Books

“Political scientists have forever, assumed that ordinary people have no meaningful views about the presidency and presidential power. No longer can that assumption stand. In a masterful work, Andrew Reeves and Jon C. Rogowski have shown that not only do people hold views, expectations, and judgments of the presidency but that their opinions are highly consequential for politics. Hats off to a path-breaking piece of research!”

“Executive orders, signing statements, budget impoundment, brinksmanship - has the system of checks and balances failed? Has the United States entered the era of the imperial President? Andrew Reeves and Jon C. Rogowski, two of the nation's leading scholars of American institutions, offer a careful and thorough assessment of the ability of its President to act unilaterally. The public - through its commitment to ideas embodied in the Constitution - has time and again constrained what Presidents do. The public itself, more than Congress, has preserved the American system of checks-and-balances. No Blank Check is required reading for any serious scholar or student of American politics.”

“A president is by far the most public politician in America. How successfully they exploit public strategies remains an unsettled question, even after several decades of active research. Into this research field, Andrew Reeves and Jon C. Rogowski offer a fresh consideration: the American public's expectations about how presidents should and should not pursue their goals. For this, No Blank Check commands our attention.”

“In this well-informed and rigorous work, the authors challenge the view of presidential universalism with their finding that presidents routinely allocate federal resources to benefit their partisan and electoral constituencies. The fact that chief executives skew policy to the demands of the electoral college encourages us to reconsider our views of the presidency and the manner in which we elect its occupants.”

“Doug Kriner and Andrew Reeves have written a terrific book that is destined to shake up the presidency subfield. I, myself, will be arguing with it for a long time. Marshaling an eclectic array of data, Kriner and Reeves contend that presidents are not quite the national statesmen that they are made out to be. Rather, in their basic orientation toward distributive politics and disaster relief aid, presidents can be just as narrow-minded and shortsighted as legislators. Whether presidents and legislators are of a piece, well, that remains to be seen. But with this stimulating book, a gauntlet has been dropped.”

“In a book that is beautifully crafted and filled with careful empirical analysis, Kriner and Reeves offer a forceful challenge to mainstream thinking on the presidency, arguing that presidents are just as particularistic in their approach to politics as members of Congress are and cannot be relied upon to counterbalance the latter's parochialism. This volume is destined to be controversial and to stimulate new thinking and research on the presidency.”