It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power—a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.

This article examines the historical significance of Barack Obama's creation of “OFA,” a presidential grassroots organization. It attempts, as Theda Skocpol has put it, to analyze American political development “as it happens.” Born as “Obama for America” during the 2008 campaign, OFA was renamed “Organizing for America” and ensconced in the Democratic National Committee during Obama's first term, where it served as the “grassroots arm” of the party. After 2012, it was spun off as a nonprofit social-welfare entity called “Organizing for Action” dedicated to advocating for Obama's second-term objectives: immigration reform, efforts to fight climate change, gun safety legislation, LGBT rights, and the implementation of health reform in the face of continuing intense opposition. That OFA was kept intact after Obama's successful election and reelection efforts marks it as an especially pioneering effort. Making use of several personal interviews, a wealth of primary documents, and data on spending and mobilization tactics, we explain how Obama's paradigm-shifting organization marked an effort to meet the challenges of forging a new progressive coalition in a fractious polity. More broadly, the article considers how this digital age grassroots effort has been influenced by, and in turn has contributed to the advance of an executive-centered partisanship characterized by high expectations for presidential leadership in a context of widespread dissatisfaction with government, strong and intensifying political polarization, and high-stakes battles over the basic direction of domestic and foreign policy programs.

Ascending to the presidency in the midst of a severe economic crisis and an ongoing war on terrorism, Barack Obama faced numerous political and policy challenges. We examine the responsibilities he faced in assuming the received tasks of modern presidential leadership amid a polarized political system. To a point, Obama has embraced partisan leadership, indeed, even further articulating developments in the relationship between the president and parties that Ronald Reagan had first initiated, and George W. Bush built upon. Thus Obama has advanced an executive-centered party system that relies on presidential candidates and presidents to pronounce party doctrine, raise campaign funds, mobilize grassroots support, and campaign on behalf of their partisan brethren. Just as Reagan and Bush used their powers in ways that bolstered their parties, so Obama's exertions have strengthened the Democratic Party's capacity to mobilize voters and to advance programmatic objectives. At the same time, presidential partisanship threatens to relegate collective responsibility to executive aggrandizement. Seeking to avoid the pitfalls that undermined the Bush presidency, Obama has been more ambivalent about uniting partisanship and executive power. Only time will tell whether this ambiguity proves to be effective statecraft—enshrining his charisma in an enduring record of achievement and a new Democratic majority—or whether it marks a new stage in the development of executive dominion that subordinates party building to the cult of personality.

Interpreting the 1970s is a difficult business. On the one hand, reformers struggled earnestly and effectively to codify the exalted vision of a good society that was celebrated during the 1960s. And yet in doing so, they appeared to routinize rather than resolve the virulent conflicts of the previous decade. Scholars tend to agree that the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s marked a transformation of political life no less important than the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Unlike these earlier reform periods, however, the 1960s and 1970s did not embrace national administrative power as an agent of social and economic justice. Instead, reformers of the 1960s and 1970s championed “participatory democracy” and viewed the very concept of national governmental authority with deep suspicion. Indeed, Hugh Heclo characterizes the reform legacy of the 1960s and 1970s as one of intractable fractiousness, as a “postmodern” assault on the modern state forged on the anvil of reforms carried out during the Progressive and New Deal eras. “In the end, it appears that a great deal of postmodern policymaking is not really concerned with ‘making policy’ in the sense of finding a settled course of public action that people can live with,” he writes. “It is aimed at crusading for a cause by confronting power with power.”

During the 1992 presidential contest, the press and pundits alike characterized the challenge posed by H. Ross Perot and the political organization he created, United We Stand America, as the most significant assault on the two-party system since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Campaign. In one sense, this comparison is more penetrating than these observers imagined, for the impressive showing of Perot was emblematic of the candidate-centered, plebiscitary electoral politics that Roosevelt and the Progressive party championed in 1912. Given that Perot ran without partisan attachments and refused to cede authority to the rank and file of a new reform movement, however, the allusion has proven to be as ephemeral as the public opinion polls it relies on. The Progressive party was born during the 1912 election as more than an aegis for Roosevelt's ample desire for power; it embodied the aspirations of reformers whose quest for a vehicle of political, social, and industrial transformation was at least a dozen years old.

Scholars have long expressed concern that the ascendance of the modern presidency since the New Deal and World War II, by hastening the decline of political parties and fostering the expansion of the administrative state, portended an era of chronically low public engagement and voter turnout and an increasingly fractious and impotent national politics. Presidents' inattentiveness to the demands of party-building and grassroots mobilization, coupled with their willingness to govern through administration, were seen as key obstacles to the revitalization of a politics based in widespread political interest and collective responsibility for public policy. This article argues that George W. Bush's potent combination of party leadership and executive administration, foreshadowed by Ronald Reagan's earlier efforts, suggests the emergence of a new presidential leadership synthesis and a “new” party system. This new synthesis does not promise a return to pre-modern party politics; rather, it indicates a rearticulation of the relationship between the presidency and the party system. The erosion of old old-style partisan politics allowed for a more national and issue-based party system to develop, forging new links between presidents and parties. As the 2006 elections reveal, however, it remains to be seen whether such parties, which are inextricably linked to executive-centered politics and governance, can perform the critical function of moderating presidential ambition and mobilizing public support for party principles and policies.Sidney M. Milkis is Professors of Politics (smm8e@cms.mail.virginia.edu) and Jesse H. Rhodes is a doctoral student (jhr7t@cms.mail.virginia.edu) at the University of Virginia. The authors would like to thank the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for their thoughtful and constructive comments.

How did two political scientists, both lifelong Democrats, end up working for the Republican National Committee (RNC)? We did so with more than a little trepidation and only after consulting extensively with each other and our friends. Many considerations influenced our difficult decision to join the plaintiffs as expert witnesses in McConnell v. FEC, but the most important factor was that we shared a long-standing commitment to the party system and feared that the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act (BCRA), the most significant campaign finance legislation to be passed in 25 years, marked the dangerous culmination of a regulatory regime, born of the Progressive era, that weakened the parties' ability to engage in those activities that have made them so important to the working of constitutional government in the United States. Moreover, we predicted that BCRA would shift money and the balance of power away from political parties and towards interest groups, with serious consequences for American democracy.