Presidential Transitions and Their Influence in the Policy Process. Embodying the Change: is it All About Policies?

In light of existing literature and drawing on a three years comparative research on the presidential transitions of five presidents, Obama, Trump, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron, this paper aims to explore how this "window policy" would make it possible to define new roles, new structures, and new power relationships within the administration and between the administration and the legislature. This approach presupposes studying a sequence that goes from the presidential campaigns and the establishment of a government to its first measures, to study the policy-change across presidencies and institutional settings. The process-tracing method contributes to opening the “black box” of institutional constraints. This window of post-election opportunity and the breathing space a new government can hope to gain while it is open remains undefined. How are newly-elected Presidents using the election as a window of opportunity to influence the policy process? Understanding the influence of the presidential institution during the policy process requires to understand: 1/The formal and informal constraints: economic and social context, expectations related to the President (accountability, authenticity, etc): the use of their resources, internal and external (Light, 1982) as well as formal and informal (Ponder, 2017) needs to be contextualized; 2/Constraints related to the election: campaign promises, the power relationships redefinition and the distribution of resources between the different coalitions resulting from this election; 3/How they articulate these constraints with their preferences; 4/And how does the “wall of reality” yields learning and feedbacks, influencing thereafter the policy-process, presidential political and technical capacities, and the subsequent possibilities. All of this needs to be taken into account to understand the “presidential leverage” (Ponder, 2017) in the political system. This “presidential role” informs about the institutional constraints a President has to deal with to define his leadership. According to Donald Searing: « Political roles are the place where individual choices meet institutional constraints […] we need to understand the institutional context in order to understand how the actor understands the situation ». Going beyond the concept of a role as a mission, we need to understand how early successes and failures lead to a consistent redefinition of the policy process, from problem identification to policy-enactment. These cases, by providing contextualized amendments to the MSF, will highlight the respective weight of institutions and presidential leadership in this process and how the constraints are balanced with three dimensions: policy, office, and votes (Müller, Strom, 1999). The alliance of the MSF and a favorable coalition has been proved to be important when it comes to implementing “campaign pledges” (Guinaudeau, Saurugger, 2018). This will lead us to identify how the “votes” and “office” dimensions influence the policy process. Based on three types of data and the process-tracing method, this paper includes interviews with staff of presidents, media and testimonial material and institutional data. As a “Visiting Scholar” at the Miller Center (UVA) during a presidential election year, I will also rely on their work titled the “First-Year Project” and the considerable center’s resources.