Opinion Leadership and the Problem of Executive Power: Woodrow Wilson's Original Position

Abstract

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics inConstitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.