Situation Analysis

IBM, the model information technology company of the world, had 70% oft the industry’s profits in 1984. In 1990, they were the second most profitable company in the world. 8 years later, from 1991 to 1993, the company lost nearly $16 billion. John Akers and his executive team planned a recovery for the company, involving a breakup into 16 child corporations. But when the problems got worse in the fourth quarter of 1992 — the time Akers had claimed recovery would begin — the Board began its search for a new CEO outside the company. Lou Gerstner, formerly of RJR Nabisco, American Express, and McKinsey, must remake IBM into a profitable corporation however he can.

By the time John Akers became CEO in 1985, IBM had essentially stopped evolving as a company. Their business model was so successful that nobody felt a need to modify it; indeed there was fear that doing so would be bad for the company. As a result, the company failed to respond to several important developments in its field. First, computing moved away from the mainframe architecture (responsible for huge portions of IBM’s revenue and profits) to the client/server model. Second, computers became commodity hardware with interoperable parts running interoperable technologies. This interoperability pushed prices lower, but IBM’s managers could not break from their high-margin mainframe sales to compete in other areas.

Even worse, the company was thoroughly inefficient. As a worldwide operation with 24,000 product lines, it had many ways to hide redundant products and redundant parts that filled the same holes in different product lines. The customer sales teams, organized geographically, no longer understood all the software and hardware they were selling. And ironically, IBM had difficulty billing its customers correctly.

Akers was not blind to all of this, and began efforts to combat the problems in 1988 while the company was still profitable. He reorganized to better match resources to the market; made managers more accountable while decentralizing authority; and gradually decreased the number of employees. His efforts bore some fruit as financials got better, but in 1991 they suddenly plunged and the company lost money. IBM’s problems had caught up with it, not because they suddenly became worse but because people had stopped buying IBM mainframes, which had propped up the company’s financials in previous years.

Akers and his team instituted a new plan, deliberately removing workers, both through early retirement programs and firings, for the first time in the company’s history. And they quickly decided the way to save IBM was to break it up into child corporations.

Opportunities & Threats

As a company, IBM faces a number of threats. Its core business in mainframes has died as a serious computing arena, and IBM is organizationally unsuited to compete in the PC market. Nevertheless, IBM has its strengths too. The company is worldwide and competes in nearly every part of the information technology industry, so at least some portions of the organization can generate profit. Its global reach means that profitable areas of the company can be rapidly expanded and evangelized

Even better, because of IBM’s huge scale, it has all the expertise necessary to become a big player in providing network services and infrastructure if it can reorient its organization around this major new industry. And company weaknesses, like marketing, should give a high return for very basic reforms.

Decisions To Face

Lou Gerstner faces a number of important decisions. The most obvious is whether to accept Akers’ planned breakup of IBM or to keep the company whole, and this decision will frame the rest of the strategy. But there are other decisions as well. He must develop a coherent customer strategy to retain and develop clients, either for the new IBM or for its new child corporations. As a new CEO joining a partly-failed management team, he must decide who to keep and who to lose. And whether he breaks up IBM or keeps it whole, Gerstner must decide which employees to keep and which to fire, and how to do it.

Alternatives & Analysis

Gerstner’s first choice as CEO will be which managers to keep and which to let go. Such a decision cannot be made instantly, but it must be made quickly and based on performance. Choose carefully, but make sure executives know they are not immune to their own results.

The next decision Gerstner will face is whether or not to break up IBM into many smaller corporations. The plan, developed by Akers, has several potential benefits. Breaking up the company will allow the effective subgroups to flourish while letting the market kill off the inefficient players. Smaller groups will be more agile, and the dramatic change of a breakup will force people to adopt other changes — in customer communication, in product strategy, in employment guarantees —more easily. But there is evidence that doing so will deny IBM its greatest strength: IBM is a provider of everything, worldwide. And breaking up the company, while it could let business units sink or swim on their own, could also lump together profitable groups with dying ones, and simply break the problem down from one IBM-sized problem to 16 smaller problems that still sum to the same size. Similarly, the computing market is changing, and business units that have a bright future collaborating within IBM could end up in separate child groups, unable to benefit from their collective knowledge.

Finally, Gerstner must retain and develop IBM’s customer base through what may be a difficult process. He can either delegate the task to subordinates whose sole job is to interface with customers, or make customer satisfaction part of his own role in the company. By delegating, he ensures that customers will always know who to talk to; but by making satisfaction part of his own role he shows commitment to customers, which is valuable directly for its customer impact and for its influence on IBM’s workforce.

Recommendation

The only advantage of breaking up IBM seems to be that it passes the buck, making market forces — rather than the management team — responsible for any layoffs that occur. IBM should remain a single company, but it should either shut down or sell off the unprofitable business units that suck money and coherency out of the organization and reduce its workforce to remain competitive. This will maintain the company’s unique advantages as an expert in every area, letting it quickly take advantage of new fields in computing and continue to service customers as a one-stop shop around the world.

In customer support, Gerstner should rework the current troubled system. Each client should have a dedicated support person as a customer representative, but the customer representative should be an overseer and coordinator, responsible for bringing the appropriate product salespeople to the client and for tracking the status of orders and other processes. This stands in contrast to the current system where customer representatives are responsible for acquiring enough domain knowledge on anything to sell it to their client, and nobody is responsible for process management. This change in support structure should be matched by a stronger and simpler customer accounts system, so that customers can trust their IBM invoices and not have to reprocess them for accuracy.

Critique of Existing Recommendations

It is easy to endorse Gerstner’s recommendations with the benefit of hindsight, but even in his time they should have been an easy sell. His strategies forced the company and its executives to accept reality as a competitor in the market (rather than the only option), and his customer focus gave IBM the information it needed to survive. Even better, his focus on IBM as a worldwide company gave it uniformity in areas that had previously been highly fragmented and made communication and responsibility a part of the corporate culture. Assigning executives to individual clients helped to refocus management on customer service; its only downside is that executive time is valuable and such intense work on individual companies is probably not sustainable in the long run.

Comparison of Leadership Styles

John Akers and Lou Gerstner had very different leadership styles at IBM. Akers was a product of the company, having worked there for years. He tried to fix IBM without actively firing a man, and maintained management traditions focused around committees and agreement. He revealed himself to be a human-assets leader, encouraging regional autonomy and consensus.

Gerstner was very different. Brought in to fix an ailing company, he explicitly rejected many of the assumptions that Akers had continued to accept. Gerstner focused on clients, brought in other individuals to perform cost-cutting and efficiency measures, and formed strategy groups at multiple levels. He clearly revealed himself as a strategy CEO, which matches well with the role he was expected to play.

Bibliography

Farkas, Charles & Wetlaufer, Suzy. “The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead.” Harvard Business Review on Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 1998.

Austin, Robert. D & Nolan, Richard L. “IBM Corporation Turnaround.” Harvard Business School. Case 9-600-098. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 2000.

Situation Analysis

After 4 years of strong growth under Andrew Jung, Avon’s earnings have gone flat and the share price has fallen more than 30%. Because 70% of Avon’s revenue are in overseas developing markets, any flat growth means that Avon is losing to competitors and will eventually collapse if growth cannot be renewed. Andrea Jung has charged herself with renewing growth like any outsider would, while using her knowledge of the company to streamline the process.

1999

Jung had faced similar challenges at Avon when she became a member of the executive team in the mid-nineties, as she pressed for unified production schemes instead of the splintered manufacturing they had in dozens of local markets. By the time she became CEO in 1999, she had largely succeeded and the company was well off. By more directly aligning the company with its mission — which she interpreted as being to improve women’s lives — the company gained an improved image through donations to breast cancer research and self-testing campaigns run through sales representatives.

The company’s revenue and profits also increased dramatically after Jung’s ascension, as she significantly strengthened research & development in all areas. With help from Susan Kopf, Avon reduced its material suppliers from 300 to 75, and made ordering and fulfillment significantly more automated. While this allowed them to introduce online sales, Jung deliberately kept that opportunity low-key in order to retain direct representatives as Avon’s main outlet —and the faster ordering system meant that sales representatives could spend more time selling and less time filling out forms.

2005

Unfortunately, by 2005 Avon’s growth had largely stalled. Competitors in developed markets offered better prices by selling online and through stores, while a number of competitors had entered emerging markets, providing Avon’s first real competition in an area which its continued existence depends on. Avon needs to reinvigorate growth if it hopes to remain relevant in the developing world.

Opportunities & Threats

Avon faces a number of threats. Most notably, the company gets 70% of its revenues from overseas markets despite the fact that a consumer in the USA spends nearly twice as much on toiletries and beauty as a single Russian, four Chinese, and four Indian consumers combined (notice that these numbers pair overseas consumers with US consumers in rough proportion to total population). The fact that overseas markets are growth markets does not mitigate Avon’s significant decline in US sales, and companies that maintain strong domestic sales will be better-financed in their attempts to capture other markets. Nonetheless, Avon’s pre-existing sales representative network in these countries give it a strong organizational advantage in making new clients.

China’s WTO accession has required it reinstate direct selling, and Avon’s expertise in direct selling (and previous sales network) give it a great opportunity with important company strenghts in that country. Of course, the ban on direct selling might have accustomed consumers to store shopping, in which case competitors with a stronger retail focus may have the advantage. Avon will need to remain nimble if it hopes to remain relevant in the large and growing market that is China.

Decisions To Face

Jung & Avon face a number of important decisions. As always, Avon, could expand into retail marketing. The company is organizationally resistant to such an idea, but retail offerings cost less and produce higher profit margins since they do not require sales representatives, with the requisite commissions.

Avon further needs to decide how it will approach China. At present, the company maintains retail stores there, but China has recently lifted restrictions on direct selling, so Avon could attempt to rebuild its sales representative network throughout the country.

Additionally, Avon must determine why demand has slumped so sharply in the developed markets. Are its products directly unpopular? Are there not enough sales representatives? Are high-volume consumers of beauty products unaware of the brand?

Finally, Jung could again redirect Avon’s capital, as she did at the beginning of her tenure by dramatically increasing research & development.

Alternatives & Analysis

These decisions turn out to be a choice between 2 main alternatives: Avon can either focus on the domestic or the overseas markets, and it can do so while either maintaining its direct-sale methodology or by switching to a retail model.

Avon has a great deal of expertise in the direct-selling method, but direct-selling is becoming less and less viable in the developed markets as consumers have become accustomed to retail shopping and resentful of salespeople knocking on their door. Nonetheless, Avon’s previous retail entrance strategies have failed rather dramatically, and something would need to change that. Jung demonstrated the impact a single well-placed individual can have, so if she could poach a retail expert from competitors Avon might be able to formulate a successful entrance strategy.

In China, Avon can either maintain its focus on the retail outlet it built up during the direct-seller ban, refocus entirely on sales representatives, or pursue a hybrid approach. Focusing on sales representatives plays to Avon’s current core strength, but limits their market range until the sales force has successfully built up. A hybrid approach could allow Avon to maintain contact with consumers who expect a store-buying experience, while limiting sales representative resentment by growing the network in areas currently without retail options.

In other markets, Avon has established sales forces and absolutely no retail exposure. Clearly a retail entrance that angers the sales representative network is inviable, but carefully-limited retail agreements could increase market penetration — for instance, by selling Avon products through existing general stores in small towns without a sales representative.

Other alternatives exist, but these are the main lines to choose along. Any decisions will of course depend on the result of market research: if Avon’s domestic sales have slumped because young buyers have never heard of the company, marketing in conjunction with a retail entrance or sales representative expansion could solve their problems; if there are not enough sales representatives in certain kinds of markets then a retail entrance in appropriate store chains might be the proper solution.

Recommendation

Avon should continue its focus on direct selling overseas while executing a viable retail strategy in the United States. Avon cannot abandon its core competency in direct sales, but this method is clearly failing in the United States. In attempting this, Jung should bring in an outsider with strong retail experience who can help reshape the company’s domestic operations. Depending on the results of market research, this retail expansion should be either a subset of Avon’s products, a new line, or a subsidiary with discreet or removed Avon branding.

In overseas markets, Avon should work to expand its sales representative force and work with them to develop and better serve local competencies. If, for instance, local representatives are serving customers in a bartering capacity then selling new items for their profits, Avon should train similar representatives in this technique and provide tools to make the exchange as productive as possible. For instance, providing simple log sheets so sales representatives can note typical prices for different items might increase their effectiveness, as would providing new representatives with a typical exchange rate for different items. Incorporating these capabilities into their ordering system would allow sales representatives to notate their bartering alongside their product orders, letting them identify and purchase the most profitable items more easily.

In China, Avon should follow a hybrid approach. It should not shut down existing retail operations, but growth should be strongly tilted in favor of sales representatives, who can travel to villages and other insular areas unlikely to be exposed to retail opportunities.

Critique of Existing Recommendations

Avon’s existing recommendations, produced by Andrea Jung, are serviceable but vague. An increase in research & development is unlikely to go wrong, but her commitment to doubling advertising only works if customers are unaware of the company or it has a perception problem. Increased advertising is unlikely to help any perception problems, since the company is already known to have a commitment to women’s health. Customers may be unaware of the product, but cited product research (greater than 90% brand awareness) indicates this is unlikely to be the case.

A renewed and revamped focus on direct selling (“win with Commercial Edge”) is a good choice in overseas markets, but domestically may cause issues —I suspect US consumers are simply uninterested in a direct sales model, and so this investment is misplaced.

Reducing company size is a risky step, but one that Avon may be ready to take. It has significantly automated many processes since 2000, and if typical turnover has not slimmed Avon down enough since that time, a staff reduction is called for.

Leadership Style & Lessons

Andrea Jung is clearly a change agent, as exemplified by her quote: “The risk is not in being wrong, it’s in being late, in not changing fast enough.” As CEO she has led two significant company reorganizations, and she spearheaded significant product change in her role modernizing the company’s image before that.

Her changes at the company were moderately successful. Avon’s stock price rose to over $40 before the recession, and today the company has revenues in excess of $10 billion annually, with an operating income of over $1.3 billion in the last year (Google Finance).

Bibliography

Farkas, Charles & Wetlaufer, Suzy. “The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead.” Harvard Business Review on Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 1998.

Google Finance. “Avon Products, Inc.” http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:AVP Accessed April 1 2009.

George, Bill; Mayer, Diana; & McLean, Andrew. “Andrea Jung: Empowering Avon Women.” Harvard Business School. Case 9-408-035. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 2008.

Situation Analysis

Teach For America’s mission is to provide quality education to inner-city students. At present, there are serious concerns by outside observers that Teach For America is harming rather than helping these students. What is the best way to achieve Teach For America’s mission?

At present, Teach For America is approximately $1,200,000 in debt, and projects that it will have an additional $1.3 million deficit for the current fiscal year, with revenues of roughly $7.8 million. The start-up grants have run out and Teach For America is searching for alternative funding, but a negative review in Phi Delta Kappa has made this difficult by bringing the organization’s efficacy into question, and current donors are concerned. Teach For America employs 60 veteran teachers for professional development and has roughly 900 new teachers in the program, plus a variety of support staff. There are also two new subsidiaries: TEACH! and The Learning Project.

Opportunities & Threats

Teach For America has an ongoing opportunity: there continue to be under-served urban school districts, and this will not change. But Linda Darling-Hammond’s critique in Phi Delta Kappa is a serious fund-raising threat and may alienate current and future school district partners. The timing is especially difficult because Teach For America’s start-up grants are ending. TEACH! is currently a drain on resources, but could eventually provide positive income, unlike Teach For America and The Learning Project.

Organizationally, Teach For America is a mixed bag. The veteran teachers and passionate leadership are valuable assets, but managers are inexperienced (despite work with organizational development expert Nick Glover) and seem to have little respect for their day-to-day duties despite working hard at them. As a result, many of TFA’s large donors are encouraging new management under Wendy Kopp’s leadership.

Decisions To Face

Teach For America’s most fundamental decision is simply whether to continue operating — do they fulfill their current mission, or if they don’t is the brand worth saving? If the decision is yes, they face a host of other decisions. Should Kopp cede some of her managerial duties to a CEO and a “full-time director of development”? Is cutting the size of the teacher corps a good cost-cutting measure? Should they scale back (or perhaps expand) TEACH! and The Learning Project? Spin them off and remove them from the current fund-raising apparatus and budgeting? Are the veteran teachers aiding the teaching corps, and if they are can they still do better? If not, should they be dismissed, scaled back, or differently managed? Should the general support staff be cut? Can organizational effectiveness be better-documented?

Alternatives & Analysis

There are essentially 3 different courses of action Teach For America can choose from as it moves forward. First, it can maintain the status quo. Second, it can scale back and become a data-gathering pilot project (a step essentially skipped when it formed as an organization). Third, it can attempt to expand in the face of criticism. Once a course has been chosen, a new leadership structure also needs to be discussed; either maintaining the status quo or adding new managerial positions to provide more experience and reduce the strain. Each of these three options, along with leadership, is discussed below.

There is, of course, one final option: Teach For America could shut down as an organization. Leadership has presented strong resistance to this idea, however, and the author agrees: Teach For America fills a need by providing intelligent, motivated and upwardly-mobile teachers to inner-city students and should continue operating as an organization and a principle.

Maintain the Status Quo

If Teach For America chooses to maintain the status quo, it is making some important claims. First, it asserts its value as an educational organization. Second, it tells school districts and the teacher corps that they will not be willingly abandoned. While both of these are valuable, maintaining the status quo is not recommended: the fund-raising crisis is simply too severe. There is little evidence that fund-raising will resolve itself if the status quo is maintained. Additionally, there is a mass of evidence that Teach For America is not a well-run organization and Darling-Hammond’s critique, though scathing, is seemingly well-founded in some areas.

If Teach For America does choose to maintain the status quo, changing the leadership structure is not a recommended course of action: making no serious changes is a vote of confidence in the organization’s position, while changing management says that the organization does not trust the people who brought it to its current position. A change in management without changing the organization’s methods could assuage some donors worried about inexperience, but is unlikely to seriously impact the mission or efficacy.

Become a Pilot Project

Teach For America, in its current incarnation, went from concept to full-scale project in the space of a single year. This left little time for data-gathering on teacher effectiveness and good implementation strategies, and these are the deficiencies pointed out in Darling-Hammond’s article. Regardless of whether her allegations are justified, shrinking down to a pilot would let Teach For America gather solid data on its organizational effectiveness and try out different methods of mentoring on a small scale. Additionally, the smaller corps would require fewer support personnel and less money budgeted for corps payout. Finally, a smaller Teach For America corps would give leadership more time to focus on the TEACH! project, which could be accelerated into a revenue-positive program supporting any future Teach For America expansion.  This course would significantly ease the fund-raising burden, let Teach For America assure critics and donors that it is taking concerns seriously, and allow more agile refocusing on successful methods before a wide-scale deployment. Even better, once Teach For America’s performance is documented and successful, the organization can relaunch itself to old donors and critics and should be able to resume fund-raising at the same or higher levels as previously with little effort.

If Teach For America were to adopt this course, I recommend a change in leadership structure to give an experienced outsider management responsibilities. A new manager is more likely to regard the program neutrally, thereby producing better end results. More importantly, Kopp and her leadership team have demonstrated their desire to start new organizations rather than run existing ones in starting 3 new operations within a 5 year time span; bringing in outside management will allow them to focus on successfully launching TEACH! and formulating ideas to make the Teach For America corps more competent and innovative.

Expand the Organization

There is some evidence that Teach For America is top-heavy and should be expanding the teacher corps to match the size of management and support. Whereas the previous course of action recommends shrinking the teacher corps and shrinking the organization even further to match, this course of action recommends expanding the teacher corps to match the support staff available. This course of action will make several statements:

1. Teach For America’s premise is valid, and bringing in new graduates for two-year stints is good for students.
2. Teach For America has had some administrative difficulties which it is working to correct
3. Teach For America is confident in its future.

In expanding the size of the corps while maintaining a static oversight and training organization, Teach For America increases its teacher:dollar ratio and lets donors impact more students for their money. Because the support staff is underused at present, expanding the teacher corps should not hurt teacher morale or training; in fact the support staff should be given new goals for interacting more often with teachers in a mentor role and handling individual issues rather than attempting formal professional development exercises during the school year. Shifting the support staff’s focus will also allow them to gather data on effectiveness in the course of their normal duties, providing information invaluable to disproving Darling-Hammond’s claims and establishing Teach For America’s legitimacy. Finally, expanding the program would allow strong contact and investment with more school districts, which should build support for Teach For America at a grassroots level.

This course of action does not directly address the fundraising issue, which is its major weakness. However, expanding the program’s reach to new school districts (perhaps targeted to be near potential major donors) and decreasing overhead costs should tempt new donors to meet the program, and changing organizational tactics to address criticisms should renew confidence of prior donors and encourage them to continue or expand giving.

Under this course of action, new management is a necessity — the program’s growth will only exacerbate the issues with current leadership.

Recommendation

Given the alternatives above, my clear recommendation is that Teach For America return to the pilot phase it never had by cutting the teacher corps roughly in half and dramatically shrinking the support staff. The current teacher corps should be allowed to finish their terms following the same protocol they began with, but their Teach For America liaisons should implement formal efficacy-tracking measures. The next teacher corps should undergo a new school-year regimen of informal but constant mentoring with one of the experienced on-staff teachers (each teacher should be able to handle roughly 15 corps members, which would require only 17 teachers instead of the current 60), along with efficacy measurements.

The Learning Project should be spun off or shut down to allow Teach For America to focus more directly on its core competency (introducing new teachers to school districts), and a new high-level manager should be brought in to allow Kopp and her peers to focus on teacher development and turning TEACH! into a money-making enterprise that can help support Teach For America.

The support staff, when not involved with the teacher corps, must be measuring their effectiveness and introducing different techniques among small groups and testing the successful ones in larger areas until the process is refined. Hopefully Teach For America can relaunch itself in approximately five years as a data-driven organization which can prove it successfully connects inspiring teachers with inner-city students to provide positive impact.

This course of action should reduce or remove the current fund-raising burden from the organization and allow it to refocus in a maintainable fashion on the mission.

Leadership Style & Lessons

Wendy Kopp has admirably demonstrated certain leadership qualities since the 1995 near-disaster. She has emerged as a strong strategic leader who creates highly expert workers and expanding Teach For America while focusing on the mission.

Kopp followed a blend of the “shrink” and “expand” strategies outlined in this study, dramatically reducing support staff but refusing to shrink Teach For America’s teach corps, instead choosing to improve accountability and effectiveness while maintaining the corps at its then-current size. She did not bring in outside management, but did ask for and receive more training and advice in management. Teach For America shut down TEACH! (the only major conflict with my own recommendations) and spun off The Learning Project in order to focus exclusively on the teacher corps. These steps were immensely successful, and Teach For America is highly-regarded today with nary a fund-raising difficulty.

Bibliography

Farkas, Charles & Wetlaufer, Suzy. “The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead.” Harvard Business Review on Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 1998.

George, Bill et al. “Wendy Kopp and Teach For America.” Harvard Business School Case 9-406-125. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 2006.

Situation Analysis

In 1990, Bill Bratton has just been appointed Chief of the New York Transit Police. He faces ballooning crime, a public fearing the subway, aggressive vandals and fare evaders, and a police force that doesn’t like to make arrests because of the paperwork. In 1994, he is appointed police commissioner of New York City. He faces ballooning crime, a public without confidence in their police force, and a police force refusing to take responsibility for crime and blaming others for its own failures.

In both cases, the people fear for their safety and avoid areas under his jurisdiction, leading to lower use of public transit and a middle class “fleeing to the suburbs.”

Opportunities & Threats

Amongst all this doom and gloom there are bright spots. While the NYPD as an organization is quite insular, many individual precinct commanders are effective within their domain. The frequent fights over jurisdiction and funding are an easy target whose eradication will improve efficiency. The information revolution has yet to reach policing in the BIg Apple, and the introduction of computerized analysis might have serious benefits. A misallocation of resources to the police (the Transit Police have an overabundance of cars) give Bratton bargaining tools to acquire what he needs. And as Bratton has previously learned, there is probably a disconnect between what upper management thinks and the front-line police know and believe. If this can be eliminated or reduced through good communication and work policy, the situation tends to improve without Bratton taking any other action at all. Finally, the federal government has begun funding of local police departments under certain circumstances, and Bratton is prepared to take advantage of this program to hire additional police.

This is not to say that the police are destined to go up by virtue of having bottomed out, though. If Bratton cannot convince the police that making arrests (with 16 hours of associated work) is always worth their time, or if the powerful courts refuse to handle the arrests that come in, no amount of better planning can make the city safer. Continuing turf wars, though they are an easy target to increase efficiency, will scuttle even the best reform plan. The city has handed down budget cuts in recent years, and if the police are seen as doing nothing the cuts might continue.

Decisions & Analysis

Bratton faces a number of serious choices in his job leading the police. His mission is to make his jurisdiction (first the subway system, and eventually the entire city) safer. He must allocate man-hours to be most effective in meeting that goal. He also needs to take steps to narrow the information gap between patrol cops and upper management, to encourage expertise-sharing across departments and precincts, to reduce political infighting and increase accountability, and to convince the public that the police department is effective so he can maintain resources and achieve goals in opposition to other political interests.

The first decision Bratton faces is how to narrow the information gap. Several possibilities present themselves:

1. Officers can write reports and memos that go up and down the chain of command.
2. The organization can be flattened to give everybody more face time with officers at different levels.
3. Management can be put in situations where they experience what beat cops deal with.

Currently, most information is passed along in reports that are never read. This creates a serious disconnect from reality going up the chain, and makes rumors the primary source of information going down the chain. Flattening would solve this problem, but actually putting beat cops face-to-face with upper management is a logistical impossibility because of the ratios. Putting management in situations that beat cops deal will narrow the information gap at a relatively low cost. However, this approach does not deal with top-down information loss. Any such approach will also need a slight flattening of the structure so that information is delivered and maintains its integrity on the way down.

Bratton’s second important decision is how to increase accountability; his method should also concurrently reduce infighting by making it more difficult to pass blame to somebody else. Periodic performance reviews are the typical solution to this problem, but they do present unique problems in an organization with little trust of peers. However, there are other competent supervisors available to a police force besides their commanding officers: the people they serve and protect. Precinct commanders and other officers could hold regular open meetings to present their work and solicit suggestions from interested citizens. Such an approach has many benefits: blaming neighboring precincts for your own troubles is harder when speaking to civilians who don’t understand the police organization structure, officers would hear directly from citizens about the issues that concern them, and such meetings would also inspire public trust in the police department (satisfying another goal). Of course, feedback on methods from such meetings would hold little use if it could not be acted on, so precinct commanders might also be given increased power to determine methodology within their precinct.

In attempting to reduce political infighting, perhaps the best tool will be to simply make such fights public within the police organization and to prevent them from having utility in the allocation of resources through firm oversight. Making the fights public will prevent group leaders from secretly slandering others without repercussion and bring the opinions of their peers against offending parties. Removing their utility in resource management can be done by influencing only a small group of budgeters and will in turn remove the incentives that caused infighting to flourish in the first place.

Bratton’s third major decision is how to allocate men to the police work. Currently, they have assignments with historical bases that have not been analyzed in the recent past. Continuing these assignments might work, but the proliferation of crime suggest that a new pattern of enforcement is called for. Unfortunately, there isn’t currently available data suggesting how to better deploy cops on beat. Other sub-decisions must also be made. Currently, officers generally let off minor offenders with a warning rather than go through the 16-hour hassle of performing arrests. A zero-tolerance policy has recently been popularized by the broken window theory of crime escalating from simple vandalism, but zero tolerance will require streamlining arrests and other activities.

Bratton can also reallocate cops between departments, changing the proportions between beat cops, homicide detectives, narcotics agents, and other groupings.

Bratton’s final major decision is how to increase expertise-sharing throughout the police force. Currently, sharing expertise has limited benefits but has definite costs in terms of time spent on enforcement and strengthening another officer you may soon be competing with for funds. If the goal is reducing costs and increasing the benefits of information and expertise sharing then one answer is, again, publicity within the organization. By making sharing more public in the form of workshops, costs per transmission go down and benefits go up as other officers credit you for not only your own better performance, but with the techniques that increased their own performance. Alternatively, Bratton can accept the current level of sharing.

Recommendations

The status quo has not sufficed to prevent crime in New York City or its subway system, and Bratton must implement a number of serious changes to help the organization fulfill its mission of keeping the jurisdiction safe.

First, I recommend Bratton solve the communication problem. Management must know what beat cops experience: transit police officials should ride the subway instead of taking cars; general police management should walk the streets in bad neighborhoods and speak to city residents. To deal with top-down information loss, I recommend flattening the organization somewhat, so that precinct commander have direct communication with the police commissioner. Doing this ensures that at least one person in every cop’s circle of contacts knows exactly what the goals and methods are at all times while not overloading administrators with face-to-face meetings.

Second, he must increase accountability. I recommend first making precinct commanders more directly accountable to the civilians they protect by requiring regular community meetings. To go along with this increased accountability, precinct commanders should receive new authority so they can act on community recommendations, and cannot claim the rules prevent them from being ineffective. These meetings should also be used to publicize new techniques the police force is making use of and share positive statistics on crime-fighting to increase confidence.

In order to reduce infighting and increase accountability and information sharing, I also recommend Bratton’s suggested public performance reviews, in which precinct commanders are questioned by both their bosses and their peers on both negative and positive performance aspects.

Third, new information is needed in order to effectively allocate men to police work. Bratton should generate current statistics on where and when crimes are committed, and target the hot spots with increased enforcement to drive up the probably costs of criminality. He should also make enforcement easier on police officers by reducing the effort required to book an arrest.

I. International Politics

As Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla were coming to power, the world was a dark and scary place. Experts were finally coming to grips with the Soviet Empire as a permanent political feature. Left-wing Marxist rebels throughout the Third World were applying serious pressure to liberal capitalist governments; rebel movements against Marxist governments were small, ineffective, and sparse. The world’s democracies were in the grip of stagflation or worse; proxy wars like Vietnam had gone very poorly indeed; and friendly governments like the Shah of Iran were being toppled for anti-American crusaders and Soviet-backed Communists. Other governments, wary of being themselves toppled or drawn into violence, were declaring neutrality as part of the Non-Aligned Movement, but their economic goals were essentially pitting them against the United States and on the side of the Soviets in forums like the United Nations.

Given these evident truths, the smart money in international affairs was for a continued détente with the Soviet Union. This would allow the democracies of the West to solve their economic issues without threat of invasion while reducing defense spending, allowing more money for capital investment and social services. More importantly, it would prevent drawing the world into a war that would have to dance around nuclear weapons, and which nobody was sure the West could win.

Unfortunately, such a policy had serious flaws. First, it ignored the plight of those within the Warsaw Pact — a plight that Pope John Paul II could not ignore. Second, the policy assumed the Soviet Union was a permanent feature of the international system — an assumption not shared by President Ronald Reagan. Third, it implied a limited moral equivalence between Western democracy and Soviet Communism as equal governments of sovereign states — an equivalence that Thatcher was not prepared to grant.

Each of these leaders came to power willing and expecting to fight Communism — John Paul for the sake of religion; Thatcher for the sake of Europe; Reagan for the sake of his economic ideology and the freedom of the world. Luckily for us, the Soviet Union was far more pliable than anybody else realized. Though the Soviets had long hidden it, they were beginning to realize that their economy had grown hardly at all since World War II. Client states were taking ever-increasing funds to prop up satisfactorily, and the recently-commenced Soviet-Afghan war was shaping up to be worse for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the United States — and in their own backyard rather than on the opposite side of the world.

II. Critical Decisions

As leaders, each individual had different focuses, and their decisions reflect these priorities. Pope John Paul II was temporal guardian of God’s Church, and his opposition to Communism resulted from its determined atheism and control over each individual’s cultural life. Margaret Thatcher felt the specter of Soviet invasion over Europe, and longed for a day when England’s economy could rise to the powerhouse it had once been; her ironclad strength resulted from a determination to return England to free-market capitalism and to free Europe from fear. Reagan found Communism evil both for its political ills and for its opposition to the laissez-faire free market he promoted; Reagan pushed the United States to a far more conservative liberal economy and was able to face down the Soviet Union on the strength of his moral conviction that Communism was not only evil but destined to fail. Each made specific decisions that helped speed the fall of Communism and the triumphant re-emergence of capitalism as the world’s premier economic system.

Reagan’s decisions are the broadest and most identifiable. First, he committed the United States to supply-side economic management for eight years, and changed fiscal policy’s focus from unemployment to inflation (which may well have reduced unemployment in the end).

Second, he committed to bankrupting the Soviets through a massive defense buildup, which he thought they would be unable to match.

Third, he began to support anti-Communist forces, mostly in Latin America, but also and importantly in both Afghanistan and the peaceful resistance of Poland.

Fourth, despite widespread scorn he began to direct resources at a Strategic Defense Initiative which the Soviets evidently took seriously; and though many individuals and governments considered Reagan a cowboy he maintained some moral authority by offering to share his potentially MAD-disrupting “Star Wars” program.

Fifth, he directly opposed the Soviet Union far more openly around the world, installing missiles in Europe and expending US blood and treasure in Grenada, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

Thatcher made a number of similar decisions during her time as Prime Minister. She committed her country to privatization, and England’s subsequent rebound provided an inspiring example to many former socialist nations over the following decade, as “privatization expertise became one of the City of London’s most profitable services.”

Thatcher ordered a 3% annual growth in defense spending

, and while such an increase from the UK was hardly noticeable compared to Reagan’s US defense growth, it was a serious statement of her priorities and plans. Later on, it surely helped England’s ability to wage the Falklands War, which Thatcher championed and greatly benefited from.

After Reagan’s support during the Falklands War, she generally supported his policies, with the notable exception of SDI and nuclear disarmament, which she feared would leave Europe vulnerable to Soviet conventional forces. But her public disagreements hardly influenced American policy, and her private ones usually settled an argument already in progress.

Thatcher’s influence over Communism was surely greatest in her display of the free market’s power.

Pope John Paul II’s actions before the fall of Communism are the most interesting. He wielded a relatively miniscule economic power and no military forces at all, yet was instrumental in Poland’s resistance. His mind seems to have been the subtlest of the three, yet he was also the leader most bound by tradition, for his traditions were those of God. John Paul II made a number of critical strategic and moral decisions. First, as a bishop in Poland he encouraged the creation of parishes without churches — virtually unheard of in Catholicism, but the formation of parishes allowed the Church to bring much greater force against the Communist government in applications to build new churches. In a somewhat similar vein, he created an archdiocesan synod that as part of his promotion of the Vatican II reforms.

This tactic developed stronger local leadership than is typical of the Catholic system that must have proved useful later. Second, John Paul II encouraged civil dissent against the Communist government, as both bishop and Pope, at a time when many local priests were willing to accept much less in concessions from the government.

Third, John Paul II not only withheld his blessing from liberation theology but spoke out against it.

These decisions manifested themselves in numerous local and tactical actions, including his visits to specific locations within Poland. And they were apparently indispensable in maintaining Polish morale and keeping their desire alive as a righteous one.

In the face of these lists of actions, it is clear that Pope John Paul II brought moral authority to the struggle against Communism, while President Ronald Reagan brought money and guns. Margaret Thatcher’s contributions are surely appreciated but, in the end, were not needed to accelerate the Soviet Union toward a destruction substantially like that witnessed by history.

III. Leadership Characteristics

Each of these leaders had a significantly different style. Their personalities varied dramatically: Keirsey identifies Reagan as an Artisan, Thatcher as a Rational, and John Paul II as an Idealist.

Accordingly, Reagan was concerned with making practical decisions that were effective, possibly while disregarding the rules (as in Iran-Contra); Thatcher focused on the creation of effective systems (as during the Falklands War and in her interactions with the European Community), and John Paul II focused on creating moral systems (in his encyclicals, discussion on Humanum Vitae, and opposition to both Communism and liberation theology).

In terms of Farkas and Wetlaufer’s leadership analysis, these leaders all had characteristics of the strategic style, picking an end goal (the elimination of Communism, and for both Thatcher and Reagan the revival of market economies) and then making decisions based on that. Nonetheless, they varied somewhat in their other tendencies. Thatcher seems to have incorporated a more expertise-based approach, not only in her own government but also in society by selling public housing to its occupants. Reagan was heavily strategic but focused more on human assets with his hands-off management style. John Paul II, as Pope, focused on both human assets and box management, proscribing certain teachings in no uncertain terms while still attempting to keep his effective priests and return misguided members to the fold (as in his dealings with the Sandinistas).

IV. Best Leader

From this description of events, it seems clear to me that Pope John Paul II was the best leader of the three. Reagan was able to defeat the Soviets economically and militarily on the world stage; Thatcher did wonders for England. John Paul, boasting no weapons or powers beyond moral authority, succeeded in overthrowing the Communist government of Poland. He did this peacefully, without armed militias or bombs from planes. And his role was the only one of the three that would not have been inevitably replicated by somebody else.

Reagan’s role in the collapse of the Soviet empire was important — his deliberate military buildup and aid to anti-Communist guerillas in Soviet client states increased economic pressure on the Soviet Union. Likewise, his aid to Solidarity in Poland certainly contributed to the movement’s widespread survival. And Reagan’s portrayals of the “Evil Empire” probably convinced Soviet planners that he would not tolerate military occupations of rebel countries like Poland that they might otherwise have committed to. But Solidarity in some form would have survived indefinitely even without aid. The Soviet Union’s many economic troubles would have continued to grow worse even in the face of an American reduction in defense spending, and eventually military and monetary aid to client states would have been cut off regardless. For these reasons, Reagan was not an indispensable leader — and the best leader is the one who does things needing doing that nobody else could have done.

Like Reagan, Thatcher was not indispensable, either in the fight against the Soviet Union or to her native England. Certainly she advocated market reforms and privatization before anybody else in power did so, but the continued failure of socialism in the UK and elsewhere (and the successes of the world’s capitalist economies) would inevitably have driven a small-l liberal to national prominence in any country as accustomed to success (both individual and national) as the United Kingdom (in stark opposition to the Soviet Union, where peasants had been ruled by authoritarian regimes for generations). And though from time to time Thatcher may have denied the Soviet position some moral credibility in Europe (as when she argued for the placement of US missiles to counter the SS-20 installations), for the same reasons Reagan was not indispensable, her positions did less to topple Soviet Communism than speed the adoption and return of capitalism in countries that had experimented with socialist economies. You simply cannot be considered the greatest leader if your primary foreign-policy acts were to support your closest ally whenever possible.

Compared to the works of Reagan and Thatcher, John Paul II’s successes were distinctly evitable. He helped to create the cultural resistance that became Solidarity’s base, against a Church tradition that insisted on majestic churches before the formation of a congregation. He created church-based webs of communication with local thinkers and leaders by encouraging this door-to-door evangelism and teaching others to obey the law while making it ineffective. This he did before shedding the name Wojtyla for John Paul II.

As Pope, John Paul continued his distinctive accomplishments. He spoke clearly and distinctively in defense of the individual and labor’s rights (as needed in Poland) while explaining liberation theology’s inherent moral (and spiritual) failings. On his visits to Poland he inspired the country, encouraged them to continue their peaceful struggle, and legitimized resistance as a Christian good, insisting then and later that Soviet-style atheist Communism was not and could not be a moral system. And his visits to Poland — along with his conduct in Nicaragua — helped to show the Communists just how weak, how lacking, and how fragile their rule was. Pope John Paul II’s behavior was indispensable in ending Communism internally, on the basis of elections and without violent riots, in a peaceful fashion. (Obviously this worked better in countries where he and Catholicism had more influence, whereas in Russia people took violently to the streets to undo military coups.) And unlike the behaviors of Reagan and Thatcher, it is entirely unclear that the Church without John Paul would have ever addressed the Warsaw Pact with the same forceful language, or encouraged Solidarity with the same unwavering support — the behavior of many local leaders in fact suggests just the opposite.

Bibliography

Choiniere, Ray & Keirsey, David. Presidential Temperament. Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, Del Mar CA. Copyright 1992.

Farkas, Charles & Wetlaufer, Suzy. “The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead.” Harvard Business Review on Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston MA. Copyright 1998.

O’Sullivan, John. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. Regnery Publishing, Washington DC. Copyright 2006.

1. Summarize the Founders’ criteria for a presidential selection system, then assess the current system—both nomination and general election—by those criteria.

The founders had a number of specific criteria when creating a presidential selection system. The president had to be independent from the legislature, a statesman insulated from public opinion, immune to improper foreign influences, and competent. Our system today satisfies many of these goals, but fails miserably in others.

The party nominations and general election are clearly immune from foreign influences today, as they involve million of people across the entire United States. If a foreign entity has managed to improperly influence this many people, the influence has been public and they have probably succeeded in “subverting” the entire country — at which point it is hardly subversion!

Happily, our presidents are also competent. People may moan about “Dubya” and make references to his “monkey face,” but even when critiquing him on serious policy grounds one must admit that he has generally succeeded at what he set out to do. The glaring exceptions to this (the Iraq War and a domestic agenda on immigration and healthcare) only prove the point: the Iraq War was an institutional failure perpetrated in large part by inherited bureaucracies, and his domestic agenda was opposed on ideological grounds, not competency ones — indeed, many commentators openly admitted that his immigration solution was a practical one.

Again satisfying the Founders’ criteria, the president is unquestionably independent from the legislative branch. He must cooperate with them to some degree if he has a legislative agenda, but Clinton’s humanitarian “interventions” and Bush’s insistence on an Iraq surge demonstrated conclusively that, in foreign affairs, the opinion of the legislature is unlikely to hinder the executive.

Unfortunately, the president is not exempt from popular opinion, and far too often they are not a statesman. The proliferation of polling data and day-to-day scramble against unpopular stories, even for presidents in their second term, illustrate that they continue to care about public opinion in a way that is not healthy for our country. Perhaps the only candidate to truly disregard the public on an issue: John McCain, with his unwavering support for the surge in Iraq — and he lost. George Bush did implement the surge against public opinion polls, but he knew that things would likely go even worse for him and his party in the 2008 elections if he agreed to leave Iraq.

2. What is the case for the Electoral College? What is the case against it? Which do you find more persuasive and why? Would you favor any changes, either incremental or radical, to the system?

The Electoral College has one very strong thing going for it: the electoral college demonstrably works. It has survived 200 years and a civil war without change, and has never been the basis for a serious constitutional or political crisis. Why would we change a system that works?

The argument against the electoral college is very simple: it isn’t “fair.” Critics say that the College ignores the principle of “one man, one vote,” gives disproportionate voting power to residents of small or rural states, and allows the election of a President who most people did not vote for. These are valid criticisms; do the benefits of the electoral college outweigh these concerns?

First, let us disavow the one man, one vote principle. It is appealing for its simple fairness, but is not constitutionally-founded. The votes of residents of a smaller state count for more than those of larger states thanks to the Senate, and “one man, one vote” directly contradicts the avowedly federal nature of our government.

The disproportionate voting power of smaller states is by design. Opponents argue that this is a bad design choice, but (as Judith Best argues), such disproportionate voting is actually a positive feature: it reinforces federalism and encourages presidential candidates to build wide bases of support throughout the country, rather than campaigning on a regional platform. This in particular overcomes the plurality (rather than majority) President flaw.

Another major criticism of the electoral college is the “unit rule” in which states allocate all their votes to the popular vote victor. This is actually not a necessary feature of the electoral college and can be changed by the states at their pleasure — as it is, in the case of Maine and Nebraska. While I am more ambivalent on the unit rule, it too has powerful arguments in favor: the unit rule further encourages broad-based presidents and parties, ensuring that regional candidates will never become President. In general, it acts to exclude third-party candidates from national elections of any sort (a party which cannot produce a candidate is a weak party), but this also is a feature, encouraging big-tent politics and promoting a competing “competence” model of party rather than the fundamentally opposed ideological parties of a parliamentary system. Of course, the unit rule also discourages candidates from campaigning in or catering to states that they cannot win a plurality in, so it also works against national unity.

I do not think that changing the electoral college is in the best interests of the United States, but changing the unit rule might be, and would make many opponents of the electoral college much happier with the system.

3. How are presidential campaigns today similar to the campaign of 1992 as portrayed in The War Room, and how are they different?

Presidential campaigns today are largely similar to that featured in The War Room, but continuing advances in technology (and more experience) have also produced some significant changes. In general, there are two specific components to a presidential campaign: the big-media campaign and the grassroots efforts.

The big-media campaign has changed little since Clinton’s 1992 run. It receives most of the campaign funds for use in television commercials, and the focus is on controlling the news cycle. Campaign ads are used largely to define yourself (positively) and your opponent (negatively). They can also defensively respond to negative stories against yourself, as illustrated when Clinton’s team conceptualizes, writes, and produces a defensive ad in under 6 hours. Changes in this part of the campaign are mostly due to new big-media outlets: the internet is available as an inexpensive, well-targeted advertising platform that campaigns are using, especially to generate news stories which re-air the ad for free. The focus remains the same, however.

The grass-roots campaign has changed significantly, however. These changes were foreshadowed by the Clinton campaign’s tight integration, but have been taken to new levels recently. The Obama campaign exemplifies these changes: Beyond simple mobilization mailings, the Obama campaign tightly integrated grass-roots efforts to produce campaign output from regular citizens without requiring them to travel. Using technologies unavailable in 1992, the Obama campaign paired its many disparate databases, allowing supporters to make targeted phone calls to undecided voters using cell phones and information provided by the Obama campaign via the internet. Technology-savvy workers heavily promoted Obama in third-party areas such as Facebook, and once elected Obama modernized FDR’s fireside chats by posting videos to Youtube.

4. How did voting behavior in the 2008 presidential election confirm general historical patterns? Were there ways in which it varied from those patterns or called the patterns into question?

Voting behavior in the 2008 presidential election largely followed the historical trends, although it had some indicators of a generational shift toward the Democrats. There were some surprise victories for Obama in unusual demographics (the very rich, for instance), but these are largely explained by dissatisfaction with George W. Bush and a unified Republican government from 2004 on.

Barack Obama and the Democrats continued to win among all minorities. Blacks voted for Obama at record percentages. In a blow to Republicans, Latinos voted more Democratic than they did in 2004 (reversing a hard-fought battle by the Bush campaigns), but not at levels exceeding many earlier elections.

Voters identified as liberal or conservative at rates nearly the same as in 2004, though they moved about 2 points toward liberal and the utility of this measure is disputed. A higher proportion of Democrats and independents voted than in 2004, but this is typical for the winning party, since a large part of winning is simply generating a vote turnout.

The surprises (given that Obama won) were the 2:1 Obama:McCain ratio among voters aged 18-29 and the 39-point margin among first-time voters for Obama, which seems to indicate a generational shift toward the Democratic party. Time will tell if the Republicans can recover from this — if they can’t, it spells certain doom, since a party outnumbered 2:1 is no party at all in a 2-party system. I don’t think this is a likely outcome, however; the Republicans will almost certainly reorganize their priorities to attract younger voters and continue to exist, as the two major parties have done for the last 150 years.

5. Analyze the debate between Mayhew and the realignment theorists (including Campbell and Sundquist) over the utility of realignment as a concept. What are the strengths of each argument? Overall, which side has the strongest argument?

Realignment is an interesting concept, but Mayhew convincingly illustrates the flaws inherent to the current theoretical framework of realigning elections. Realignment theorists long fixated on specific elections as realigning elections without specifying why that election — rather than a prior or following one — indicated the realignment, despite the fact that changes in long-term voter preferences are inherently a long-term phenomenon.

Mayhew demonstrates conclusively that, when evaluating proposed measures of realignment, the conventional realigning elections do not rate significantly higher than the “average” election, and that other elections considered normal often rate higher. This evidence convinces me that any approach to realignment based on outlier realigning elections are flawed and their idea is useless.

However, that doesn’t mean that realigning as a concept has no value, merely that realigning should not be assigned concrete events; rather, it should be viewed as a continuously on-going process which political students (and actors) can study (and attempt to manipulate). There are demonstrable trends in voter preferences based on different criteria: the disintegration of the Democratic solid South, and the corresponding black voter change from Republican to Democrat, is perhaps the most famous. This change first manifested itself in the 1964 election, but it continued over several more.

Similarly, the 2008 election has been heralded as a possibly realigning election based on what is perceived as a huge win for Barack Obama and the Democratic party, particularly among juvenile and first-time voters. But I do not believe this is the case, rather, it is the first indicator of dissatisfaction with the Republican party that (if left unresolved) could produce a generational realignment, but will not necessarily do so. Thus I conclude that realignment is a useful concept, but it is not a discrete event and should not be studied as such.

6. Does the campaign finance system need to be fixed? If yes, what would you suggest?

The campaign finance system is a mess of conflicting priorities, but whether (and how) it needs fixing is a question of highly controversial competing ideologies. The primary ideological dichotomy is over the meaning of money? The first ideology is that campaign money is speech, and speech has first amendment protection, so obviously campaign-finance law (possibly with certain exclusions like forbidding foreign contributions) is unconstitutional. The second view is that money is not speech, so it can be regulated.

It’s not really that simple, though: we prohibit all kinds of speech that fall outside first-amendment protections. Child pornography and slander against private individuals are prohibited forms of speech that pass constitutional muster, because these forms of speech harm individuals and regulating them does not impede democracy. This hints at a more theoretically useful question: is regulating money likely to impede democracy or enhance it?

There is a strong argument that campaign finance laws enhance democracy. It prevents an oligarchy where the rich and powerful buy up government offices by brainwashing the masses; it provides a more even playing field so that good ideas can be said loud enough to be heard; it (nominally) means that voters will hear about each candidate in roughly equal proportion and so will vote based on their beliefs rather than the name they’ve heard most often.

Unfortunately, regulating campaign finance to achieve this particular end has proven difficult to the point of impossibility. You could argue that we should continue fighting the good fight in pursuit of this goal, but I must disagree. I find campaign finance laws to be constitutionally uneasy, even if not necessarily outlawed; I believe in a marketplace of ideas where the good ideas (and political figures) will attract attention (and therefore money); and I believe that meeting the goal of campaigning equality —without leaving loopholes so large they break the regulatory system — is impossible without an impermissible regulation of individual free speech protections.

Yes, the campaign finance system needs to be fixed. It should be dismantled to leave only the necessary protections against foreign influences on campaigning, and let Americans use their money how they like in promoting candidates and issues.

7. Is presidential primary front-loading a problem? If so, why? And can it be “solved”?

Presidential primary front-loading is a serious problem in our presidential selection system that should be rectified. Early selection of general election presidential candidates does not benefit the country, and it has many downsides.

Why doesn’t early selection produce any benefits? There is nothing inherently non-beneficial about it: early selection could allow voters more time to study the candidates and learn about their policy and leadership positions, thus producing a more informed vote. Unfortunately, it does not do so: an earlier start to general election campaigning simply produces more “horse-race” coverage by the news media and lets the candidates paint each other negatively for longer periods of time. Horse-race coverage does not advance the cause of democracy, and negative campaigning probably has a negative effect by reducing trust in government and the parties (what kind of organization elects such sleaze ball candidates for office?).

In opposition to the benefits we could have but do not, there are many disadvantages to front-loading. The first primaries and caucuses have a disproportionate impact on selection by pushing a few candidates to receive all the news coverage, giving them front-runner status. This discourages people in other states from voting for other candidates who may be more nationally popular. Front-loading also decreases the time given to party vetting of individuals and requires that candidates have a substantial campaign fund prior to the first nominating contest.

Luckily, front-loading can be solved. Doing so may be hard, but we have seen hope in the 2008 election cycle. The later Democratic primaries had a real impact on the outcome of the nomination, and the parties enforced their rules on how early states could hold their nominating contests. As a result of this election, we may see states more willing to go later in the nominating process based on the impact of those later states.

Even if the states do not willingly prevent front-loading, and the parties will not (since front-loading allows an earlier start to the general election campaign), the government could take a stronger role in preventing front-loading. For instance, campaign finance laws could be changed so that the general election laws must be followed after a candidate cannot lose, even if the convention is yet to come. This would encourage the parties to draw out their nominating contests so as to preserve the friendly primary finance laws.

Question 8: what was the most interesting thing you learned about presidential elections this semester? Elaborate.

I thought the most interesting thing I learned this semester was Judith Best’s arguments for the electoral college (and federalism generally) on the basis of national unity. I had previously thought such concepts were largely an inheritance from our past, perhaps better gotten rid of, rather than possessing real current value.

Introduction

The Presidency of the United States. It is the single most powerful office in the world, and men as varied as our country can produce have wielded it. Their leadership styles and decisions in office ranged from unyielding and outrageous to laid-back and utterly conventional — with every combination in between. Yet every one of them was influenced by their personal traits and life before office, and a study of these personalities is sure to educate: if certain traits are common to our failed or venerated leaders, surely we should look for them in future contenders. As documented by Lyons, scholars have attempted such works before, but there are difficulties: personality typing is still an unsure science, and its application to presidential theory has been contested. Nonetheless, the study of personality is growing and I present new data compilations here.

Our presidents have also come into power through different (and ever-changing) selection systems, and an evaluation of these systems should help in determining their merits. In the following essay, I will explore the connections between personality traits, skill in office, and presidential selection systems.

In doing so, I will make use of some widely-accepted analysis tools. The first and most important is the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, along with Keirsey’s own analysis of past Presidents and their personality types in Presidential Temperament. Second is a ranking of the Presidents, conducted for the Wall Street Journal by James Lindgren of Northwestern University Law School. Third is the division of presidential selection systems articulated by James Caesar in his Presidential Selection: Theory and Development.

Personality

Types

David Keirsey has described a system based on four main character archetypes: Artisans, Guardians, Idealists, and Rationals. While his full system contains 16 different groupings that roughly correspond to the also-famous Myers-Briggs type indicator; Keirsey has focused on these four archetypes and describes the Presidents largely in these terms. There is one sub-distinction he consistently makes within each category, which is whether the person leads primarily by issuing orders (directing) or sharing information (reporting).

In Keirsey’s system, the Artisan seeks excitement and virtuosity in whatever he does, and makes choices largely upon what he thinks will work while focusing on the physical world rather than abstractions. To an Artisan self-respect is based in bold action. Artisan Presidents include George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, and both Roosevelts.

Guardians, by contrast with Artisans, seek security and stability, and are highly concerned with rules as the basis for stability, although they share the Artisan’s focus on the concrete. Guardians are highly traditional and achieve self-respect through societal acknowledgement. Guardian Presidents include George Washington, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush.

Rationals seek competence in all they do; like Artisans they are concerned with results rather than rules or ideology, but unlike Artisans or Guardians they work in abstractions rather than concretions. Their self-respect derives from their competence and their autonomy; their self-confidence derives from a strong will. Rational Presidents include the two John Adams, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Abraham Lincoln.

Idealists are like Rationals in their concern with the abstract, but are like the Guardian in their respect for rules rather than efficacy. There have been no Idealist Presidents, although some observers cast Barack Obama as an idealist (Keirsey places Obama as a Rational).

Efficacy

I have compiled data on each President, their personality type, their ranking as a president, their re-election percentage (defined as those elected to the office again after holding it rather than those winning two elections, so that both Grover Cleveland and LBJ were re-elected), and the system under which they were elected. Presidents who died during their first term were excluded from the re-election calculation, as was Barack Obama since he has yet to undertake a second election. Doing so reveals a number of interesting trends among the personality types.

The simplest and broadest distinction we can make is between those Presidents who direct and those who report. There is a strong trend here: directing Presidents do much better than reporter presidents in both elections and the presidency: we’ve had 26 ‘directors’ with an average rank of 18.21, and only 16 ‘reporters’ with an average rank of 23.5. The directors also get re-elected more often: 58% rather than 45%.

We have had 14 Artisan Presidents in our history, and they have been middling. Their average ranking of 21.50 is the worst among the 3 personality types, but their average rating of 3.02 is in the middle. Fully 60% have been re-elected. There is a significant difference between directing and reporting Artisans, though: the directive Artisans have an average ranking of 13.86 (a vast improvement) and the reporters have an average ranking of 27.33. Their respective average ratings are 3.43 and 2.55.

Guardians have fared slightly worse than the Artisans; the 20 Guardians having an average rank of 21.06 but a lower 2.85 average ranking. They have a much worse re-election rate at 39% and maintain the distance between reporting and directing personalities, though not as strongly as the Artisan presidents: Directing Guardians have an average rank of 20.85 while reporters average 26.5 with ratings that average 3.01 for directors and 2.50 for reporters.

The Rationals are a bit of a paradox. Electorally, they are the least successful, as we have had only 14 Rational Presidents, but they have by far the best ranking. The average Rational rank is 16.13 with a 3.34 average rating; 71% have been re-elected, so Rationals have remained popular once in office. The Rationals reverse the high directing-based variance in rankings that Artisans demonstrated: director Rationals average a rank of 21.2 with a 2.95 rating, while the reporter Rational rank average is 7.67 with a 3.99 rating.

Selection Systems

Types

We’ve had different electoral selection systems in our country over time. The first organized system was the Congressional caucus established for the 1800 election. Party conventions rose to prominence in 1828, and around 1908 reformers pushed the country to a mixed convention-primary system. The move to a primary-based system was completed around the 1976 election. These systems have had measurably different outcomes in the type and efficacy of persons elected to the presidency. The following descriptions are drawn from James Ceaser’s “Presidential Selection.”

The congressional caucus system was directed and defended largely by Thomas Jefferson, as he became more convinced that partisan politics were necessary to republicanism. Caucuses came into being due to the 12^th Amendment and its implied need for parties to coordinate presidential nominations, and party leadership at the time was concentrated in the Congress. This system established issue advocacy as a reason for nomination and put the focus in nominations on who would best put your party in control of government, rather than who would best lead the nation.

Martin Van Buren deliberately strengthened partisan competition when he came to Washington, on both a theoretical and partisan basis. Van Buren contended that parties remained too weak in presidential selection, and this created “personal candidate factions and unchecked popular leadership.”

Van Buren believed that a convention system would reduce the time devoted to campaigning, and especially that it would help to keep personal campaigning out of legislating. An unintended consequence of the system was the increased power it gave to local state interests over those of the national government. These changes also reduced the oligarchic tendencies present in the caucusing system.

Woodrow Wilson formulated the next major theory of presidential selection. Wilson believed that power should flow directly from the people, and that the only basis for leadership is personal popularity. He attempted to free presidential selection from control of the parties, and his ideas helped fuel a progressive movement that led to a new mixed primary-convention system. Nonetheless, party leadership continued to play an important role after “outsider” strategies based on primary wins continued to fail.

Finally, a resurgence of ‘progressive’ thought in the 1960s led to a full primary system, which in turn led to the full supremacy of the candidate with little room for party leadership in selection. There was no single standard-bearer for this selection system; in fact it was in large part a fulfillment of Wilson’s thoughts.

Efficacy

These numbers were compiled along with those for the personality types. Presidents who received the office through succession are not counted under a selection system’s rating unless they were subsequently elected again while under it. Presidents who died or have yet to undergo a second election are excluded from the re-election calculations.

The congressional caucus, over 4 Presidents, was by far the most successful system in terms of Presidential rankings, with an average rank of 15.5, average rating of 3.3, and a re-election rate of 75%. Party conventions produced the worst Presidents, with an average ranking of 21.87, average rating of 2.91, and a re-election rate of only 36%. Despite their terrible record, the convention lasted through 80 years and 16 Presidents.

Following the party conventions, the mixed convention-primary system performed moderately better. Its 10 Presidents ranked an average 18.7, were rated 3.11 on average, and were re-elected 70% of the time. When we finally adopted a full primary system, we got 5 Presidents with an average ranking of 20.4, average rating of 3.03, and a 60% re-election rate.

Selection Impacts on Personality

There is a clear bias among the electoral systems toward different personalities. Only half of the Presidents selected via congressional caucus were directors; three quarters were Rationals and one was a Guardian. This presents a remarkable lack of Artisans and is quite the reverse of the country’s history as a whole, in which Guardians far outnumber Rationals. This makes some sense: while party leaders had control of the process, they would want to choose people who had been previously effective, and Rationals would have been over-represented in a Constitutional Convention — a place requiring the construction of large abstract systems without needing to follow existing sets of rules, except insofar as they were proven to work.

The party conventions presented a huge change in selection tendencies. A comparable rate (56.3%) of directors was elected. However, only 1 was a Rational (12.5%), while fully 50% were Guardians and slightly more than a third (37.5%) were Artisans. Certainly Guardians would have been preferred by the nation at large, since throughout most of the convention period those in power wanted to maintain the status quo — either to prevent a Civil War or to maintain Republican dominance. However, the conventions also tend to produce compromise candidates due to the power held by many diverse local interests, and a Guardian is suited in that role as well. Artisans were moderately successful in this system as well, perhaps due to their ability in ideological arguments. Interestingly, Guardians were singularly unsuccessful in re-election bids: of the five presidents re-elected under the convention system, only Grover Cleveland was a Guardian. Both Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were re-elected Artisans, and the systems two Rationals (Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant) were both re-elected.

The mixed system provided another major change in those elected. While the ratio of each archetype remained similar at 40% Artisan, 40% Guardian, and 20% Rational, this period was strongly pro-directors as an astounding 90% of Presidents had directive rather than reporter personalities. This trend toward director personalities may be thanks to the wars throughout this period.

Finally, the Primary system provided a moderate change in elected personalities. A fairly strong pro-Artisan bias is present, as they constitute 50% of elected Presidents. 33% of the primary Presidents have been Guardians, and Barack Obama is the first Rational elected since this selection system began. The percent of directors has dropped significantly from the mixed system’s 90% to 40%, the lowest share directors have had under any system. Notably, all 3 of the Artisans have been re-elected, while neither of the Guardians have. And while historians rate Ronald Reagan highly, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have rankings around 3.0, which is right on the line as far as re-electability apparently goes. This suggests that our new system favors campaign abilities far more than governing abilities, at least in the case of first-term contenders.

Conclusion

Presidential selection and nominating systems have a strong impact on what personalities are most viable in being elected President. Ideally, a nominating system would be designed to encourage those personality types we have found most effective in office: reporting Rationals and directing Artisans. Unfortunately, a system favorable to one of these groups is probably opposed to the other: directing Artisans are masters of primary campaigning (our current selection system), while reporting Rationals are intellectuals likely to be destroyed in the campaign environment for being out of touch.

However, it is possible that as our experience with this election system grows Rationals will find a place in it: primary campaigns, after all, are large distributed systems, easily abstractable. Barack Obama’s election demonstrates this, though he is a directing rather than reporter Rational.

In general, I have shown links between selection systems and candidate personalities, and between candidate personalities and their performance in office. While the dataset is small and some of the conclusions implied may be erroneous, this data should be considered by anyone trying to create a new selection system or refine the one we have in order to select more capable candidates to lead our nation.

Bibliography

Ceaser, James W. Presidential Selection: Theory and Development. Princeton University Press 1979.

Keirsey, David & Choiniere, Ray. Presidential Temperament: The Unfolding of Character in the Forty Presidents of the United States. Prometheus Nemesis Book Co, 1992.

Lyons, Michael. Presidential Character Revisited. Political Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1997): pp. 791-811. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3792210.

Parent, Kip. Presidential Temperament — Obama Vs McCain. Accessed 11/24/08. http://ezinearticles.com/?Presidential-Temperament—Obama-Vs-McCain&id=1627828.

Taranto, James. Presidential Leadership The Rankings. Wall Street Journal. Accessed 11/24/08. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007243.

The Winning Secret — 2008. Keirsey.com. Accessed 11/24/08. http://www.keirsey.com/picking_president_temperament.aspx

Appendix

Attached is the data I have generated for this paper. Classification of personality comes from Keirsey, Kip, and The Winning Secret. Ranking and Rating are from Taranto, and the selection system is from Ceaser. Election information is generally available from any encyclopedia.

I. Introduction

In his book War and Responsibility, John Hart Ely has famously suggested that constitutional original intent “can be obscure to the point of inscrutability”, but in the case of war powers “it isn’t” — original intent is clear and indisputable. He argues that the Founding Fathers clearly meant for all military action to be authorized by the legislature, except in limited circumstances when the executive could pursue a military response to “genuine and serious threats to our national security,” even “beyond actual attacks on United States territories” as long as the executive requests Congressional authorization as soon as doing so “would [not] serve to defeat our military effort” (ie, there is no time) and withdrew if it was not then promptly granted.

Yet Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who in 1788 had been writing the Federalist Papers together as Publius, were by 1793 arguing bitterly over the President’s war powers in the Pacificus-Helvidius debate. Such a quick degeneration indicates that “original intent” could not have been very uniform.

In this paper, I will describe some of the original debates on war powers, the modern state of affairs, and offer a conclusion on original intent regarding war powers.

II. The Original War Powers Debate

There is a distinct lack of evidence available from the Constitutional Convention on the distribution of war powers. However, many of our Founding Fathers debated the matter at later points. We consider here the Constitution itself, the Constitutional Convention, selections from the Federalist Papers, the Pacificus-Helvidius debates, and Jefferson’s war against the Barbary States.

The Constitution

The Constitution distributes war powers among Congress and the President. Congress is authorized “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;” “To raise and support Armies [and] provide and maintain a Navy;” furthermore “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States;” finally “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.”

The President is vested with the executive power; he “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”

Certainly the Constitution devotes more text to the legislative powers of war. Also notable is that Congress grants letters of marque and reprisal, so the President cannot authorize privateers. But a sensible line can be drawn: Congress provides the military (in all forms) and makes laws for the military (as it does civilians), while the President leads that military. The question arises when that military can be used; certainly Congress is granted the power to declare war while the President has only implicit grants via his executive and commander-in-chief power, but there are gray areas to which the Constitution does not provide any real hints.

The Constitutional Convention

Madison’s convention notes on the matter are short, and include only a brief debate over Congress’ power to declare war. Originally, Congress had the power “to make war,” but the delegates objected to this as the Legislature was ill-suited to it, and they wanted the Executive to have the power to repel sudden attacks. Granting Congress the power to make peace was opposed, as it should be easier “to get out of war, than into it.”

The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay famously discuss the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, but even the papers discussing war powers give us little enlightenment on how these powers are to be distributed. Number 25 (by Hamilton) asserts that “nations pay little regard to rules and maxims calculated in their very nature to run counter to the necessities of society,” and argues the necessity of allowing a peacetime military force so that the country may respond to threats before being actually invaded. This point is reinforced by Madison in Number 41.

Federalist 69 (Hamilton) discusses the character of the executive at some length, yet his war powers are not revealed at all. We learn only that “The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States” which “amount[s] to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces;” this is different from the British king which “extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies.” This restatement of the Constitution illuminates nothing, except perhaps that Hamilton considered the Constitution to be complete in its allocation of war powers. He revisits the subject in Number 74, titled “The Command of the Military and Naval Forces, and the Pardoning Power of the Executive,” but the only new thing he says is “the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand.”

The Pacificus-Helvidius Debate

The first true debate on war powers came after Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality in the war between France and Britain; yet it was singularly not about war powers, per se, but foreign affairs. Hamilton, as Pacificus, argued for the Proclamation and its lawfulness; Madison, as Helvidius, eventually argued against it at Thomas Jefferson’s request.

Hamilton’s argument is simple: the President has the executive power of the nation, and issuing a judgment such as the Proclamation of Neutrality is an executive function; moreover, it should be the President’s domain as he is the “organ of intercourse with foreign nations;” he is responsible for making treaties and ensuring the laws are faithfully executed, so he must surely be responsible for interpreting these laws and treaties by himself; if he can interpret he can tell the country what he has interpreted; finally, while Congress has the power to declare war the executive is duty-bound to maintain peace until Congress has instructed him otherwise.

Madison’s response summarizes Hamilton’s argument and then extrapolates from it. Importantly, he casts Hamilton as holding treaty-making and war powers to be inherently executive powers; Hamilton has claimed that since the President has the executive power his powers should be construed broadly “where not especially and strictly excepted out of the grant.” Madison argues that these are not executive powers, since treaties are laws and the executive is an enforcer of laws, not a giver of laws; moreover the power to declare war is the power to change which laws the country operates under, so these too must be legislative rather than executive in nature; moreover, the only reason for conflating these powers is that they are given to the British King (talk about an ad hominem attack)! Finally, after an extensive argument showing why it would be bad if the executive had the powers claimed here, Madison says that the legislature should be as free from restraints on entering war as not, and that a Proclamation of Neutrality hinders this ability because of the schizophrenic message it sends.

The Barbary Wars

Despite his opposition to the Proclamation of Neutrality’s theoretical roots, Thomas Jefferson assumed great Presidential power during his time in office. Most strikingly, he asserted powers to send military force abroad for defensive purposes — without the knowledge or consent of Congress. These actions are detailed in Max Boot’s book The Savage Wars of Peace.

In 1801, the US Government was spending a large portion of its funds (as much as one-sixth) in tribute to the Barbary States to prevent these African nations from pirating US trade ships. Many ships were lost whenever this tribute faltered or the Barbary kings wanted more money, and Jefferson resolved to end the piracy by force.  In May 1801 he sent the remaining Navy (left over from the Quasi-War with France) to the Mediterranean Sea to protect US shipping. These ships would not blockade any nation that had not declared war on the United States, and would not attack unless first attacked. But they could use force to protect American shipping and enforce “existing treaty obligations” and “chastise” any nations which had declared war (even if the US government back home had no knowledge of the declaration).

III. What Are War Powers?

As we have seen, there was little disagreement on war powers

at the time of the Convention and ratification. There are two possibilities: either everybody agreed on the distribution, or the war powers were considered so little that nobody realized the gray areas in which the power was not explicitly granted to either Congress or the President.

The early debates generally pitted the out-of-office party against a Presidential action they disagreed with on policy grounds, indicating that the exchange over powers was probably partisan and therefore politically motivated rather than theoretical, as does the fact that views on Presidential power tended to swap whenever the Presidency changed hands. Yet the kind of debate, the situations that were encountered, and the way the debaters changed and refined their views suggests that they had not considered a number of elemental situations when designing the distribution of war powers.

Believing the constitutional framers to have neglected the war powers makes sense, too. They were, in general, far more concerned with the oppression their own government might bring than any oppression inflicted by a foreign government. And they were revolutionaries, with practical experience in rebellions (of the legitimate and illegitimate variety) and government oppression, but little first-hand knowledge of international diplomacy. These men managed to get into a naval war with France a mere 15 years after France helped found our nation! The idea of sending the military abroad without an explicit and long-standing interest, or for longer than a few months of fighting, probably did not occur to them; as George Washington’s farewell address indicates, these men expected our primary interaction with other nation’s to be via trade.

IV. Conclusion

It seems evident that our founding fathers had clear rules in mind for the uses of military force, but that these rules were adequate only to the situations they envisioned and quickly fell short of reality. Any original intent the document had is completely inadequate to our present methods of governing and international discourse, not because the original intent is obsolete but because it was never complete to begin with.

Accordingly, we have evolved a system of war powers that is based on the present political power of those in Congress compared to the President; it is neither consistent nor very theoretically desirable. The Supreme Court, perhaps wisely, has declared the division of war powers a political issue that it largely cannot adjudicate. Our nation would be well-served by the wide acceptance of a more concretely-defined system, but our country’s survival without one is testament to the governing approach the founding fathers formed and their emphasis on internal forms.

Introduction

The 2008 election produced several significant results, including a large margin of victory for the winning Presidential candidate. This and other changes have led some observers to herald this election as the dawn of a new age in American politics; they claim that we are witnessing a realigning election. There are obvious arguments in favor of this observation, but on balance we will find they are wrong.

Theoretical Examination

First, we shall examine the election from a theoretical perspective. David Mayhew summarizes many factors in his book Electoral Realignments defining realigning elections, which we may check for consistency with this year’s results.

First, Mayhew says that voter turnout will be high in a realigning year. But that has not been the case this year. While voter turnout rates have gradually increased for the last several elections, 2008’s election saw roughly the same turnout as 2004’s election did.

Examining CNN’s 2004 and 2008 exit polls, one finds little difference in voter identification metrics. Voters in 2008 focused more on the economy than they did in 2004, which traditionally leads to a Democratic victory; whereas in 2004 the largest single issue was morality and then terrorism (both Republican strongholds).

Mayhew also indicates that nominating conventions will be in turmoil during realignment years. Despite a longer-than-usual nominating process in the Democratic party, both major conventions were peaceful. Additionally, the drawn-out nomination process in the Democratic party was chiefly due to the lack of a clear successor after 8 years of Republican-dominated government and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did not strongly differentiate themselves on any policy.

A third indicator of realignment elections is the presence of strong third parties. But the elections of 2004 and 2008 are characterized by the distinct lack of serious third-party contenders, after 3 elections in which a third party candidate either played the role of spoiler or took a significant portion of the popular vote.

The last two indicators of a realignment election are idea-based: that there is a new dominant ideological divide replacing the old main divide, and that political outsiders will lead the charge in polarizing the parties over this divide. There have been two new high-profile issues in the last 8 years: terrorism and gay marriage. Terrorism does not create strong ideological divides among the populace or the government, however. There are serious differences over the best policies to pursue, but the strong ideological divides have all been upon secondary issues, like whether the Iraq War was a helpful idea or well-planned. Issues of planning do not provoke realignments in the electorate.

Gay marriage has been seized upon by the Republican Party as a polarizing issue, but polling doesn’t bear out its strength as a realigning issue. The serious Democratic contenders for President all agreed that marriage should not be extended to gay couples, and most states have passed public initiatives banning gay marriage. A strong cross-cut is evident over this issue: blacks and Latinos are overwhelmingly in support of banning gay marriage; they are also overwhelmingly Democratic and the Democrats support gay rights more than Republicans do. However, since this election went strongly for the Democrats it clearly cannot be realigning on the basis of gay marriage.

James Sundquist has also charted how realigning elections are born in his 1983 book “The Dynamics of the Party System Revisited;” the first 4 steps are idea-based and do not apply to this election for reasons outlined in the previous two paragraphs.

In general, the Democratic victories in the 2006 midterm and 2008 presidential elections can be explained via shifting electoral focuses and events that benefited the Democrats, after a long period of issues that played to Republican strengths. The new issues of the past 6 years have largely followed the existing ideological divides, and any party defections can largely be explained by retrospective voters disagreeing with a failed process.

Question is indented at the beginning, all the rest is my paper.

In City of Boerne v. Flores, Justice Kennedy argued:

“Our national experience teaches that the Constitution is preserved best when each part of the government respects both the Constitution and the proper actions and determinations of the other branches. When the Court has interpreted the Constitution, it has acted within the province of the Judicial Branch, which embraces the duty to say what the law is.”

In support of this contention, Justice Kennedy cited Marbury v. Madison. But does Marbury support such a claim to judicial supremacy? Is constitutional interpretation the sole province of the judiciary? After all, seizing upon the first sentence of this quote, departmentalists like Abraham Lincoln have insisted that constitutional interpretation from the other branches is central to preserving the Constitution. Consider that Congress, too, has offered independent interpretations of the Constitution, some of which—the War Powers Act, for example—have never come before the Court.

Against this backdrop, who may interpret the Constitution? Is there a final interpreter?

I. Introduction

The United States of America is a constitutional republic. There is a written Constitution and its word is unbreakable law. It is clear and simple — except when there are disputes about what a clause means or how it applies. The three branches of government, generally, have three views of constitutional interpretation: the judiciary believes in judicial supremacy, the legislature — thanks to party politics and a relatively less-educated group — schizophrenically varies between legislative supremacy and departmentalism, and the executive branch espouses departmentalism. In the following pages I will examine each of these three versions of interpretation, then conclude by determining which is best, which is practiced, and who the final interpreter is.

II. Forms of Interpretation

Judicial Supremacy

The roots of judicial supremacy come from Justice Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison and the doctrine of judicial review it espouses. But the case’s support for judicial supremacy is not so obvious as opinions today make it seem.

Marbury made the (perhaps startling) assertion that the Judicial Department may strike down legislation that it finds contrary to the Constitution. The assertion is well defended:

This doctrine [of no judicial review] would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions. It would declare that an act which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void, is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare that if the legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express probation, is in reality effectual…Thus it reduces to nothing…a written constitution…

This determination leads inexorably to judicial review, for “If [an ex post facto bill] should be passed, and a person should be prosecuted under it; must the court condemn to death those victims whom the constitution endeavours to preserve?”

Marbury, though, only firmly establishes judicial review in the context of a court case. It says nothing about Congress’ ability to pass new interpretive bills, such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This bill directly responded to a precedent-changing court decision by declaring broad leeway in the exercise of religious freedom, even if it goes against existing statutory law; it offered a Congressional interpretation of Amendment 1 in statutory form. Striking RFRA down in City of Boerne v. Flores, Justice Kennedy offers strong language; for while he devotes most of the opinion to determining that RFRA is not enforcement legislation under §5 or Amendment 14, it is the closing paragraphs that are most memorable:

When the political branches of the Government act against the background of a judicial interpretation of the Constitution already issued, it must be understood that in later cases and controversies the Court will treat its precedents with the respect due them under settled principles, including stare decisis, and contrary expectations must be disappointed. RFRA was designed to control cases and controversies, such as the one before us; but as the provisions of the federal statute here invoked are beyond congressional authority, it is this Court’s precedent, not RFRA, which must control.

The language is striking in its force and apparent anger, and in its decision-making process: while Congress can interpret the Constitution, and “its conclusions are entitled to much deference,” Congress cannot offer conflicting interpretations of the Constitution after the Court has spoken. The opinion is unusually brief, and implies that the Supreme Court may strike down laws merely for conflicting with precedent. There is no co-equal status of the branches; the Court rules supreme and the other branches may not contest it.

Is this a departure from Marbury, or merely a fulfillment? It must be a fulfillment. For while Marshall stopped short of openly declaring the other branches constitutionally subservient, he did so implicitly. If Congress could somehow override the Court’s interpretation, the Supreme Court’s interpretive powers would mean nothing and Congress would be as illimitably powerful as if the Court were forced to make decisions while ignoring the Constitution. Judicial supremacy has thus been Supreme Court doctrine since 1803, and the country has generally (often grudgingly) accepted it ever since.

Legislative supremacy

This form of Constitutional interpretation has received little attention in the United States, but legislative supremacy has been practiced implicitly in certain Congressional actions and is explicit in other countries around the world (such as the United Kingdom), so it deserves a brief analysis.

The issue with legislative supremacy is expressed in Marbury v. Madison: if the legislature is supreme a written Constitution cannot limit it. Indeed, the countries that practice legislative supremacy do not have written constitutions. Many of them function well and protect civil liberties, but some do not and the American people have long cherished a written Constitution.

What then is the argument for legislative supremacy? It is simple: the legislative branch is the only part of government that is directly elected by the people of the United States (or other respective country) and it makes the laws. As such, it should have a special place in interpreting the laws and the framework under which they operate. And indeed, Congress occasionally acts in this way: the War Powers Resolution is a document of either Constitutional interpretation or Constitutional amendment, enacted by Congress to limit the power of the presidency and bind the nation’s war powers more tightly to Congress. While the Supreme Court has never openly acknowledged legislative supremacy as viable, it has on occasion allowed the legislature practical sovereignty — as In Reconstruction following the Civil War — by avoiding certain cases.

Departmentalism

The policy espoused by Presidents since the country’s inception, departmentalism holds that the branches of government are “co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves”

. Under departmentalism, each branch is responsible for interpreting its own powers and nothing else. In general departmentalism is articulated reflexively against the legislature attempting a power play over the executive (as in the case of presidents disavowing the War Powers Resolution), or as an executive power play over the legislature (as in the case of presidential signing statements, whereby a President offers his interpretation of statutory law and the enforcement thereof). Only rarely is departmentalism focused on the Supreme Court — but when it is so focused, as in the case of Lincoln’s first inaugural, departmentalism is dramatic.

Arguments for departmentalism are persuasive: this method of interpretation preserves the Federalist Papers’ clash of ambitions; departments are prevented from ignoring the Constitution via their interaction with the other two departments. It allows the correction of bad judicial decisions, so tempting in cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford (quickly ignored by Northerners, with Lincoln’s departmentalism argument as justification; and overturned by the Civil War and 13^th Amendment) or Plessy v. Ferguson (which nobody refuted until Brown v. Board of Education). Departmentalism even has some judicial standing, for while the Supreme Court has never explicitly recognized the principal it does refuse to rule on certain “political” questions and interactions between Congress and the President.

Moreover, departmentalism embraces the unavoidable fact that each branch must interpret the Constitution in carrying out its everyday duties. Its disadvantage, of course, is that two branches can disagree over their constitutional interpretations and never resolve the issue; this has persisted most apparently in the case of the War Powers Resolution, which both sides have — for fear of the possible outcome — avoided bringing to court.

III. The Final Interpreter and their chosen form

It is easy to realize that every branch of the government should perform its own Constitutional interpretation in the course of daily business. Congress should not waste time passing a law that is unconstitutional, so if a law is over the line some member should say so and the law should be removed from the table. The President, in handling diplomacy, should be mindful of the tools he does and does not have at his disposal. The courts should not listen to cases that the Constitution denies them jurisdiction to hear. But determining which form of interpretation to follow is difficult from the text alone, which provides remarkably few hints. Luckily, determining the final interpreter of the Constitution is not so difficult, and the final interpreter can help us learn what form of interpretation to follow.

The Final Interpreter

The final interpreter of any Constitution must be the force that gives the Constitution its power. Under a dictator this is the military might of the tyrant; under a theocracy this is God — or, rather, the state church; under our constitutional democracy this is explicitly “we the people.”

The final interpreter of the Constitution is and must be the people of the United States. They gave the Constitution its form and the government its powers; they can unmake it as they please through the exertion of revolution. They can amend the Constitution through their elected representatives and special conventions and they elect the government. Thus the Constitution is what we the people will it to be. Of this there can be no doubt. But what is the best means of expressing this will within the government?

The Chosen Form

We the people have embraced all three forms of constitutional interpretation in the history of our country. Legislative supremacy was the expectation during Reconstruction; departmentalism generally reigned prior to that and pops up throughout our history; we follow judicial supremacy today (as evidenced by compliance with Roe v. Wade) even as we sometimes seek to undermine it with cries against “activist judges” and “legislating from the bench.” Nonetheless, there are clues to be gathered.

Because we the people are the final interpreter of the Constitution it would be easy to pick legislative supremacy — as our free brethren around the world have — as our chosen form of interpretation in the government. But the arguments against it in Marbury are too convincing to ignore, and we cherish our written constitution. We experimented with this form during Reconstruction, and the results damn it. Too much can be done in haste that we would not do if given time to think and a larger perspective. So we dismiss legislative supremacy as averse to our constitutional form.

We dismissed legislative supremacy as too democratic; perhaps we can dismiss judicial supremacy as too undemocratic. After all, if we embrace this form of government 9 unelected persons (even just 5) can define fundamental aspects of our lives, sometimes to the good, sometimes to the bad. Witness the Northern anger over Dred Scott, the southern discontent at Brown v. Board, the moral outrage at Roe v. Wade. People would have been angered at any choice in all of these cases, but Dred Scott was followed by a civil war; Brown took over a decade to implement, and Roe is still fought by legislative bodies throughout the country. And yet, the decisions in all these cases were followed — often grudgingly, often after time had passed, but all were followed. Judicial supremacy, however, leaves us with a serious problem: what if the Supreme Court makes the wrong call, as in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson?

What then of departmentalism? It has the noted advantage of allowing us to fight against judicial missteps and pitting ambition against ambition. But it has a serious disadvantage noted above: non-resolution of Constitutional questions. This is simply too large an issue to be ignored. Moreover, a strict reading of departmentalism in fact leads to the conclusion that the Supreme Court is supreme in matters of constitutional interpretation. Marbury v. Madison is an argument from the departmentalist point of view. If it were not, the Supreme Court would have adopted unlimited judicial review, not requiring the presence of a current case or controversy for it to strike down laws; it would feel free to advise the other branches on constitutional issues before they arose as a case; in short, if our understanding of judicial supremacy did not spring from a departmental reading of the text, our Supreme Court would be far more Supreme than it has grown.

I have explained why legislative supremacy cannot stand, and why departmentalism falls apart. Let me also explain why judicial supremacy is safe. Why, from a practical point of view, it works and does not flounder for the issues raised above. The argument boils down to power. The Supreme Court’s sole power consists of telling other people what to do. It has no means to force the Congress or the President to abide by its decisions; it can only order and hope that its orders are followed. If a case is decided so disastrously badly that the people disagree with it en masse, the President can follow in Lincoln’s footsteps and abide by the Court’s decision in that case and that one alone; for while the Court may find that interpretation unconstitutional, if the people disagree the Court cannot force the issue; if the people do agree with the Court the President will never be able to work in politics again. In the worst case, Congress and the President can pack the court and insert justices friendly to a different choice. If the courts were not the final judge they would not have any power to speak on the Constitution; while the Legislature (in passing laws) and the Executive (in vetoing them) both get an explicit opportunity to deny a bill’s Constitutionality, the Judicial branch would be forced to remain silent. Judicial supremacy, far from dismantling checks and balances, in fact fulfills them. Moreover, the courts have proven themselves cognizant of the people as their ultimate masters and final interpreters: The Supreme Court, initially hostile to FDR’s New Deal plans, abruptly changed their rulings after his landslide re-election in 1936. They have also strategically avoided hearing cases that they suspected would lead to unpopular decisions (as in Ex Parte McCardle).

Moreover, judicial supremacy is the best guard of civil rights. The legislature and the President are both encouraged to infringe upon rights in the pursuit of their duties; the sole purpose of the Courts is to interpret the law, and many justices believe their job is to be the last bulwark against unnoticed tyranny. Even if the Supreme Court rules an action Constitutional and they are wrong, other people must carry out the infringing action before anybody’s rights have actually been violated.

Lastly, despite the broad language used in Boerne v. Flores, the Courts have shown themselves amenable to sharing interpretive powers in contested areas. Many states and the Congress have enacted laws limiting abortion since Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court has only rarely struck them down. War powers are a highly disputed area of policy, and the Court generally leaves them and other political questions to be decided by the political branches with a more direct root in the people.

IV. Conclusion

Judicial supremacy is a necessary and proper method of interpreting the Constitution. It maintains the checks and balances, allows each branch to fulfill its purpose, and best safeguards civil liberties. But Supreme Court justices are not the final interpreters of the Constitution. That esteemed highest place, as with all the high places in our government, upon we the people.