Charles Zug

University of Colorado Colorado Springs | UCCS · Department of Political Science

The idea of a unitary executive is based on a mistaken understanding of the origins and purpose of the federal bureaucracy in the American regime. Strictly speaking, there is no "executive branch" in our system-if by "executive branch" we mean a network of governmental departments that have their origins in, and that are strictly subordinate to, a...

Defenders of the modern presidency allege that Congress is ill‐equipped to design public policies adequate to a rapidly changing society. Because the president is positioned to use expertise to circumvent logrolling and horse trading—so goes this rationale—the presidency should effectively replace Congress as the polity's substantive legislator. Sc...

What are the political consequences of negative political theory concepts such as demagoguery? What happens when they are deployed in a way that brands an innocent victim with a reputation he or she does not deserve? This article contends that Daniel Shays was just such a victim. Despite playing only a peripheral role in the erroneously named “Shay...

House deliberations over healthcare legislation in 1798 show members of the Fifth U.S. Congress debating the constitutional basis of small government assumptions about States’ rights and federal power, asking why the regime’s principles should not be understood as requiring direct federal intervention in the lives of socially and economically vulne...

For almost four decades preceding the 1787‐88 ratification debates — during which American Federalists drew severe criticism from the Anti‐Federalists — Enlightenment politics in Europe had been undergoing equally severe criticism from Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. Though largely unaware of each other, both of these critics advanced distinctive republican...

Anne C. Pluta’s reply to my critique perpetuates the errors that undermined the article I criticized. Pluta dismisses out of hand my suggestion that her mistakes are the result of the particular lens through which she and much of the political science community view the American presidency. Yet this suggestion has the merit of explaining why she co...

The terms populism and demagoguery have come to be used with increased frequency in political discourse. And yet, the concepts which these terms refer to remain unclear—as testified by the emergence of books (scholarly and general-audience) purporting to clarify what it is, precisely, that makes a demagogue and a populist. Adding to, or perhaps res...

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a...

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article's second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis's thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which mani...

Political philosophers and their commentators frequently analogize human bodies and bodies politic, evaluating individual cities and empires in terms of health and sickness much the way a doctor would evaluate a patient. Today, however, the field of political science has all but renounced the task of which its ancient counterpart held itself worthy...