Evaluating Presidents and Mastery of the Office
In this final, you will take the cumulative knowledge from the semester to answer the core question of presidency:
What determines presidential success or failure? Create an informed definition of success and failure. In crafting your answer to this part, assess the following dimensions of presidential governance
i) the system-wide demands of the office and to what extent they are conducive for mastery
ii) tools presidents have to accomplish their goals
iii) constraints that make achieving goals difficult
iv) pitfalls that lead to failure and
v) illustrations of success. Next, does presidential success necessarily mean betterment of the polity, and similarly, is prosperity in society necessary for presidential success?
Having established the contours of success and failure, conclude your paper by assessing the prospects for presidential success moving forward, and whether our politics need to de-emphasize or rely even more on the chief executive
Please use Chicago Style’s Author-Date citation protocols. These are the in-text parenthetical citations you will see in most of the readings and lectures (e.g., Neustadt 1990 [1960], 8; Milkis and Nelson 2020, 61), which also require a formatted references page using the style of this syllabus’ readings schedule section. The reference page does not count against your page limit
