Does the president represent the entire nation? Or does he speak
for core partisans and narrow constituencies? The Federalist
Papers, the electoral college, history and circumstance from the
founders' time to our own: all factor in theories of presidential
representation, again and again lending themselves to different
interpretations. This back-and-forth, Jeremy D. Bailey contends, is
a critical feature, not a flaw, in American politics. Arriving at a
moment of great debate over the nature and exercise of executive
power, Bailey's history offers an invaluable, remarkably relevant
analysis of the intellectual underpinnings, political usefulness,
and practical merits of contending ideas of presidential
representation over time. Among scholars, a common reading of
political history holds that the founders, aware of the dangers of
demagogy, created a singularly powerful presidency that would serve
as a check on the people's representatives in Congress; then, this
theory goes, the Progressives, impatient with such a
counter-majoritarian approach, reformed the presidency to better
reflect the people's will-and, they reasoned, advance the public
good. The Idea of Presidential Representation challenges this
consensus, offering a more nuanced view of the shifting
relationship between the president and the American people.
Implicit in this pattern, Bailey tells us, is another equivocal
relationship-that between law and public opinion as the basis for
executive power in republican constitutionalism. Tracing these
contending ideas from the framers time to our own, his book
provides both a history and a much-needed context for our
understanding of presidential representation in light of the modern
presidency. In The Idea of Presidential Representation Bailey gives
us a new and useful sense of an enduring and necessary feature of
our politics.
General
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