American Presidency

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This is a graduate-level course on the presidency in which we will examine the presidency from a number of substantive and methodological perspectives. Focusing on the president's leadership dilemma throughout, the course explores that dilemma within the context of the constitutional design of the office, institutional rivalries, and contemporary partisan and international politics. Our goals will be three fold: a theoretical understanding of how the presidency operates; methodological analyses that enable students to see the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and methods for studying the presidency and doing research on important, not peripheral, aspects of it; and an applied focus that better enables students to understand the structure, operation, institutional interactions, and policy decisions of the Obama administration. We will begin by examining political science research methodologies and the study of the presidency. Next we turn to the principal conceptual frameworks that have been used to evaluate the president’s power dilemma and his success in overcoming it: legal, political, institutional, and historic developmental. From these foundational perspectives, we then turn to the structure of the Presidency, the principals who have served in that office, and their patterns of decision making. Next, the course then focuses on the unilateral and shared powers of the presidency in the domestic and international arenas. The final segment of the course deals with the relationship of the president to political parties, interest groups, the news media and the general public.