What is the role of a president in a representative democracy

This question is a central one for our course, with its focus to this point being on competing conceptions of the state in the French republics up to and (starting next week including) the 5th Republic.

Here is a very interesting article on the American presidency, influenced by recent work in Political Science, that asks the question in a slightly different way -- instead of asking as we have if the president should be a proponent of policies that express  the will of the "Nation" or if the president should express the "reasons of state" and fulfill the need for continuity and order outside the legislative process, this article asks if the president should be a rhetorical leader who tries to guide the country, and its elected representatives in the legislature, to a certain consensus that can be expressed in legislation or whether the president should be a broker of interests within the legislature which would otherwise never come to consensus. It also introduces a concept we will discuss extensively in the next few weeks, the role of parties in a presidential system (or, conversely, the role of the president in a political system dominated by parties).

Its worth reading and considering although outside our direct topic and thus not a required reading for HIST 362.