In America, the elected chief executive faces pressures, arising from roles the officeholder must play, that can potentially push in different directions. He must simultaneously be both a political figure who responds to and makes demands of other members of the polity, and an administrative chief who sees that the law is executed in a satisfactory manner. The executive challenge is to reconcile these possibly competing pressures successfully toward the end of providing leadership. Leadership, in this thesis, is the maintenance of a successful electoral coalition based on a stable, coherent program of governance, which is implemented once the candidate is in office. Because politicians and thinkers have conceived of politics and administration differently at different times, American politics has produced three broad conceptions of the executive: the constitutional executive, the partisan administrator, and the popular manager. Each conception of the executive also is a reflection of a broader political culture that an officeholder is able to emphasize. Each of these conceptions has appeared at both the national and state levels. This thesis examines the executive challenge using as a case study the development of the Massachusetts governorship from colonial and Revolutionary times through the present day. It then focuses on the political experiences of Michael Dukakis as an in depth examination of each conception of the executive. The position taken here is that the governors who were most successful at providing leadership were those who were attentive to competing political cultures and who sought to lead a discussion including all members of the community. Executives are most effective at exercising leadership when the officeholder remembers the legitimacy of other constitutional institutions; when the chief executive remembers that carrying out the law is a political activity; and when the president or the governor presents a vision while also allowing sufficient opportunity for discussion within and about that vision.

My dissertation is a study of the origins and legacy of participatory democratic thought in America. In June 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society signed the Port Huron Statement, in which they articulated their vision of citizens participating directly in the governance of their country and putting an end to many intractable problems in American life, including racial discrimination, poverty, and the paranoid logic of cold war policy (e.g., brinkmanship). The New Left ideal of participatory democracy captured the imagination of a generation of political activists in the late 1950s and early 1960s but never planted a firm foothold in American political soil. Largely dismissed as an unviable idea in such a large country, it had limited influence on the development of political institutions in the United States and would only receive serious consideration from political theorists. To understand why participatory democracy was so short-lived, I argue that one must trace its intellectual origins to the pragmatists who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundation for this ethos. Thus, I focus on the writings of the early pragmatist philosophers, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Next, I turn to the legacy of participatory democratic thought and examine the work of Sheldon Wolin and Benjamin Barber, two contemporary political theorists who, respectively, represent radical and mainstream versions of this idea. Finally, I argue that once situated within the pragmatist tradition, participatory democratic thought proves not only impracticable but also theoretically untenable. This might compel political scientists to revisit questions about participation, civic education, citizenship, civil society, and representation.

This study demonstrates that Roosevelt spent most of his life trying to reconcile two often competing values: the collectivist spirit of Progressivism and the individualism of the founding fathers. As President, TR used the power of the national government to break down obstacles that prevented everyone from competing on a level economic playing field, thereby providing them with opportunity to realize their individual potential. But he believed that much depended on the character of the individual and therefore relied on personal example, the bully pulpit, and an extraordinary number of public writings to preach the values of fair-play, decency, hard-work, self-control, and duty to family, community, and nation. In essence, Roosevelt played the role of the kindhearted tough guy---his American ideal---and he hoped that his words and deeds would inspire his fellow citizens to appreciate the importance of both individualistic and collectivistic qualities. Roosevelt accepted largeness in American life, including the new corporate scale of the economy. He rejected both the Wilsonian desire to break up corporations and the Socialistic wish to nationalize them. He preferred instead to strengthen the regulatory powers of the federal government, while remaining devoted to the principle of individual responsibility. He was simply unwilling to regard structural solutions like statutes, constitutional amendments, and regulatory bodies as an appropriate response to all of society's problems. Especially where the private behavior of individuals was concerned, Roosevelt believed rhetoric and example were often more effective than either institutional reform or law in elevating mankind to a higher plane of morality. In short, TR was not in the mainstream of Progressive reformers in that he set out to reform, not forsake, the individualist values that prevailed during the 18 th and 19th centuries; and the sum of his efforts (both institutional and personal) offers a third way, not yet chosen, to transcend the liberal-conservative dichotomy of both modern American politics and contemporary political scholarship.

This dissertation attempts to expand our understanding of the most important political reform period in American history---the Progressive Era. Academic literature on the Progressive Era has focused almost exclusively on the reformers of the time and has ignored the question, "With whom were the Progressives arguing?" By attempting to answer this question, we can develop a better understanding of the intellectual and ideological conflict that gave rise to the direct democracy reforms of the time and extend our understanding of the development of the American state. What this research reveals is the existence of a dynamic and lively resistance to the direct democracy reforms of the Progressive movement. This Anti-progressive voice provides intellectual and political arguments against a variety of direct democracy reforms including the direct primary, initiative and referendum, judicial recall, and the direct election of senators. These voices of dissent come from a variety of sources that represent different ideological backgrounds, various professions, and a range of geographic origins. Together, these dissenters to Progressive reform include academics, politicians, public servants, and socialists. Those identified for this dissertation include: Henry Jones Ford, Nicholas Murray Butler, William Howard Taft, Emanuel Philipp, Elihu Root, Bernard Freyd, Charles Hollingsworth, and Victor Berger. Analysis of their arguments and of the debates of the time reveals several central themes that offer a way to initially define the claims of the Anti-progressives. These included a belief in representative institutions, constitutionalism, a strongly independent judiciary, and the primacy of politics and political parties.

Major League Baseball, alone among industries of its size in the United States, operates as an unregulated monopoly. This twentieth century regulatory anomaly has become known simply as the "baseball anomaly." Major League Baseball developed into a major commercial enterprise without being subject to antitrust liability. Long after the interstate commercial character of baseball had been established, and even recognized by the Supreme Court, baseball's monopoly remained free from federal regulation. This study explains the baseball anomaly by connecting baseball's regulatory status to the larger political environment, tracing the game's fate through four different regulatory regimes in the United States. The constellation of institutional, ideological and political factors within each regulatory regime provides the context for the persistence of the baseball anomaly. Baseball's unregulated monopoly persists because of the confluence of institutional, ideological and political factors which have prevented the repeal of baseball's antitrust exemption to date. However, both the institutional and ideological factors, which have in the past protected baseball's unregulated monopoly, are fading. Baseball's owners can no longer claim special cultural significance in defense of the exemption, nor can they claim that the commissioner system approximates government regulation sufficiently. Both of these strategies have been discredited by the labor unrest in baseball over the last decade. While baseball is one labor strike away from losing part of its exemption, it will likely retain the aspects of the exemption which cover the contractual relationship between the major and minor leagues, as well as the part of the exemption which allows Major League Baseball to regulate the migration of individual franchises. These aspects of baseball's exemption with likely be codified and expanded to all professional sports leagues. The eventual partial repeal of baseball's exemption and the likely expansion of part of baseball's exemption to other sports makes it both an outdated anomaly and a harbinger of sports antitrust policy in the twenty first century.