The Skowronek Theory of Presidential Cycles

[Heebie Jeebie]

Stephen Skowronek has a theory about presidential elections. He looks at the sequence of ‘political time’, the historical pattern of the American presidency that has repeated itself over the last 200 years. The sequence goes from “reconstructive” presidents who transform politics in their own image (Roosevelt, Reagan), followed by their handpicked successors (Truman, Bush ‘41) ; in turn they are usually succeeded by presidents Skowronek calls “pre-emptive”, who adopt the reigning orthodoxy of their parties (Eisenhower, Bill Clinton) followed by a faithful servant of that orthodoxy (Kennedy/Johnson, Bush ‘43) followed by another pre-emptive opposition leader (Nixon, Obama). The final stage is the “disjunctive” leader, who is outside their party’s orthodoxy, and that’s where we are now with Trump.  https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2016/12/skowronek-views-the-trump-win-through-political-time

It's an interesting idea, but I think Skowronek is off on his pairings.  I'd say
Hoover = Carter
FDR = Reagan/Bush '41
Truman = Clinton
Eisenhower = Bush '43
JFK/LBJ = Obama
Nixon/Ford = Trump/Pence

So, if you think Skoronek is right, Trump is due to lose in 2020.  If I'm right, Trump is due to win.  Anyway, political theories like this are fun fluff.  Any thoughts?

[Orser67]

It's an interesting theory, and I think "Trump as Carter" is absolutely the best case scenario for Democrats, but there's certainly a chance that Trump is more like Nixon or even destroys the cycle altogether.

[RI]

This type of cyclical thinking is marginally better than astrology.

[pbrower2a]

The worst two losses by incumbent Presidents in the 20th century were Hoover (1932) and Carter (1980) That is 48 years apart. I came to the conclusion, even before the Mueller report came out, that Donald Trump is headed to defeat because six keys have turned against him in the Lichtman test.

He lost the Party mandate because his Party lost seats (in fact the majority) in the midterm election. He faces a serious challenge in the primary election in former Governor William Weld (I saw this as the killer, and it happened yesterday before the exposure of the bulk of the Mueller Report), 'his' economy cannot do better than the Obama economy (which rises from a would-be replay of the Great Depression), social unrest in the form of racist and terrorist attacks has happened with the President mishandling the situations, HIS IS THE MOST PERVASIVELY CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and America's usual allies find him an embarrassment.

The Mueller Report is an embarrassment, but it simply loads onto the perception of a fantastically-corrupt Presidency. Such looks like the most likely theme of Presidential failure.       

[bagelman]

The worst two losses by incumbent Presidents in the 20th century were Hoover (1932) and Carter (1980) That is 48 years apart. I came to the conclusion, even before the Mueller report came out, that Donald Trump is headed to defeat because six keys have turned against him in the Lichtman test.

He lost the Party mandate because his Party lost seats (in fact the majority) in the midterm election. He faces a serious challenge in the primary election in former Governor William Weld (I saw this as the killer, and it happened yesterday before the exposure of the bulk of the Mueller Report), 'his' economy cannot do better than the Obama economy (which rises from a would-be replay of the Great Depression), social unrest in the form of racist and terrorist attacks has happened with the President mishandling the situations, HIS IS THE MOST PERVASIVELY CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and America's usual allies find him an embarrassment.

The Mueller Report is an embarrassment, but it simply loads onto the perception of a fantastically-corrupt Presidency. Such looks like the most likely theme of Presidential failure.       

He also somehow managed to gain Senate seats during all this. Oh, and we're supposed to think William Weld is a serious challenger? Watch that snob get 2% in NH.

[JA]

Supposing this is true, then what's the underlying cause(s) of the cycles?

[izixs]

I'm generally skeptical of pattern matching when it comes to political trends on this scale. Aka, reading too much into the back and forth while not giving much consideration to the underlying currents producing the top level results (which may or may not have cyclical trends themselves).

But I don't really need to go there for this one as the notion of a disjunctive as defined outside the orthodoxy of the party would require, if it were to be the description of Trump, for him to actually be outside the mainstream of the Republican party. The differences between him and someone like McConnell are minor in terms of policy, with all the contrasts coming in the form of personality and level of criminality (though McConnell is hardly clean, he's much more so than Trump because unlike Trump, McConnell's smart enough to keep his corruption out of view and/or falling through loopholes the Republicans are happy to keep open for this kind of thing).

And what more, Trump is also very much in line with the rank and file of his party. His values, as awful as they are, are also their values. He is very much a perfect representation of the Republican electorate. Therefore, he is by no means outside the party orthodoxy at either end of things.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

Stephen Skowronek has a theory about presidential elections. He looks at the sequence of ‘political time’, the historical pattern of the American presidency that has repeated itself over the last 200 years. The sequence goes from “reconstructive” presidents who transform politics in their own image (Roosevelt, Reagan), followed by their handpicked successors (Truman, Bush ‘41) ; in turn they are usually succeeded by presidents Skowronek calls “pre-emptive”, who adopt the reigning orthodoxy of their parties (Eisenhower, Bill Clinton) followed by a faithful servant of that orthodoxy (Kennedy/Johnson, Bush ‘43) followed by another pre-emptive opposition leader (Nixon, Obama). The final stage is the “disjunctive” leader, who is outside their party’s orthodoxy, and that’s where we are now with Trump.  https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2016/12/skowronek-views-the-trump-win-through-political-time

It's an interesting idea, but I think Skowronek is off on his pairings.  I'd say
Hoover = Carter
FDR = Reagan/Bush '41
Truman = Clinton
Eisenhower = Bush '43
JFK/LBJ = Obama
Nixon/Ford = Trump/Pence

So, if you think Skoronek is right, Trump is due to lose in 2020.  If I'm right, Trump is due to win.  Anyway, political theories like this are fun fluff.  Any thoughts?

I teach this theory in my intro to American politics course every year (largely as a contrast to more quantitatively oriented political science).  I don’t understand how your pairings work.  How can Democrats be paired with Democrats some of the time and with Republicans other times?  The idea behind Skowronek’s theory is that at any point there is a dominant “regime” that gradually enervates, and the president can either be allied with the regime or opposed to it.  I’m not sure what the underlying idea to your pairings is.

[Heebie Jeebie]

Stephen Skowronek has a theory about presidential elections. He looks at the sequence of ‘political time’, the historical pattern of the American presidency that has repeated itself over the last 200 years. The sequence goes from “reconstructive” presidents who transform politics in their own image (Roosevelt, Reagan), followed by their handpicked successors (Truman, Bush ‘41) ; in turn they are usually succeeded by presidents Skowronek calls “pre-emptive”, who adopt the reigning orthodoxy of their parties (Eisenhower, Bill Clinton) followed by a faithful servant of that orthodoxy (Kennedy/Johnson, Bush ‘43) followed by another pre-emptive opposition leader (Nixon, Obama). The final stage is the “disjunctive” leader, who is outside their party’s orthodoxy, and that’s where we are now with Trump.  https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2016/12/skowronek-views-the-trump-win-through-political-time

It's an interesting idea, but I think Skowronek is off on his pairings.  I'd say
Hoover = Carter
FDR = Reagan/Bush '41
Truman = Clinton
Eisenhower = Bush '43
JFK/LBJ = Obama
Nixon/Ford = Trump/Pence

So, if you think Skoronek is right, Trump is due to lose in 2020.  If I'm right, Trump is due to win.  Anyway, political theories like this are fun fluff.  Any thoughts?

I teach this theory in my intro to American politics course every year (largely as a contrast to more quantitatively oriented political science).  I don’t understand how your pairings work.  How can Democrats be paired with Democrats some of the time and with Republicans other times?  The idea behind Skowronek’s theory is that at any point there is a dominant “regime” that gradually enervates, and the president can either be allied with the regime or opposed to it.  I’m not sure what the underlying idea to your pairings is.

My view is that a new generation asserts itself every 24 years (1944, 1968, 1992, 2016) and redefines the politics of the subsequent era.  These years are obviously not necessarily moments of party realignment, but I'd argue the Democratic Parties of Bill Clinton and Harry Truman were substantively different from the parties of Jimmy Carter and FDR, respectively.  Clinton and Truman were continuing the leftist tradition of their forebears obviously, but they were each at the beginning of a new dominant "regime."  Hence, I'd classify both Clinton and Truman as "consolidators" of the ideological victories of the previous generation's arguments.  Or, to put all this less abstractly, I think Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party of the 90s had more in common with Reagan/Bush Republicans than with Carter/Mondale/Dukakis Democrats. 

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I don't believe it. Piecing together patterns from such limited data (especially if you're confined to the last 80 years) is difficult.

From a scientific perspective this theory (and most of these cyclical theories of Presidential elections) won't really be useful until it can predict the next 30 - 40 years of American politics.

The worst two losses by incumbent Presidents in the 20th century were Hoover (1932) and Carter (1980) That is 48 years apart. I came to the conclusion, even before the Mueller report came out, that Donald Trump is headed to defeat because six keys have turned against him in the Lichtman test.

He lost the Party mandate because his Party lost seats (in fact the majority) in the midterm election. He faces a serious challenge in the primary election in former Governor William Weld (I saw this as the killer, and it happened yesterday before the exposure of the bulk of the Mueller Report), 'his' economy cannot do better than the Obama economy (which rises from a would-be replay of the Great Depression), social unrest in the form of racist and terrorist attacks has happened with the President mishandling the situations, HIS IS THE MOST PERVASIVELY CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and America's usual allies find him an embarrassment.

The Mueller Report is an embarrassment, but it simply loads onto the perception of a fantastically-corrupt Presidency. Such looks like the most likely theme of Presidential failure.       

He also somehow managed to gain Senate seats during all this. Oh, and we're supposed to think William Weld is a serious challenger? Watch that snob get 2% in NH.

He gained Senate seats because he had the most favorable Senate map in a generation where there were plenty of D seats on loan in heavily rural R states. Not that hard to understand. If anything it's an indictment that he couldn't even win Montana, West Virginia, or Ohio (let alone Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona).

[bagelman]

I don't believe it. Piecing together patterns from such limited data (especially if you're confined to the last 80 years) is difficult.

From a scientific perspective this theory (and most of these cyclical theories of Presidential elections) won't really be useful until it can predict the next 30 - 40 years of American politics.

The worst two losses by incumbent Presidents in the 20th century were Hoover (1932) and Carter (1980) That is 48 years apart. I came to the conclusion, even before the Mueller report came out, that Donald Trump is headed to defeat because six keys have turned against him in the Lichtman test.

He lost the Party mandate because his Party lost seats (in fact the majority) in the midterm election. He faces a serious challenge in the primary election in former Governor William Weld (I saw this as the killer, and it happened yesterday before the exposure of the bulk of the Mueller Report), 'his' economy cannot do better than the Obama economy (which rises from a would-be replay of the Great Depression), social unrest in the form of racist and terrorist attacks has happened with the President mishandling the situations, HIS IS THE MOST PERVASIVELY CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, and America's usual allies find him an embarrassment.

The Mueller Report is an embarrassment, but it simply loads onto the perception of a fantastically-corrupt Presidency. Such looks like the most likely theme of Presidential failure.       

He also somehow managed to gain Senate seats during all this. Oh, and we're supposed to think William Weld is a serious challenger? Watch that snob get 2% in NH.

He gained Senate seats because he had the most favorable Senate map in a generation where there were plenty of D seats on loan in heavily rural R states. Not that hard to understand. If anything it's an indictment that he couldn't even win Montana, West Virginia, or Ohio (let alone Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona).

He had absolute 0 chance to win in Ohio anyway with Brown vs. Fitzgerald with a drivers license. West Virginia also put up a joke candidate in the form of a corrupt carpetbagger from New Jersey, while Montana put up a carpetbagger from Maryland.

[lfromnj]

well the most obvious one would be Trump = Carter with Sanders = Reagan.

[The Mikado]

I tend to think of all these theories as bunk because they never go more than two generations back and break down as a result. Would Grover Cleveland really work as a disruptor to an era of GOP dominance that went back a quarter century, for example?

The thinking where politics seems to have started with FDR leads to a lot of myopia. It's this weird sort of Greatest Generation onward solipsism that history began with World War II/the Depression and there's nothing worth looking at further back, but that means you're dealing with a sample size of 13 presidents and 22 elections (assuming we're starting from 1932), and you cannot possibly make any serious trend argument with such a small sample size.

[MT Treasurer]

He had absolute 0 chance to win in Ohio anyway with Brown vs. Fitzgerald with a drivers license. West Virginia also put up a joke candidate in the form of a corrupt carpetbagger from New Jersey, while Montana put up a carpetbagger from Maryland.

Yeah, I’m sure Rosendale would have won that race if only he had moved to Montana 35 instead of 20 years ago! Just ask Congressman Quist and Senator Melcher how easy it is to beat "carpetbaggers" in Montana.

Liz is right on the spot here. The fact that R+2 is considered a good result for Republicans with the most R-favorable map in history, ridiculously weak Democratic incumbents in ND, FL, and MO, and after they blew very winnable races in AL, MT, OH, and WV that probably would have secured a GOP Senate majority for another decade is laughable and shows how the goalposts have been moved.

[Heebie Jeebie]

I tend to think of all these theories as bunk because they never go more than two generations back and break down as a result. Would Grover Cleveland really work as a disruptor to an era of GOP dominance that went back a quarter century, for example?

The thinking where politics seems to have started with FDR leads to a lot of myopia. It's this weird sort of Greatest Generation onward solipsism that history began with World War II/the Depression and there's nothing worth looking at further back, but that means you're dealing with a sample size of 13 presidents and 22 elections (assuming we're starting from 1932), and you cannot possibly make any serious trend argument with such a small sample size.

I mostly agree, but I think you can go all the way back to the years just after the Civil War and the symmetries don't look that outlandish:

Carter = Hoover = Garfield/Arthur
Reagan/Bush '41 = FDR = Cleveland/Harrison '23/Cleveland
Clinton = Truman = McKinley/1st-term-TR
Bush '43 = Eisenhower = 2nd-term-TR/Taft
Obama = JFK/LBJ = Wilson
Trump = Nixon/Ford = Harding/Coolidge = 2nd-term-Grant/Hayes

Again, these don't work perfectly, but if you squint hard enough you can kind of start to see a cyclical pattern.

[Orser67]

I mostly agree, but I think you can go all the way back to the years just after the Civil War and the symmetries don't look that outlandish:

Carter = Hoover = Garfield/Arthur
Reagan/Bush '41 = FDR = Cleveland/Harrison '23/Cleveland
Clinton = Truman = McKinley/1st-term-TR
Bush '43 = Eisenhower = 2nd-term-TR/Taft
Obama = JFK/LBJ = Wilson
Trump = Nixon/Ford = Harding/Coolidge = 2nd-term-Grant/Hayes

Again, these don't work perfectly, but if you squint hard enough you can kind of start to see a cyclical pattern.

I would argue you can go all the way back to 1824 with this particular cycle theory, though it works far better with the disjunctive and reconstructive presidencies than with the other presidencies, largely because of Democratic dominance from 1828-1856 and Republican dominance from 1860-1928.

These disjunctive presidents all left office extremely unpopular and gave way to new regimes:

Adams=Pierce/Buchanan=Cleveland (second term)=Hoover=Carter=Trump?

All these "reconstructive" presidents presided over a huge change in the political order:

Jackson=Lincoln=McKinley/T. Roosevelt=FDR=Reagan=2020 Dem?

These "first successors" largely upheld the party orthodoxy, but weren't as successful as their predecessors:

Van Buren=Grant/Hayes/Arthur=Taft=Truman=Bush

These "first pre-emptive" presidents had varying degrees of success in implementing their agenda, but failed to really change the underlying political dynamic:

Arguably Tyler=Cleveland (first term)=Wilson=Eisenhower=Clinton

These "second successors" were generally pretty successful at implementing domestic policies that adhered to the party orthodoxy:

Polk=B. Harrison=Harding/Coolidge=JFK/LBJ=W. Bush

These "second pre-emptive presidents" failed to change the underlying political order, but did point the way to the next cycle:

Arguably Taylor=No one=No one=Nixon/Ford=Obama?

I like the idea of using cycles to see parallels between different presidents. I think it would be a mistake to take the cycle theory too far and assume that all future presidencies will have to fit into the cycle in a predictable way.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I don't believe it. Piecing together patterns from such limited data (especially if you're confined to the last 80 years) is difficult.

From a scientific perspective this theory (and most of these cyclical theories of Presidential elections) won't really be useful until it can predict the next 30 - 40 years of American politics.

To be fair, I believe Skowronek developed the theory early in the Reagan presidency, based on cases going back to Thomas Jefferson.  And it has predicted the subsequent 30-odd years pretty well.

[Cassandra]

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Skrowronek with The Nation, for those who might be interested.

RK: So what comes next?

SS: Obama sketched an outline of what an alternative to Reaganism looks like, but since he couldn’t dislodge the orthodoxy that alternative has been pushed off into the distance. Think of Richard Nixon. He had this idea of the Southern strategy, a way to break white voters off from the Democratic Party, but the regime of New Deal liberalism was too strong for him to accomplish a wholesale political reconstruction. That had to wait for Ronald Reagan. Similarly, Obama has this idea of a diverse coalition but he couldn’t yet displace the old orthodoxy. If you have a real disjunctive moment now, if conservatism finally implodes, if it exposes through its insufficient actions the impossibility of its own formula, then we should expect Trump to be replaced by a genuine reconstructive leader, someone who can firmly repudiate that Reaganism and completely redefine the terms and conditions of legitimate national government.

RK: What might that reconstruction look like?

SS: The obvious answer would be somebody like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But I’m not so sure. If the opportunity is not simply to oppose conservatism but to build something different and new, then something much broader than the current left alternative—something that mixes things up—might be more attractive.

We already see in the rise of Donald Trump the limitations of thinking in terms of Reagan-style conservatism versus Obama-style progressivism. He is already mixing up these new coalitions with a different ideological makeup than anything we have seen before. That’s precisely why he is out of sync with his own party. The most brilliant and interesting thing about Trump is that he has a sense of creating something that’s largely alien to the Republican Party but which at least is fresh and new.

With that in mind, it may be wrongheaded for Democrats to plan on returning to power on the basis of old-school left-liberalism. It might be better to consider what a totally different configuration would look like. Instead of trying more of the same, maybe Democrats need to think about what something completely different would look like for them, and how they can bring it about. It would need to be something broader than just harping on the old lines of cleavage.

Think about reconstructive leaders in the past. They don’t just come in with the opposite of what was there before. There hasn’t always been this eternal battle of liberalism and conservatism—if conservatism loses then liberalism wins. That’s not how history works. Jefferson built something completely new. In his first inaugural address he said, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Jackson marginalized many of his supporters and created this new thing that hadn’t been anticipated in the previous set of alternatives. That’s also true of Franklin Roosevelt. He said he didn’t want the support of conservative Democrats, and he welcomed progressive Republicans with a New Deal. And then there’s Reagan, who famously won over blue-collar Democrats in the South and Midwest.

If there’s going to be a reconstruction following a failed Trump presidency, it’s going to be something completely different than what we’ve seen before. Somebody has to come up with what that’s going to be. That’s a job for political action, not political science.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I tend to think of all these theories as bunk because they never go more than two generations back and break down as a result. Would Grover Cleveland really work as a disruptor to an era of GOP dominance that went back a quarter century, for example?

The thinking where politics seems to have started with FDR leads to a lot of myopia. It's this weird sort of Greatest Generation onward solipsism that history began with World War II/the Depression and there's nothing worth looking at further back, but that means you're dealing with a sample size of 13 presidents and 22 elections (assuming we're starting from 1932), and you cannot possibly make any serious trend argument with such a small sample size.

Skowronek’s theory tracks back way more than two generations.  His first article where he begins to develop the theory (published in the early ‘80s) is confined to the parellels between the 1824-1860 and 1928-1980 periods.  His book The Politics Presidents make, published in the 90’s, explains how almost every major president from Washington to Clinton fits into the pattern.

[Mr. Smith]

It's almost perfect.

[FalloutBoy97]

I think this theory has some merit (particularly as it can be fairly easily connection to the macroeconomic regime theory) and I want to believe that Trump will go down as a failed one-term president that unsuccessfully tried to bridge two political eras. But the thing about these theories is that they can be dismantled by a single instance. For example, I think that Trump has die hard supporters in a way that Carter and Hoover did not. Might that be enough for him to avoid a dramatic loss? The internet has also had the effect of hardening people into one camp or another, which makes it hard to imagine Trump supporters/"Reagan conservatives" from rolling over and accepting the new political order. There's just so many confounding variables when you're looking at this long of a time period.

[HisGrace]

I think there are problems with both of these. For yours, why is Clinton Truman when Reagan/Bush are FDR? Reagan/Bush/Clinton as FDR/Truman/Eisenhower is actually a pretty good analogy, and I've long thought of Clinton as the Democratic Eisenhower. For the one in the link, I don't see what is particularly "disjunctive" about Carter as compared to other Dems at the time.

[Roll Roons]

I think there are problems with both of these. For yours, why is Clinton Truman when Reagan/Bush are FDR? Reagan/Bush/Clinton as FDR/Truman/Eisenhower is actually a pretty good analogy, and I've long thought of Clinton as the Democratic Eisenhower. For the one in the link, I don't see what is particularly "disjunctive" about Carter as compared to other Dems at the time.

Mostly that he ran as an outsider who didn't have the stink of Watergate anywhere near him.

[Mr. Smith]

I think there are problems with both of these. For yours, why is Clinton Truman when Reagan/Bush are FDR? Reagan/Bush/Clinton as FDR/Truman/Eisenhower is actually a pretty good analogy, and I've long thought of Clinton as the Democratic Eisenhower. For the one in the link, I don't see what is particularly "disjunctive" about Carter as compared to other Dems at the time.

Mostly that he ran as an outsider who didn't have the stink of Watergate anywhere near him.

He ran under fire for some remarks about Lyndon Johnson...how's that different from Trump's remarks regarding the Bushes?

He deregulated for some silly reason, the rest of the mainline were New Dealers that knew better. Trump started all these trade wars for silly reasons [not as silly as the deregulation stupidity that ran nonstop from 1974-2009 though]

He brought in a bunch of inexperienced goons from Georgia, Trump's only hired the best in the most sarcastic terms possible.

Tell me how any of that is something besides disjunctive?

[Grassroots]

Oh god please let Trump be Nixon, that means 2024-2036 republican rule!