Nathan D. Gibson
About Me
I am a Postgraduate Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and am affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. I study American political institutions with an emphasis on the presidency, bureaucracy, and Congress. My teaching experience is in American politics, public policy, and political institutions.
My dissertation examines how the president manages policy-making in the executive branch, with a particular focus 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. The first chapter introduces a formal model that jointly models centralization with politicization, exploring the strategic trade-offs that the president faces when making policy. With this theoretical backdrop, the following chapters employ a combination of large-scale surveys of government executives, archival research, and observational data to test various aspects of centralization and politicization.
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 a PhD and an MA in Politics from Princeton University and a BA in Public Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University.
My CV is available here.