White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs
Fast Facts
- Author of What Happened to the Vital Center?
- White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs
- Award-winning educator
Areas Of Expertise
- Social Issues
- Governance
- Elections
- Founding and Shaping of the Nation
- Political Parties and Movements
- Politics
- The Presidency
Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs and a professor of politics. His research focuses on the American presidency, political parties and elections, social movements, and American political development. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate students, he regularly gives public lectures on American politics and participates in programs for international scholars and high school teachers that probe the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in the United States.
Milkis earned a BA degree from Muhlenberg College and a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Featured Publications
Sidney Milkis News Feed
Popular expectations of the presidency were changing, and not just when a storm hit. The bigger the federal government became, the more a president had to act as a warming face of that distant behemoth—and its avatar on TV. “In the ’60s, expectations exploded,” says Sidney Milkis, a political scientist and Miller Center fellow at the University of Virginia. “We’ve become a presidency-obsessed democracy.” A key question, Milkis says, is “whether 300 million people can expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self-government.”
The Atlantic
University of Virginia politics professor Sidney Milkis lectures on James F. Byrnes, who served in the U.S. House and Senate, as a Supreme Court Justice and in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He explains how Byrnes, in the 1930s and '40s, was a key figure in the implementation of the New Deal and the management of the wartime economy. Mr. Milkis describes the relationship between FDR and Byrnes and how their work shaped the United States in a time of great uncertainty. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer introduces the speaker. The Supreme Court Historical Society hosted the event in the Supreme Court chamber.
C-SPAN
Sidney Milkis is part of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He and others at the Miller Center are specialists on U.S. political history. Milkis says that, when it was created in the late 1700s, the U.S. presidency was unlike any other position in world history.
Voice of America
Eight months into his presidency, most depict the Trump administration as being mired in chaos and frenzy. Such a perspective, however, overlooks the aggressive pursuit of Trump’s campaign agenda through unilateral administrative action.
In the arena of executive action, he is pursuing a model established by his recent past predecessors, with worrisome consequences to constitutional governance. That’s the conclusion of an essay in the most recent issue of the Forum, a nonpartisan journal of ideas and political analysis. Sidney M. Milkis and Nicholas Jacobs, both of the University of Virginia, argue that Trump’s deployment of what they call “executive-centered partisanship” is both in keeping with the modern presidency and a potentially damaging shift in our politics.
The Washington Post
One hundred years ago this week, a dramatic Republican National Convention prepared the ground for the transformation of American democracy.