Governing the White House: From Hoover Through LBJ. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1996  by Robert T. Golembiewski

Tags: White House

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Governing and Politicizing, to use convenient labels, constitute a singular double-play. The products of the same university press, in the same year, they add substantially - even prodigiously - to the stock of conveniently available information about the offices of the modern U.S. presidency. Looking backward, tomorrow's scholars may well pinpoint 1995 as the most prominent spike on the growth curve of research on the institutionalized presidency.

Although they both add insight and detail concerning the most powerful executive office in the world, Governing and Politicizing are otherwise an odd couple. They differ in their intervals for analysis (1929-1969 and 1948-1994), their methodological tetherings, and their breadths of coverage of the executive offices. These differences are usefully developed in some fullness.

The approach of Walcott and Hult can be circumscribed meaningfully by four emphases. First, their focus is on the White House Office (WHO), whose staffs recently include 500-600. The authors report on a decade of research on the WHO over the 40-year period ending with President Johnson's term. This deliberately excludes from detailed analysis significant parts of the presidency - e.g., what was called the Bureau of the Budget and now is the Office of Management and Budget.

Second, Governing seeks to frame its inquiry in scientific terms, given the challenges of testing theory against "hard cases" like WHO. That collection of agencies is usually seen as structurally fluid and loosely coupled, if not as the proverbial quaking aspen responding to changes in leadership, environment, and even passing fads. Broadly, the authors distinguish dependent variables, with the most prominent being a matrix of five characteristics circumscribing seven governance structures (especially, p. 15) - hierarchy, collegial-competitive, collegial-mediative, and so on. Walcott and Hult also focus on three clusters of "explanatory variables," which (roughly) include environmental features, the influence of particular presidents, and organizational dynamics. The authors provide this summary formulation of their basic research design (p. 19): "Uncertainty and controversy constitute intervening variables, mediating the relationship between the explanatory variables . . . and the dependent variables - the emergence, stability, nature, and differentiation of governance structures." Governing intends a quantum leap for presidential research, which has been gently touched by the concepts and results of empirical organizational studies. To illustrate, the presidential literature has been influenced by the early work with communication networks - e.g., "wheels" of linkages between people involving a hub and several spokes. Governing proposes to move far beyond such early penetrations of organization research into the literature on presidents.

Third, the bulk of Governing is expressed in 10 central chapters that reflect a traditional historical approach to WHO activities. These chapters are organized in three clusters of executive functions: as outreach to various publics, as policy processing, and as coordination and supervision. The details here are kaleidoscopic, even byzantine. Clearly, the authors have done their homework, and specialists will exalt in new detail as well as unique assemblages of the well known.

Fourth, Walcott and Hult return decisively to their empirical analytic framework in a final section - curiously, at least to these eyes, titled "Epilogue." Given chapter 1's ambitions, "capstone" seems the more appropriate heading. The major findings in this last substantive part of Governing fall into two categories. Broadly, the authors expected to observe that simple hierarchy would not dominate, and they were not disappointed. They found many examples of the seven governance structures described in their analytic framework (Table 1, p. 15). More ambitiously, Governing reports on WHO structural "fit" - e.g., with type of task - and assesses the stability of different degrees of congruence. This material is presented briefly (pp. 255-263), even in a rush, and gets characterized as "far from arbitrary" but as nonetheless "necessarily subjective" and as involving "blurry" distinctions (p. 259). The summary treatment does not provide sufficient detail for a meaningful assessment by this reviewer.

Weko's approach in Politicizing generally stands in marked contrast to Governing, as four major particulars illustrate. First, the focus is on one WHO "facet" - the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), whose staff "screens and recommends to the president candidates for political appointments" (p. 11), especially the 3,000 or so appointments available to each new administration. Over the years, PPO has varied in size from a few staff members to four or five dozen.

Second, Politicizing sharply details the character and consequences of a decided shift in the appointment process - from the primacy of political parties and their officialdom to the dominating influence of the presidency and especially the PPO. The text contains useful detail about the ebbs and flows in the balances associated with 10 presidential administrations and adds useful specificity to the presidential literature, which has for some time accepted the general shift that Politicizing now documents. Given the significance of this finding, the volume could have been titled Two Approaches to Politicizing Presidential Appointments. The shift in power toward PPO and WHO, and away from political parties and local actors, induced major changes in the kind and character of appointment politics - as in the heightened central conflict in WHO and PPO associated with their greater roles in appointments.