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Presidents have long been seen as operating within a political environment that is intractable and highly resistant to change. Recent historical-institutional research, however, has revealed presidents to be powerful agents of structural change. Building on this emergent literature, this article endeavors to demonstrate that Terry Moe's tripartite analytical framework-of structures, incentives, and resources-remains a helpful starting point for historically oriented scholars seeking to examine the relationship between presidential behavior and institutional change. It offers methodological suggestions for conducting historical research along these lines and illustrates the potential gains by reconsidering some recent research into the relationship between presidential action and party development. Each illustration shows that presidents, through their instrumental efforts to bring inherited party structures into closer alignment with their incentives, contributed to long-term party developments. Rather than leave their structural environment undisturbed, as leading theories might predict, their actions reconfigured party arrangements and altered their trajectories, influencing the choices made by subsequent presidents and other political actors.
Over the last half-century, most presidency research has been built upon Richard Neustadt's (1990 [1960]) premise that modern presidents operate within a political environment that is intractable and highly resistant to change. Though they may rack up some policy accomplishments and enjoy short-term victories over their opponents, presi- dents are widely seen as having limited capacities to alter the institutional and organi- zational arrangements that surround them. As George C. Edwards III has written, "there is little evidence that presidents can restructure the political landscape and pave the way for change. Although not prisoners of their environment, they are likely to be highly constrained by it" (2000, 34).1
Not all presidency scholars, of course, have shared this view. Scholars of rational choice institutionalism, in particular, ventured into presidency studies in the 1980s and 1990s heralding a very different perspective. In two important essays, Terry Moe (1985, 1993) urged scholars to shift attention from analyses of presidential strategy and style within fixed constraints to studies of how presidents factor into the broader "logic of institutional development" (1985, 236). As an illustration, Moe suggested that all modern presidents had contributed to a dynamic process of change in the executive branch. In their efforts to make administrative structures more competent and responsive to the White House in the...