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Department of Political Science

John Dearborn

Assistant Professor
Carolyn T. and Robert M Rogers Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Political Science

John Dearborn is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His research and teaching interests include the Presidency, Congress, American Political Development, American Political Thought, and Archival Methods. He is the author of two books, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (with Stephen Skowronek and Desmond King, Oxford University Press, 2021; expanded paperback 2022). Power Shifts received the 2022 Richard E. Neustadt Award for best book on executive politics from the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Prior to joining Vanderbilt's Department of Political Science, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and in the Policy Lab of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 2019 and his B.A. from the University of Connecticut in 2013. His dissertation received the 2020 E.E. Schattschneider Award for best dissertation in American government from APSA and the 2020 George C. Edwards III Award for best dissertation on executive politics from APSA's Presidents and Executive Politics section.

Representative publications

  • Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation. University of Chicago Press (2021).
  • Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (with Stephen Skowronek and Desmond King). Oxford University Press (2021, expanded paperback 2022).
  • "The 'Two Mr. Wilsons': Party Government, Personal Leadership, and Woodrow Wilson's Political Thought," Congress & the Presidency 47, no. 1 (2020): 32-61.
  • "The Foundations of the Modern Presidency: Presidential Representation, the Unitary Executive Theory, and the Reorganization Act of 1939," Presidential Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March 2019): 185-203.
  • "The 'Proper Organs' for Presidential Representation: A Fresh Look at the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921," Journal of Policy History 31, no. 1 (January 2019): 1-41.
  • View Curriculum Vitae