Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policy Making - Softcover

George C. Edwards III, one of the country's leading scholars of the presidency, is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and also holds the George and Julia Blucher Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies. He has served as both the Winant Professor and the Olin Professor of American Government at Oxford and the John Adams Fellow at the University of London, and has held senior visiting appointments at Sciences Po in Paris, Peking University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He has authored dozens of articles and has written or edited 25 books on American politics and public policy making. He is also editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly and general editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Politics series. Among his latest books, ON DEAF EARS: THE LIMITS OF THE BULLY PULPIT examines the effectiveness of presidential leadership of public opinion, WHY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS BAD FOR AMERICA evaluates the consequences of the method of electing the president, THE STRATEGIC PRESIDENT offers a new formulation for understanding presidential leadership, and OVERREACH analyzes leadership in the Obama presidency. Professor Edwards has served as president of the Presidency Research Section of the American Political Science Association, which has named its annual dissertation prize in his honor and awarded him its Career Service Award. He has received the Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service from the U.S. Army and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has spoken to 250 universities and other groups in the U.S. and abroad, keynoted numerous national and international conferences, done hundreds of interviews with the national and international press, and can be heard on National Public Radio.

"I would describe Edwards and Wayne as clearly the best undergraduate text on the market for a course on the presidency. No other text I have read is as well organized, accessible written, and informed in its discussion."

"I have found the Edwards and Wayne, Presidential Leadership text to be the best primary text...it is organized thematically in a way that makes intuitive sense..."

"The breadth of the book from its discussion of the origins of the presidency, through its examination of the president's relations with the media, Congress, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy to an appendix which provides a summary of the arguments for and against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton is quite remarkable...my students report what they find most commendable are the authors' efforts to substantiate and illustrate their discussion with graphs, diagrams and tables."

"As we all know, these are two very good scholars and they've done a good job with this text. The strengths of the book are threefold: it is comprehensive; it provides a great amount of detail, and explicitly addresses the president's role in policy making."

"I have used PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP as the basic text for at least the past 10 years. It is one of the few textbooks I use in any of my undergraduate courses. It is one the few that has ever worked in the sense that students read it without my having to threaten them with tests...I believe they use it because it is very well written, comprehensive in that it most often has the answers they are looking for, and doesn't have any overt, in-your-face bias."