Nathan D. Gibson
Welcome!
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, where I am completing my book manuscript, The Policies Presidents Make: When and Why Presidents Centralize Executive Branch Policymaking.
In Fall 2023 I will start as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College. I study American political institutions with an emphasis on the presidency, bureaucracy, and Congress. My teaching experience includes American politics, political institutions, and public policy. Prior to coming to the Institute, I served as a postgraduate research associate and lecturer at Princeton University.
My dissertation, winner of APSA's Presidents and Executive Politics' George C. Edwards III Dissertation Award, serves as the foundation for the book project, and focuses on the strategies of
centralization, or the movement of policy functions to the White House, and politicization, the use of political appointees to influence policy-making throughout the executive branch. I jointly model these two tools, examining the strategic trade-offs the president faces when making and influencing policy. I introduce novel measures of centralization—the first to show how centralization varies across policy areas—and empirically evaluate how presidents attempt to gain a more responsive bureaucracy.
I have also co-authored projects examining topics including legislative responsiveness to donors, congressional capacity, and separation of powers models. These works have been published in Congress & The Presidency, the SSRC volume Can America Govern Itself?, and the SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science & International Relations.
I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University as well as a B.A. in Public Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University.
My C.V. is available here.