Jack Greenberg

I am a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale and a resident graduate affiliate of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). Beginning in fall 2025, I will be a visiting assistant professor of political science, public policy, and law at Trinity College.

 

I am chiefly interested in American presidential democracy, understanding the role of presidential leadership in America’s system of separated powers. My book-length dissertation (which earned departmental distinction) concerns “presidential prioritization,” the process by which presidents and their teams determine the domestic policy issues on which they will focus at the start of their administrations.  In contrast to prior scholarship, I demonstrate that presidents have considerable agency in determining their priorities. They use that agency to establish who they are and where they want to take the nation, putting forward their own “political projects.” I develop this argument with nine case studies of presidential leadership from the modern era. The empirical backbone of the project is archival research, which I supplement by interviewing senior White House personnel, along with analyzing public opinion and combing through other primary and secondary sources. This research has been funded by the Bach Fellowship and the Scowcroft Institute at Texas A&M University.  Portions of this work have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter 2024). 

 

A companion project, Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (co-authored with John A. Dearborn; Cambridge University Press, Elements in American Politics Series, 2025), focuses on how Congress has designed laws reliant on an assumption of presidential self-restraint, an expectation that presidents would respect statutory goals by declining to use their formal powers in ways that were legally permissible but contrary to stated congressional intent. Focusing on appointments legislation in the post-Watergate era, we demonstrate lawmakers’ reliance on presidential self-restraint in statutory design and identify a variety of institutional tools used to signal those expectations. Moreover, we identify a developmental dilemma: the combined rise of polarization, presidentialism, and constitutional formalism threatens to leave Congress more dependent on presidential self-restraint, even as that norm’s reliability is increasingly questionable. A prior version of this project earned the 2025 MPSA Patrick J. Fett Award for the best scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

 

I am in the early stages of a third book project, which concerns the historical relationship between “institutional interests” and presidential conduct. I will be presenting my initial theory with an empirical application to the Gilded Age at this year’s APSA.

Additionally, I am extremely passionate about pedagogy and undergraduate research. I run the Dahl Research Scholars at ISPS and serve as one of the two graduate advisers for the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics senior essay capstone this year. I received a Certificate of College Teaching Preparation from the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning in 2023.

 

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