The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat

"It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority," wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The balance of power between Congress and the president has been a powerful thread throughout American political thought since the time of the Founding Fathers. And yet, for all that has been written on the topic, we still lack a solid empirical or theoretical justification for Hamilton's proposition.

For the first time, William G. Howell, Sa...