over inaction (Olsen 2017), this is at odds with recent work by Reeves and Rogowski
(2016, 2018, 2021), who argue that “public support is no blank check on unilateral presidential
powers” and that “Americans hold presidents accountable not only for what they accomplish
but also for how they wield power” (2021: 21). According to Reeves and Rogowski, people
punish presidents for taking unilateral action because of underlying beliefs about the rule of
law and the separation of powers. I do not dispute the idea that people can have preferences
about the way policy is made, but these considerations tend to be far less important than
opinions about the action itself and about the politician taking the action. When respondents
are surveyed and randomly assigned to treatment conditions with presidents either passing
12“Gov. Perry responds to President Obama’s executive actions,” KTLV News, January 16, 2013; Accessed January
2, 2021. URL: https://www.kltv.com/story/20603601/gov-perry-responds-to/
13In a press release, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) wrote that “President Obama’s executive orders on gun
control are in violation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. [...] In President Obama’s first term he has issued
144 total executive orders. Today’s total signifies a nearly 15% increase in the total number of executive orders
for his term on this one issue.”
14Rubio made this argument in a video posted to Twitter. URL: https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/
1352600933365112832.
22laws or writing executive orders, the public does not rate them lower in either condition
(Christenson and Kriner 2016, 2020). The public simply does not penalize presidents for
acting alone.
Unilateral action is also more effective because of the risks of investing in Congress as a
credit-claiming arena. Beyond the basic fact that credit for legislative success is shared, the
legislative process itself is typically long, drawn out, and can lead to outcomes that make the
president look bad. The congressional dysfunction I described contributes directly to this
by limiting the prospects for the president’s action culminating in a signing ceremony. The
low likelihood of a bill actually passing, however, is only partly to blame. As Lee’s (2016)
essential account of the contemporary Congresses demonstrates, the process of legislating has
evolved to dramatize differences between the parties in pursuit of majority control. The same
incentives that encourage messaging votes while discouraging bipartisanship, bicameralism,
and institutional maintenance extend to interactions with the President. The opposition
benefits most when the president appears to lose.
Another relevant concern is that the same kind of negative headlines that come from
legislative failures may arise when executive action fails. Moreover, it is possible that the
initial credit-claiming makes the magnitude of the blame worse because the policymaking is
more easily traceable to the president. This downside, however, requires that information
about the outcomes of presidential actions are available. But it is possible that patterns in
news coverage dampen these concerns. Coverage of unilateral action—even actions that do
not work out—-is typically asymmetric. The initial reports of such action have a positive
valence, with comparatively little follow up.
On his final day in office, for example, President Obama signed a series of actions that
created new national monuments and expanded old ones. The actions were heralded by
environmental groups as an important move that would help bolster the president’s envi-
ronmental legacy, and the actions generated hundreds of national and local news stories.
Coverage of whether these actions were actually successful has focused almost entirely on
President Trump’s review of those monuments. Nonetheless, several of those actions con-
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