Lawless conducted a study that examined the relationship between family arrangements and political ambition, looking specifically at whether being married, having children and having other household responsibilities affects the desire to run for office. She found that none of these variables had significant impact on candidacy considerations. While women’s numeric under-representation in politics is glaring, regardless of the level of office studied and the gender gap in political ambition among potential candidates is as large now as it was a decade ago, Lawless concludes that none of these disparities are influenced by family roles.

How do traditional gender roles impact women’s political ambition?

• Women with and without families are equally encouraged to run for office by a party leader, elected official or political activist.
• Women with family responsibilities are just as likely to be politically engaged as those without.
• Women candidates tend to fare at least as well as their male counterparts, both in terms of vote totals and dollars raised.
• Women are less likely to consider themselves “very qualified” than men, regardless of family responsibilities.

Data from Lawless’ study implies the “family explanation” does little to explain the gender disparity in interest in running for office once potential candidates find themselves well-situated in the pipeline professions. Narrowing the list of plausible explanations – especially ones that seem to have so much intuitive appeal – for women’s under-representation is a critical step to understanding the long term prospects for gender parity in U.S. political institutions.

      

 

 

Hudak identifies shortcomings for each of the systems that are currently established: The Central Personnel Data File System, The Plum Book, The Senior Executive Service and Schedule C systems and The Executive Vacancies Act Tracking System. These systems all help track positions and personnel, but are seriously restricted. Relying on agencies to provide information on positions and vacancies, updating data infrequently and listing personnel separate from positions limits the ability of these systems to maintain accurate personnel accounts.  

Hudak offers recommendations about how to change the current systems. He urges:

• Conducting an audit of appointees to determine the number of appointed positions.
• Expanding the Executive and Schedule C system to work more like the Executive Vacancies Act Tracking System, providing information about the individual serving in the position and the position itself.
• Establishing a more standardized position tracking system that links personnel to their position by using ID numbers and clarifies when new positions and new ID numbers should be made.
• Making reporting position vacancies mandatory for agencies.
• Linking performance evaluation data with appointee tracking.
• Providing the funds needed to update data systems that would organize position information and personnel systems necessary to maintain efficacy.

      

 

 

1. Strengthening OIRA. Over the three decades of the office’s existence, its budget has shrunk in inflation-adjusted terms while spending on federal regulatory activity has more than tripled.  Increasing the agency’s capacity would allow it to be more actively involved at the stage of formulating regulatory alternatives and reduce delays.
2. Scaled-down REINS.  The version of the REINS Act passed by the House in 2011 and 2013 would force Congress to vote on every significant rule—probably around 150 per congressional session.  REINS should be reformulated to force Congress to seriously consider and vote on the 10 or 20 most important rules each year, thus allowing for serious deliberation. 
3. Resurrect the OTA.  The Office of Technology Assessment served as an important source of congressional capacity in evaluating complex, scientifically-based regulatory issues during its existence from 1972 to 1995.  If Congress is to serve as an equal branch on regulatory issues it must invest in its own capacity to understand technical issues. 
4. Institutionalize Regulatory Lookback.  Cost-benefit analysis is too rarely and haphazardly applied to existing rules—many of which may be obsolete or shown by experience to be ineffective. A sensible, institutionalized lookback process would facilitate learning about the government’s effects, rather than simply acting as a mechanism for selective regulatory rollback.

Making regulations more effective should be too important to turn into a token issue, and as Wallach argues, there is enough common ground in 2014 to make several kinds of reform a serious possibility.  Overall, our regulatory system would be improved by building nonpartisan governmental capacity to evaluate the effects of regulation.

      

 

 

With historical hindsight, it is easy to see that From (and his many allies in shaping the “New Democrats,” including Brookings’ own Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston) were true political visionaries.  The vision From championed, with remarkable consistency, was to recreate the Democrats as the party of the middle class, committed first and foremost to America’s national interests rather than the party’s traditional interest groups.  This transformation was about policy and politics in equal parts: Democrats needed to update their policy agenda to match the changes in America over the preceding half century, and doing so was the best way to restore the party’s broad appeal and national competitiveness.  A remarkable number of long-time DLC priorities were realized under President Clinton, including national service (AmeriCorps), expanded crime prevention (100,000 cops), reinventing government (led by fellow-DLCer, VP Al Gore), and fiscal responsibility (culminating in the surpluses of the late 1990s). 

From’s book is required reading for those of us thinking about how today’s Republican Party might transcend the demands of its ideological base and recommit itself to serving the broader national interest, and there are many lessons to learn. 

One lesson in particular stands out: institutional change is a long slog, requiring a combination of fertile political conditions and reformers well prepared to seize their moment.  For the Democratic Party, the political conditions were a long time in the making, and included McGovern’s 1972 shellacking, resounding losses to Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and finally its failure to even come close to beating the far-less-charismatic George H.W. Bush in 1988.  From characterizes the Democrats as gradually coming to terms with its national political decline over the 1970s and 1980s, with members of the old guard vehemently insisting that anyone calling for new directions was a traitor to the party’s true principles throughout. 

Reformers thus had to labor for many years before they were in a position to offer a winning alternative.  They had to cultivate a real intellectual alternative to the party’s traditional platform, an enterprise which involved many people over two decades.  It also involved creating a parallel power structure within the party separate from the official apparatus at the Democratic National Committee.  This was not the work of thinkers out in the political wilderness: From began building a congressional base for his movement as the staff director of the House Democratic Caucus under Gillis Long (D-LA) beginning in December 1980, and over many years built a coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats looking to differentiate themselves from the left wing of the party.  Once the DLC was created in 1985, it was vital that From had buy-in from established legislators (especially Dick Gephardt and Sam Nunn) and governors (especially Chuck Robb and Bruce Babbitt) who would sustain the organization even after the DNC became annoyed by its existence.  And then the DLC had to do a whole lot of leg work to establish itself, relentlessly touring the country and enduring a hard loss in the Democratic primaries of 1988.  Its alliance with Bill Clinton (who provides a Foreword to the book) was also carefully cultivated and managed over the course of years.  From and Clinton were clearly lucky to find each other in the wake of 1988—but From especially can feel that he made his own luck by laying groundwork for many years before that, preparing him to ally the DLC with the most promising suitable candidate available.

From believes a DLC-like turnaround will be harder for Republicans to accomplish today than it was for the Democrats because today’s Republicans are more homogenous and less inclusive than the Democrats of the 1980s.  Though From, ever a committed Democrat, is an admittedly interested observer, his assessment seems fair: the group of center-leaning Republican legislators today available to form an “RLC” is historically small (and indeed, the real-life RLC is currently defunct).  Moderate Republicanism’s eclipse has been very nearly complete (as Geoffrey Kabaservice’s excellent recent book chronicles).

And yet—the equilibrating forces in American politics are extremely strong.  No matter how ideologically devoted some partisans may be, each party’s appetite for losing national elections is sure to be limited.  That means the political moment for a Republican reorientation is bound to happen, especially if the Democrats retain the White House in 2016.  Potential reformers who want a Republican Party capable of governing must ready themselves for their chance, and in doing so they have much to learn from Al From.

      

 

 

What lessons can we learn about the presidency from the post-shutdown health care roll-out that has consumed the last part of October?  One stands out – Presidents get elected because of leadership; they succeed because of management.  In the end, management failures end up hurting a Presidents’ ability to lead.

Let’s start with President Carter.  His first and only term was plagued by missteps and a bad economy.  Even so he went into his re-election campaign on a high and in January of 1980 it wasn’t at all clear that the right-wing Governor from the State of California – Ronald Reagan – would beat him.  And then, on April 24, 1980 a military operation to rescue American hostages in Iran suffered a spectacular and humiliating failure.   Lack of coordination, training, preparation and the absence of a coherent command structure were just a few of the managerial failures that led to the crash of a helicopter into a C-130 transport plane in the middle of a desert sandstorm.  Several American servicemen were killed and the mission aborted.  As the following graph illustrates, President Carter’s approval ratings sank into the 30s starting in mid-May of 1980 as the public absorbed the enormity of the failure.  And, he never recovered – losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan seven months later.

Source: University of Connecticut, Roper Center

President George W. Bush was a bit luckier.  His massive management disaster occurred in his second term.  When, on August 29, 2005, a category five hurricane struck New Orleans, the botched federal response riveted the nation for weeks.  Heart wrenching photos of people trapped on roofs or in the massive convention center made the U.S. look like a third world country.  Repeated missteps and a tangled bureaucratic response on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dominated the news for weeks – during which time President Bush’s apparent endorsement of the hapless leader of that Agency made him look even more out of touch with the operations of his government.  As the following chart shows, Bush’ approval ratings took a sharp dive in September of 2005 and they never recovered.  In fact, from then on through the remainder of his term he never again gets to even a fifty percent approval rating and his second term agenda, from privatization of social security to immigration reform, is doomed.  Of course, increasing disenchantment with the Iraq War (another mission the public viewed as a managerial nightmare) also contributed to this slide – but the inflection point was Katrina.

Source: University of Connecticut, Roper Center

For Carter and Bush, their managerial failures shine light on the common myth in American politics that governors have the executive experience needed to be president.  Between them, they served 10 years as governors of Georgia and Texas, administering large state bureaucracies. Despite that experience, both seriously mismanaged critical agencies and events, and paid the political price.

Source: University of Connecticut, Roper Center

And so we come to President Obama and the ill-fated rollout of his signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act.  Computer problems continue to make front page news and leaders of the effort have been grilled in front of Congressional Committees.  As the story of what happened unfolds it appears to have all the hallmarks of a management failure: an unclear command structure, insufficient testing, and a failure to anticipate what large scale demand would do to a new and untested system.  While Obama’s approval ratings have taken a hit in the past few weeks,  he’s not into Carter or Bush territory yet.  Jeff Zients, a talented former management consultant and former Deputy OMB Director has been brought in to fix the problems.  (Frankly, had Zients been fully in charge from the beginning this would probably not have happened.)  If he can really fix them by the end of November, Obama has a chance at salvaging his second term.  But if other ACA implementation stories continue to dominate, such as recent stories about people losing their health care plans in apparent contradiction to the President’s reassurances that this would not happen, the ACA rollout has the potential to turn into the kind of management catastrophe that dooms the remainder of a president’s term.

      

 

 

The implications of this finding allows scholars to reassess the way presidents lead in a polarized political environment, as presidents are not focused on persuading a national persuadable audience but instead on political partisans. In particular, this provides additional evidence of the president’s effectiveness at motivating his partisans and how mobilized partisanship at the state level engenders more partisan support of the president.  The effect is modest (about half a percentage point per year) but effective considering the president’s limited options.  The creation of mutual executive-legislative partisan goals through greater partisan support softens the bargaining environment for presidents.  Importantly, that these effects are specific to a more polarized period in the country and within Congress, there is additional evidence that presidential leadership has evolved into a partisan effect as political polarization has cemented in Congress.  The rumors of the death of the president’s ability to leverage his popularity into support in Congress is greatly exaggerated.  This effect wanes, however, in the polarized period, suggesting new partisan tactics are necessary. 

The polarization of politics has had a profound effect on political decision-making and presidential leadership.  These changes alter the way that presidents attempt to persuade the public and, indirectly, members of the legislature.  The “going partisan” theory is the next step in an evolving lineage of theorizing about how presidents adapt their political persuasion to their political environment.  In particular, this theory has a number of advantages:

1. First, it helps to explain how presidents act in a system besieged by partisan polarization.  The arc of the political process necessitates that presidents alter their tactics to lead and that scholars update their theoretical expectations about the success presidents may find.
2. Second, the “going partisan” theory helps to explain why presidential leadership doesn’t always work, perhaps more generally why presidential leadership of Congress does not always work.
3. Third, this theory is more cleanly resonant with evidence of the permanent campaign, which dominates the president’s strategic goals in the modern political era.

Ultimately, there is both good news and bad news for presidents.  The good news is that big losses are avoided.   Presidents, even those with a minority in both houses of Congress, can maintain a defensive position by keeping a minimum amount of opposition unified around the White House’s agenda.  Although presidential leadership of the public is never easy, persuading copartisans is an easier task.  Indeed, during the skirmishes over the budget and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in late 2013, President Obama kept the Democrats unified around primary policy goals.  Even as the House Republicans crafted their final spending offer before the government shutdown in October, “the Democrats didn’t budge, killing the proposal without a single defection. Their unity was so assured that Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) didn’t bother to convene a private caucus meeting to discuss the measure before the vote.”[1]

The bad news for presidents is that fewer substantial policy innovations or major agenda items are likely to be initiated or maintained.  Going partisan is a sustainable strategy only as a defensive measure rather than as an offensive one.  That is, presidents should focus on facilitating legislative action when they have majorities, even if opponents howl about an unfair process.