Welcome! I am a political scientist who writes about federalism, presidential politics, and geographic inequality. I teach American politics and research methods in the Department of Government at Colby College. 

​My scholarly work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, Journal of Policy History, Education and Urban Society, and The Forum. 

I study political institutions: their origins, development, and feedback on public opinion. For example: 

1. My work on the institutional presidency and book manuscript, Managing Chaos, argues that presidents were essential political actors in redefining intergovernmental relationships in the 20th century; presidents built new capacity and rearranged existing institutional commitments through the Executive Office of the Presidency. 
2. My book manuscript with Sidney Milkis, What Happened to the Vital Center, is a developmental argument about the recurrent force of populism in American politics, the rise of an "executive-centered partisanship," and the weakening constraint of party organization.  
3. Through experimental and survey-based methods, I have authored multiple studies on how geography and the structure of public policy matter for political attitudes, particularly those related to federalism and the distribution of policy responsibility in non-centralized systems. 

You can find working papers and an extended discussion of my current research under the "research" tab. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about my work or my classes.  

Nicholas Frederick Jacobs
Government Department
Colby College
Waterville, Maine 04901 
Diamond Hall 259
(207) – 859 – 5315 • nfjacobs@colby.edu
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