The Presidency and the Executive Branch

• Date: 01 July 2001
• Author: Joseph L. Wert
• Published date: 01 July 2001
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00053

500 Public Administration Review •July/August 2001, Vol. 61, No. 4

Book Reviews | Larry Luton, Editor

The Presidency and the Executive Branch

Joseph L. Wert, Indiana University Southeast

John P. Burke, Presidential Transitions: From Politics to Practice (London:

Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000). 437 pp., $65 hardback.

Paul Kengor, Wreath Layer or Policy Player? The Vice President’s Role in

Foreign Policy (New York: Lexington Books, 2000). 325 pp., $65 cloth; $24.95

paper.

Joel Aberbach and Bert Rockman, In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the

U.S. Federal Executive (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). 230

pp., $42.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

The presidency and the executive

branch itself is an ever-evolving insti-

tution. As it changes, new holes in ex-

isting research become perceivable,

even as our understanding of the in-

stitution seems to become more com-

plete. The topics covered by the three

books under review here are a case in

point. Scholarly literature on the presi-

dency has not previously focused on

presidential transition processes or the

vice presidency. Recent scholarship on

the bureaucracy for the most part,

paints a very negative picture of how

bureaucrats and bureaucracies work.

The three books here contribute toward

filling the holes in this important area

of research.

Transitions to Power

Normally, when a presidential can-

didate wins an election, he has ap-

proximately two and a half months to

make nominations to his Cabinet and

to make the large number of staff ap-

pointments he has to make before he

takes office on January 20. When the

presidential election of 2000 was fi-

nally decided, George W. Bush had

only about half of that time before his

inauguration. Although it is certain that

Mr. Bush and his transition advisors

were busily at work trying to put to-

gether a team that would be ready to

be put into place once the election was

officially decided, it is also clear that

the election snafu must have made it

extremely difficult to get his transition

team into place and to start making

offers for appointment.

Mr. Bush would have found Presi-

dential Transitions: From Politics to

Practice a valuable resource. This

book is a study of decision making in

the last four presidential transitions,

and how what happens here affects

what happens in the rest of the

president’s administration. Decisions

made in the transition period are im-

portant for the rest of the president’s

term because “it is decisions that mat-

ter, and transitions, in turn, are criti-

cally important because they are a time

when the processes of leading to policy

decisions first begin to take shape and

are organized” (5).

Burke divides the book into nine

chapters. Each of four presidents

(Carter through Clinton) receives two

chapters, with the ninth chapter con-

taining conclusions and lessons

learned. The first chapter on each

president is an analysis of the decision

processes and actual decisions made

in regard to the transition. The second

chapter for each president examines

how the decisions made during the

transition period affected the early part

of the president’s term.

The framework used by the author

is to look at nine challenges that each

president-elect faces in the transition

that relate to how he and his team be-

gin to “organize, staff, and structure a

decision making process for the presi-

dency that followed” (10). These chal-

lenges include: the pre-election tran-

sition planning, organizing the

transition effort after the election, fill-

ing Cabinet positions, setting out a

policy agenda, shaping the staff for the

White House, putting into place the

decision-making processes to be used,

looking at the president as manager

and decision maker, the policy out-

comes resulting from these decisions,

and foreign policy decision processes

and policy outcomes.

Through secondary sources and

personal interviews with participants

Joseph L. Wert is an assistant professor of political science in the School of Social Sciences at Indiana University Southeast in New

Albany, Indiana, where he teaches courses in public administration, research methods, and American politics. His research interest lies

in public opinion and the presidency and in the executive branch. Email: jwert@ius.edu.