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The Politics Presidents Make

The Politics Presidents Make

Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, Revised Edition

Stephen Skowronek

ISBN 9780674689374

Publication date: 03/25/1997

Stephen Skowronek’s wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. In an afterword to this new edition, the author examines “third way” leadership as it has been practiced by Bill Clinton and others. These leaders are neither great repudiators nor orthodox innovators. They challenge received political categories, mix seemingly antithetical doctrines, and often take their opponents’ issues as their own.

Praise

  • A magisterial work, one of the most important studies of the presidency--indeed, of American politics--ever written...[Skowronek] comes very close to identifying the root problem affecting presidents...This is the all-important fact that the Constitution is unchanging and nondeveloped, while at all times intersecting with a social, economic, and political world that has undergone incessant development from the beginning. The whole work may be read as an extended, powerful, and penetrating meditation on some of the global consequences of this fact.

    —Walter Dean Burnham, American Political Science Review

Author

  • Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University.

Book Details

  • 576 pages
  • 6-3/8 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Belknap Press

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