Presidential Leadership

Long established as a leading introduction to the American presidency, Presidential Leadership, Fourteenth Edition, provides students with a comprehensive survey that addresses the capacity of chief executives to fulfill their tasks, exercise their powers, and utilize their organizational structures to affect the output of government. The authors examine all aspects of the presidency in rich detail, including presidential powers, presidential history, and the institution of the presidency.
Edwards, Mayer, and Wayne analyze the institution and the presidents who hold the office through the key lens of leadership. The authors explain the leadership dilemma presidents face and their institutional, political, and personal capacities to meet it. Two models of presidential leadership help students understand the institution: one in which a strong president dominates the political environment as a director of change, and another in which the president performs a more limited role as facilitator of change. Each model provides an insightful perspectives to better understand leadership in the modern presidency and to evaluate the performance of individual presidents. With no simple formula for presidential success, and no partisan perspective driving the analysis, the authors help us understand that presidents and citizens alike must understand the nature of presidential leadership in a pluralistic system in which separate institutions share powers.
The fourteenth edition is fully updated through the start of Trump's second administration, with recent policy developments, the 2024 elections, changes to the media environment, and the latest data. In addition, material from the prior edition's chapter on domestic and economic policy has been incorporated into other chapters for an overall briefer text.