(S)electing the President

Looking at two salient characteristics of our current environment -- the declining influence of political parties; the communication revolution via the internet, social media, and cable television; and the impact of money -- this book asks whether our now-fully democratized presidential selection process has diminished the quality of our presidential candidates and the campaigns they run, whether the turn to demagoguery that the Founders feared has materialized, what the consequences of our presidential selection process have been for American government, and whether it would be valuable to rethink our wholehearted commitment to popular election of the President.

Michael L. Mezey is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at DePaul University. He earned his B.A. from the The City College of New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He served on the faculties of the University of Virginia and the University of Hawaii before joining DePaul University in 1977 as chair of the Political Science Department. From 1993 through 2005, Dr. Mezey served as Dean of DePaul's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is the author of four books: Comparative Legislatures (Duke University Press, 1979), Congress, the President, and Public Policy (Westview Press, 1989), Representative Democracy: Legislators and their Constituents (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), and Presidentialism: Power in Comparative Perspective (Lynne Rienner, 2013).

Preface Chapter 1. Candidate Quality and the Presidential Election of 2016 Chapter 2. Democracy, Representation, and Elections Chapter 3. The Founders and Presidential Selection Chapter 4. Democratization and Political Parties Chapter 5. The Democratized Nomination Process Chapter 6. The Democratized Media Chapter 7. Charisma, Demagoguery, Populism, and Celebrity Chapter 8. Democratization and Presidentialism Chapter 9. The Perils of Democracy Bibliography