George C. Edwards III is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies Emeritus at Texas A&M University and distinguished fellow at the University of Oxford. He is a leading scholar of American politics, particularly of the American presidency, authoring or editing 28 books and approximately 100 articles and essays.
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Edwards was born in Rochester, New York, in 1947 and moved with his family to Florida in 1959. He received his B.A. from Stetson University (1969) and his M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also has an M.A. from the University of Oxford.
He taught at Tulane University from 1973 to 1978 before moving to Texas A&M University in 1978. He was the founder and from 1991 to 2001 the director of The Center for Presidential Studies. From 1998 until 2022 he was editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly . [1] He is also general editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Politics. [2] He is currently University Distinguished Professor and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies Emeritus at Texas A&M University and Distinguished Fellow at the University of Oxford.
Edwards has held a number of visiting appointments, including:
He has advised Brazil on its constitution and the operation of its presidency, Russia on building a democratic national party system, Mexico on elections, and Chinese scholars on democracy. He also wrote studies for the 1988, 2000, 2008, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential transitions and was instrumental in bringing the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum to Texas A&M University’s campus.
Edwards's principal focus has been the American presidency. This work has focused on several themes. First, He pioneered the quantitative study of the presidency with Presidential Influence in Congress, the first quantitative study of the presidency [3] and has edited three volumes on theory and methods of researching the presidency: The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency; [4] Researching the Presidency; [5] and Studying the Presidency. [6]
His second focus has been presidential leadership in Congress. He has written that presidents are highly dependent on the strategic position in which they find themselves and can only influence Congress at the margins. [7] Edwards has also written widely on the president’s relations with the public, particularly their efforts to lead public opinion. He has reported that presidents are rarely able to move the public in their direction. Despite all their efforts, their words typically fall on deaf ears. [8]
In recent years, he has fashioned his empirical findings into a theory of presidential leadership that challenges the view that presidential power is the power to persuade. Instead, he argues, presidential power is the power to recognize and exploit opportunities. In other words, presidents cannot create opportunities for change and must understand and take advantage of whatever possibilities for change already exist. [9] [10] In early 2009, he predicted the problems President Barack Obama would face, despite the declarations of many insiders the new president would transform the political landscape and thus pave the way for major changes in policy. He confirmed these predictions in two books. [11] In 2016, he predicted that despite his reputed promotional and negotiating skills, Donald Trump would not succeed in persuading either the public or Congress to follow his lead, which his subsequent research confirmed. [12]
He has also written on reforming the Electoral College and has written and spoken widely on the subject. [13] He also was among the first authors to devote attention to implementing public policy, especially the president's role as chief executive. [14] Most recently, Edwards tackled the area of decision making, arguing that presidents and other top officials often make disastrous decisions because they are prisoners of faulty premises. [15]
Nuffield College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is a graduate college and specialises in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. Nuffield is one of Oxford's newer colleges, having been founded in 1937, as well as one of the smallest, with around 90 postgraduate students and 60 academic fellows. It was also the first Oxford college to accept both men and women, having been coeducational since its foundation.
Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, when its schools were confederated and the institution was renamed Yale University. It is ranked as one of the top colleges in the United States.
Hanna Holborn Gray is an American historian of Renaissance and Reformation political thought and Professor of History Emerita at the University of Chicago. She served as president of the University of Chicago, from 1978 to 1993, having earlier served as acting president of Yale University in 1977–1978. At both schools, she was the first woman to hold their highest executive office. When named to the post in Chicago, she became one of the first women in the United States to hold the full presidency of a major university.
Neil Leon Rudenstine is an American scholar, educator, and administrator. He served as president of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001.
Philip Chase Bobbitt, is an American author, academic, and lawyer. He is best known for work on U.S. constitutional law and theory, and on the relationship between law, strategy and history in creating and sustaining the State. He is the author of several books: Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (1982), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002), and Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008). He is currently the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law and a distinguished senior lecturer at The University of Texas School of Law.
Harold Tafler Shapiro is an economist and university administrator. He is currently a professor of economics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Shapiro served as the president of University of Michigan from 1980 to 1988 and as the president of Princeton University from 1988 to 2001.
Marvin Henry "Mickey" Edwards is an American politician who was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving Oklahoma's 5th congressional district from 1977 to 1993.
Jacob Stewart Hacker is an American professor and political scientist. He is the director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a professor of political science at Yale University. Hacker has written works on social policy, health care reform, and economic insecurity in the United States.
Avinash Kamalakar Dixit is an Indian-American economist. He is the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, and has been Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University, senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Sanjaya Lall Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
Stephen Skowronek is an American political scientist, noted for his research on American national institutions and the U.S. presidency, and for helping to stimulate the study of American political development.
Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College.
Michael P. Riccards is an American political scientist, writer, administrator, and professor. Riccards has been the president of three American colleges and has written extensively on public policy, the American political process, the papacy as a leadership problem, and the history of the American presidency. His book The Ferocious Engine of Democracy was praised by Bill Clinton. He was the founding executive director of the Hall Institute of Public Policy – New Jersey. He now is president of the American Public Policy Institute on YouTube.
The John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service is a center at New York University focused on the role of Congress with regard to U.S. policy-making. The center is supported by a grant directed by the U.S. Congress as well as private donations.
Alvin S. Felzenberg is an American author, columnist, consultant, educator, historian, public official, and spokesperson. A resident of Palm Beach, Florida and Washington, D.C., he served with the 9/11 Commission and has written books on American history and biography, with some of his best known being studies of the country's presidents, such as A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr. and The Leaders We Deserved. He has been a professor at The University of Pennsylvania. He is a political conservative who considers Ronald Reagan a "great" president who "belongs on Mount Rushmore."
Thomas Edward Cronin is a political scientist. He was president of Whitman College from 1993 to 2005. He was the McHugh Professor of American Institutions and Leadership at Colorado College. Cronin's field of study is the 'expanding power of the American presidency in the 20th century'. He has also written extensively on American elections, political novels and movies.
William G. Howell is an American political scientist and author. He is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at Chicago Harris and a professor in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency.
This bibliography of Bill Clinton is a selected list of generally available published works about Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. Further reading is available on Bill Clinton, his presidency and his foreign policy, as well as in the footnotes in those articles.
Fred Irwin Greenstein was an American political scientist, known for his work on political leadership and the US presidency.
Keith E. Whittington is an American political scientist.
Jeffrey K. Tulis is an American political scientist known for work that conjoins the fields of American politics, political theory, and public law.