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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 Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (University of Chicago Press, 2021), coauthor of 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), and coauthor of Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (with Jack B. Greenberg; Cambridge University Press, 2025). 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. In 2023, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from APSA's Politics and Executive Politics section. 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

  • "Contesting the Reach of the Rights Revolution: The Reagan Administration and the Unitary Executive," Studies in American Political Development, forthcoming
  • Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (with Jack B. Greenberg). Cambridge University Press (2025)
  • “Congress, the President, and the Constitutional Order,” in Congress Reconsidered, 13th ed., eds. Lawrence C. Dodd, Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Ruth Bloch Rubin, and C. Lawrence Evans (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/CQ Press, 2025), 355-371.
  • 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: Congress and Presidential Representation. University of Chicago Press (2021).
  • View Curriculum Vitae