When the President is not really the Boss: The Mysterious Case of Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Leadership

Abstract

In the classical theoretical debate regarding the balance between the leadership of political leaders and the strength of democratic institutions, the office of president of the United States offers a complex example. As one of the best contemporary specialists of the American presidency, Fred I. Greenstein, recently wrote in his study of presidential leadership, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama: ‘The United States is said to have a government of laws and institutions rather than individuals, but… it is one in which the matter of who occupies the nation’s highest office can have profound repercussions’ (Greenstein, 2009: 2). Few American presidents illustrate this conundrum better than Ronald Reagan. In many respects, he embodies the very definition of a successful leader. He came to power, in 1980, after years of political chaos in the United States, marked by the violent upheaval of the 1960s, the shocking corruption of Watergate and the humiliating defeat of Vietnam. Reagan astutely made the most of this difficult context in which American institutions seemed irretrievably broken, and the series of audacious economic reforms he launched in the spring of 1981 showed it was still possible to wield enormous power from the White House — in other words, his presidency tended to prove that when entrusted to an efficient leader willing to take risks to advance his ideological goals, American institutions, as in a mutually-reinforcing movement, could still work very well.