The President and Social Movements : Reflections on Executive Power, Insurgency, and the Quest for Enduring Reform

This paper investigates the relationship between the presidency and social movements, with an eye toward its impact on the achievement and character of durable legal and programmatic reform. Presidency scholars, like many citizens, regularly perceive occupants of the Oval Office as leading agents of change in a labyrinthine political system that can be difficult to navigate. It is a refrain that we can trace from Alexander Hamilton’s famous depiction of the presidency in the Federalist Papers as a critical source of energy in the constitutional order to Stephen Skowronek’s more recent observation that the institution is a “blunt disruptive force” intent upon remaking the national polity on its own terms. Social movement scholars, in turn, associate social and political transformation with organized, collective insurgencies of ordinary people motivated by common purposes or social solidarities. By definition, social movements are, to borrow James Jasper’s words, “conscious, concerted, and relatively sustained efforts by organized groups…to change some aspect of their society by using extra-institutional means.”