Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic

Stephen Skowronek is Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Policy State: An American Predicament (2017, with Karen Orren), Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, (1997), The Search for American Political Development (2004, with Karen Orren), and Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (third edition 2020). Among other activities, he was co-founder of the journal Studies in American Political Development, which he edited between 1986 and 2007, and he provided the episode structure and thematic content for the PBS miniseries entitled The American President (Kunhardt Productions). John A. Dearborn is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at Yale University, holding appointments in the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions at the MacMillan Center, the Policy Lab at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Department of Political Science. His work has appeared in the Journal of Policy History and Presidential Studies Quarterly, and he is the author of the forthcoming book Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation. He received the George C. Edwards III Award for Best Dissertation on Executive Politics as well as the 2020 E. E. Schattschneider Award for Best Dissertation on American Government from the American Political Science Association. Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He works on racial inequality and the American state, and his publications include Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (2000), Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (2007), The Unsustainable American State (2009, with Lawrence Jacobs), Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America (2011, with Rogers M Smith), and Fed Power: How Finance Wins (2016, with Lawrence R Jacobs). He is a Fellow of the Academia European, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy and the National Academy of Social Insurance.