In the two decades following the publication of The Administrative State (Waldo
1948), an embryonic theory of bureaucratic politics began to emerge from a series of studies examining decision making in the executive branch. The significant claim generated by these studies was that government decisions were products of bargaining and negotiation among interested political actors. As these studies focused on the executive branch, the central player in these bargaining frameworks was the president. The president, however, was argued to have little unilateral decision making power; he had to accommodate the interests of the various institutional factions in the executive branch. Bureaucracies and bureaucrats, in short, played high-level politics, and usually played the game very well.