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
“You have not a [pure] democracy, but a republic accountable to people — but not immediate responsive to the people,” explains Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center. “That’s why you have a third [of the Senate] turning over, so it doesn’t get too far removed from currents of public opinion.”
TIME
“With the populist movement, the idea began to develop that presidents should have a relationship with the people,” says Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, who spoke to TIME as part of a presidential-history partnership between TIME History and the Miller Center. That idea encouraged presidents both to campaign for themselves and to get out on the road to support other politicians with whom they agreed.
TIME
Ronald Reagan and the new Christian Right viewed their alliance as the vanguard of a campaign to rally conservative Democrats to their side.
The uneasy collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement marked a development more than fifty years in the making thanks to the advent of the modern presidency during the Progressive Era.
The pivotal relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists was among the first to reveal that presidential-movement alliances could be a critical dimension of American political development.
America's ongoing to struggle to reconcile its ideals with practical governing considerations—especially existing power structures—is captured in tensions between its two most important founding documents. After watching this conversation with the Miller Center's Sid Milkis, you may never think of the Declaration and Constitution in the same way again.