Prior to serving as full-time Director of the RAI, 2011-15, Nigel Bowles was for more than twenty years Tutorial Fellow in Politics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He was previously a staff member in the House of Commons before being appointed a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. His intellectual interests lie in American political history and, in particular, in the history of the US Presidency. Among his publications are The White House and Capitol Hill, an exploration of the politics of presidential lobbying; and Nixon's Business: Authority and Power in Presidential Politics, in which he examines the relationship between authority and power in five cases of President Nixon's leadership of economic policy.
His outside interests include music (especially solo piano, and 18th and 19th-century chamber music), cricket, food, and charities working in the environmental, educational, and heritage sectors.
Selected publications
- (ed. with D.A. Berry and H. Jones) Governing the North American Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Institutions (Basingstoke, Macmillan, forthcoming 2016).
- (with R.K. McMahon) The Government and Politics of the United States (3rd edn., Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2014).
- (with D.S. King and F. Ross) 'Political Centralization and Policy Constraint in British Executive Leadership: Lessons from American Presidential Studies in the Era of Sofa Politics', British Politics, 2:3 (2007), 372-394.
- Nixon's Business: Authority and Power in Presidential Politics (College Station, Texas A&M U.P., 2005).
- 'Economic Policy', in R. Singh (ed.), Governing America: The Politics of a Divided Democracy (Oxford, O.U.P., 2003), pp. 249-266.
- 'Comparing the Core Executive in Britain, France, and the United States', in M. Nelson (ed.), The Presidency and the Political System (7th edn., Washington D.C., CQ Press, 2003), pp. 29-47.
- 'The Presidency and Congress: A Trifocal Approach', in R. Singh (ed.), American Politics and Society Today (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002), pp. 118-145.
- The Government and Politics of the United States (2nd edn., Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998).
- The Government and Politics of the United States (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1993).
- The White House and Capitol Hill: Politics of Presidential Persuasion (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987).
