Nicholas Jacobs

• Professor (Associate) at Colby College

Donald Trump’s 2017–2021 presidency and his challenge to the peaceful transition of power reflects a profound transformation within the Republican Party and raises questions about the evolution of conservatism into a form of authoritarianism. This chapter situates Trump’s first presidency in a century-long development of executive-centered partisan...

This article explores the trend of increasing nationalization in American politics and its effect on the U.S. Senate's federalizing dynamics, using campaign finance as an indicator. We analyze the geographic distribution of campaign contributions to U.S. Senate races from 1984 to 2020, tracing the nationalization of donor behavior in America. Key f...

This article examines how public perceptions about the divide between blue and red states shape attitudes about secession in the United States. Through a nationally representative survey of the adult American population, I measure how individuals perceive political differences between states, and demonstrate that as perceptions of political differe...

Americans hold presidents responsible for economic growth and stability, but because each president must rely on entrenched experts and administrative norms, their ability to shift policy is often curtailed. In this book, author Patrick O’Brien tries to understand that tension by exploring how efforts to imbue the presidency with greater capacity t...

In this article, we detail how the rise of executive-centered partisanship has transformed president-Senate relations since 1993. We argue that the growing centrality of the president as a figurehead for their party has produced incentives for both co-partisans and out-partisans. We use a measure of presidential “success” to model variation over ti...

Drawing on a unique battery of questions fielded on the 2018 CCES and in two separate surveys—one in 2019 and the other during the 2020 election—we study the extent to which Americans feel animus toward communities that are geographically distinct from their own and whether these feelings explain Americans’ attitudes toward the two major political...

THE STORY OF AMERICAN STATE BUILDING is one in which crisis, once episodic, has become a routine feature of American politics. At the heart of this development is the modern executive: emergency powers are presidential powers. The principal objective of this article is to highlight institutional developments since the late 1960s that framed the Don...

This chapter introduces the idea of the vital center, as developed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1949. Populism is not new to the American experience. Many of the same anxieties plaguing America at the end of World War II continue to fester in American society. But, as we contend, Schlesinger and other, modern-day political observers who desire a re...

This chapter describes the ways in which executive-centered partisanship has transformed the Democratic Party since the 1960s. It challenges the idea that the country’s current political divide is solely attributed to Republicans and conservatives; Democrats were the first to throw the country “off-center.” The chapter explores the challenge posed...

This concluding chapter opens with a discussion of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol during the presidential transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The political aftermath and Trump’s sustained popularity inside the Republican Party is further evidence of executive-centered partisanship. The chapter then considers the first fe...

This chapter describes the ways that executive-centered partisanship has transformed the Republican Party since the 1960s. While Democrats may have been the first to throw the country “off-center,” Republicans and the conservative movements that have captured the party have had a particularly divisive effect on the political system. Beginning in 19...

How did a country once praised or blamed for its pragmatism came to be so sharply divided ? What Happened to the Vital Center? demonstrates that American politics has become so rancorous because it has been unable to heal wounds opened up by 1960s-era protest and institutional change. As various chapters document, this tumultuous decade resulted in...

This chapter focuses on the “Third New Deal,” its transformation of the party system, the development of a newly empowered presidential office, and the origins of executive-centered partisanship. We argue that the deep roots of our present discontents can be traced back to these institutional transformations—the desire to overcome, or transcend, po...

This chapter begins with a conceptual framework for understanding political parties as mediating institutions. It centers the discussion on party structure and the ways in which the organization of party politics operates interdependently with the country’s governing institutions. The chapter then takes a massive sweep of American political history...

This chapter explores the politics of executive-centered partisanship as it played out during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The pathologies traced in earlier chapters reached a troubling stage during President Obama’s tenure, but it reached a hazardous culmination during the campaign and administration of Donald Trump. These pr...

On the campaign trail and at his inauguration, Joe Biden pledged, above all else, to be a uniter to restore the soul of America. At the end of his first year in office, many campaign promises have been met, but unity has not been one. Far from transcending partisanship as promised, Biden has embraced the levers of presidential discretion and power...

This article considers the ways in which partisanship structured public attitudes about the United States’ multiple governments as each tried to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during the spring and summer of 2020. The evidence shows that Democrats and Republicans both made distinctions among their local, state, and federal governments, assigning t...

MORE THAN A DECADE AFTER THE 2007–2008 RECESSION exposed the fragility of the modern global economy, concerns about economic and social mobility continue to shape American partisanship. Numerous scholars have documented the ways in which these pervasive concerns have threatened the country’s governing institutions by challenging democratic norms an...

A growing number of scholars have documented how social identities defined by an attachment to place influence individuals’ understandings about political power and representation. Drawing on this theoretical framework, we explore how place-based identities matter for American federalism by documenting how attachments to the American states alter i...

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politic...

State and local politics have dominated the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. Despite promises to reinvigorate states' rights both before and after his campaign, Trump has used the administrative powers of the modern presidency to pursue his policy agenda at the subnational level. From waiving certain provisions of federal programs, to filin...

Prior research has shown that social identities defined by an attachment to place (i.e., “place-based” identities) are influential in shaping how citizens understand and think about political topics. Moreover, prior research has also argued that candidates sometimes use “place-based appeals” in order to win support among the electorate, and that su...

Public works spending was an integral component of John F. Kennedy’s fiscal policy. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence from the Kennedy Presidential Library, we show how the administration worked to pass a $2.5 billion infrastructure bill that would give the presidency unilateral authority in determining where and when those funds would b...

As independent elder statesmen, former presidents command a unique authority and widespread ambitions. But as the experiences of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower reveal, postpresidential goals are often in conflict with one another. Both men remained active and were forced to speak out on national issues they tried to ignore. Both were also...

Eight months into his presidency, most depict the Trump administration as being mired in chaos and frenzy. Such a perspective, however, overlooks the aggressive pursuit of Trump’s campaign agenda through unilateral administrative action. Far from “deconstructing the administrative state” as promised, Trump has embraced the levers of presidential di...

The dominant perspective on federalism and American public opinion suggests that Americans simply do not consider federalism when making policy evaluations. Recently, however, several scholars have argued that even if Americans do not make legalistic or theoretical references to federalism, they often think intuitively about intergovernmental polit...

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration i...

Using election results as our point of departure, this article places the 2016 presidential election in historical perspective. Trump’s victory was an “expected” outcome, as races following two-terms of one party rule usually go to the opposition party. Trump also ran close to fellow Republicans competing for Congress despite his unusual relationsh...

The author analyzes the revealed school preferences of parents in the Washington, D.C., and asks, “What is the main determinant of charter school choice and how does it create racial, economic, and linguistic segregation?” The author first establishes a theory of choice, which incorporates past research and adds an additional variable to our unders...

The author examines racial, economic, and linguistic segregation in the Washington, D.C. charter school system and asks, “Are government supports aimed at deterring segregation effective at preventing enrollment bias in charter schools?” The author shows that charter schools in Washington, D.C. remain heavily segregated even though market supports...