Decisionmaking in the White House: Assessing the Models.

In 1974 Richard Johnson published his seminal Managing the White House, which examined the management styles of presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. Johnson identified three dominant management approaches - the "competitive", the "collegial" and the "formalistic"- and argued that because each had their own strengths and weaknesses, none could be considered superior. Since Johnson published his book, however, most presidents have adopted variants of the formalistic approach, and scholars now describe it as the "standard" method for managing the presidency. The competitive and collegial models have been relegated to historical curiosities. In this paper we reexamine Johnson's typology. By identifying the underlying structural attributes that differentiate the three management models, we make two important points. First, the models in their ideal form differ significantly in how they channel information to the president and, potentially, in their impact on presidential decisionmaking. Second, the historical evolution of the management approaches, from FDR's competitive model to the now dominant formalistic model, can be understood as an implicit tradeoff, in which presidents opt to limit the choices flowing to them in order to achieve greater decisionmaking efficiency, but at the cost of making less informed decisions. We conclude by arguing that scholars, when advising presidents on how best to organize the presidential staff, pay more attention to the costs of using the standard model, and the potential benefits of competitive staffing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]