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Rating: 
Summary: Clear blend of archives and statistics
Review: This book just won the Neustadt Award from the American Political Science Association as the best book on the presidency (I guess for 2002). Having read it in a graduate school seminar last spring, I concur with the choice. It's the best recent book I've read on how presidents deploy their staff to produce legislative policy proposals. Rudalevige suggests a theory for when presidents will use centralized White House staff and when they will rely on the bureaucracy that is grounded in the "transaction cost" field of economics. His argument is convincing, if sometimes abstruse (especially I would guess for non-academics; this book is *not* a Bob Caro kind of book about politics). The blend of methodologies is what I appreciated most, perhaps. There's a great battle in political science between those who use statistics (quantitative methodology) and those who focus on historical or archival data (qualitative methodology). Presidency books have tended to fall in the latter camp -- one neat thing about this book is that it does both. It uses careful archival research, from presidential libraries and the OMB archives, and uses that to code a large dataset for statistical analysis. There are two quantitative chapters that non-political scientists might want to avoid, though they are summed up in the concluding chapter. All in all, an important work for presidency scholars; a very informative read for those with an interest in the presidency (and willing to tolerate discussion of political science methods!)
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