History, Identity, and Methodology in Presidency Studies

• In Event: Institution Building in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

Abstract

For decades, the dominant identity of presidency studies in American political science was one of self-contempt. While the subfield explores a diverse range of substantive interests, many practitioners expressed anxieties that presidency studies was an “immature” area of study because it lacked “a powerful consensus on appropriate methodology and theoretical approaches” (Edwards, Kessel, and Rockman 1993, 11). It was “conventional wisdom” that “presidency literature was theoretically and empirically underdeveloped” (Mayer 2009, 781), possessed “immense gaps and deficiencies” (Heclo 1977, 6), and suffered from an “absence of rigorous research” (Edwards 2017, 66); namely, quantitative, scientific analyses.

However, by the late 1990s, the expectation that legitimate presidency research used positivist methodologies was largely assumed. Today, these approaches dominate the subfield. What changed and why? How did the subfield’s historical development arrive at this self-understanding? And what does it mean for contemporary presidency research, the inclusion or exclusion of non-positivist approaches, and possibilities for methodological pluralism?

This paper offers a genealogy of ideas, which traces how this particular self-identity emerged, was amplified, and evolved into a largely unquestioned history of the subfield’s mainstream. Methodologically, my analysis draws on Dryzek and Leonard’s (1988) critical review of internal histories of political science, which identifies their inherent normative character and constitutive relationship with the discipline’s identity and dominant practices. My paper explores the particular historical framing of presidency studies’ “identity crisis,” how it shaped presidency research, and what that means for the questions we ask, methods we use, and conclusions we draw about the contemporary presidency.

Author

• Richard Holtzman, Bryant University