A contribution to the #StepUP Blog Tour Celebrating University Press Week 2024

By Nadine Zimmerli, Editor in Chief at the University of Virginia Press

Yesterday, I watched an event at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (a nonpartisan affiliate of the university that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history, providing critical insights for the nation's governance challenges) on “Election 2024: Moving toward the transition”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULvou-T9QM&t=1s

During the opening minutes of this very informative panel discussion on presidential transitions and the process currently underway to transfer power from the outgoing Biden administration to the incoming Trump administration, moderator William Antholis, the Center’s director and CEO, mentioned UVA Press’s book series Miller Center Studies on the Presidency and gave a nod to the excellent books in it on presidential transitions.

This series—edited by White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs Guian A. McKee and Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies Marc J. Selverstone—advances innovative scholarship on the American presidency by asking timeless and novel questions about the institution and its role in a constitutional democracy. The books in this series are written by both scholars and practitioners, and they explore the evolution of the office over time and highlight the relevance of historical developments to current affairs.

This year’s election and its aftermath drove home to me the importance of the books in this series and the ways in which they help make sense of political processes and current events. Three books in particular stand out that speak directly to our current political moment:

1. The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions (2022) is a highly readable and deeply informative compilation of podcast interviews with scholars, journalists, public servants, and participants in every transition from Ford–Carter to Trump–Biden to illuminate the long history, complexity, and current best practices associated with the vital yet poorly understood day-to-day process of presidential transitions. Conceived by David Marchick, these interviews first ran for one year on Transition Lab, a podcast he hosted when he directed the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition, and the resulting book offers concentrated insights that can help future transitions run better, faster, and more smoothly.

2. Year Zero: The Five-Year Presidency (2024) offers a strategic approach to building a strong and successful presidency. Written by Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Christopher Liddell, the book demonstrates persuasively that action must be taken early, comprehensively, and visibly by presidential campaigns and transition teams starting in what he calls Year Zero, the year before governing. His book lays out concrete nonpartisan steps and recommendations, month by month, for different phases of transition work, and he highlights how these reforms would fundamentally improve the functioning of the executive, and in so doing pay large dividends for our democracy by improving how the White House functions.

3. Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government (2024) highlights the crucial work performed by inspectors general, public servants most citizens have never heard of. These men and women work to keep the federal government accountable through independent oversight. Glenn Fine, who served as the Inspector General for the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and the Acting Inspector General of Department of Defense from 2016 to 2020, draws on his own experiences in several high-profile investigations during his tenure, from 9/11 through Covid, to highlight the importance of inspectors general to American democracy. Designed to restore declining trust in our federal institutions, this book provides a fascinating view from the inside on government processes, rendering transparent how federal officials spend our tax dollars and the mechanisms in place to hold them accountable. As he shows, inspectors general take seriously their charge to improve operations and deter wasteful spending, and they routinely make recommendations to agency heads and lawmakers in Congress to strengthen America's unique system of oversight, thereby safeguarding our democracy on a daily basis.

Through UVA Press’s series with the Miller Center, we publish books like the three titles mentioned here that make crucial contributions to the current debates surrounding the American presidency, and in so doing also help to shore up and try to safeguard the future of American democracy. As we watch the current presidential transition unfold and a new administration take shape, it is my hope that readers will turn to these books to make sense of the news and gain a better understanding of the inner workings of the federal government.