Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency aims to help scholars assess the state of scholarship on the presidency and the directions in which it needs to move. As the central feature of the American political landscape, it is only natural that scholars and commentators focus on the presidency. So much is written about the subject, in fact, that it is often difficult to know where we stand in our understanding of it. In this Handbook, nearly three dozen articles critically assess both the major contributions to the literature on the dimension of the presidency and the ways in which the literature has developed. Each article seeks to identify weaknesses in the existing literature be they logical flaws, methodological errors, oversights, or some combination therein and to offer their views about especially productive lines of future inquiry. Equally important, the articles also identify areas of research that are unlikely to bear additional fruit. These articles offer a distinctive point of view, an argument about the successes and failures of past scholarship, and a set of recommendations about how future work ought to develop. The Handbook is one volume in the series of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics an eight-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics