ABSTRACT

The social pluralism of the nation and the institutional pluralism of the governmental system mean that virtually every public policy that will be adopted has accumulated a history rich in exchange and compromise. The president is doubtless the Washington community's most prominent and active dealmaker. The sources and nature of policy disagreements among politicians are less well developed in the literature than are the mechanisms for their resolution. The variety of policy perspectives has long been recognized by pluralist theory, but rather than representing a source of conflict, it is exalted as providing a felicitous division of labor. A party theory of presidential leadership incorporates much of the pluralist depiction of American politics, if not its underlying rationale. The variety of policy preferences within a congressional party can be represented statistically as the standard deviation of the median voters' positions around the aggregate mean for those districts represented by the party.