Woodrow Wilson, responsible government, and the Founders' regime

The dissertation is a study of Woodrow Wilson's efforts, both as a political scientist and as a politician, to replace the political independence of and institutional jealousy between the President and Congress in the Founders' regime with interdependence and co-operation, thereby instituting what he termed responsible government in the United States. In his first years as a political scientist, Wilson recognized that the constitutional separation of powers effectively precluded the establishment of the regime he envisioned. He therefore based his program on a formal amendment of the Constitution. However, as Wilson came to realize, attaining such an amendment was a political impossibility. Wilson thus resorted to an informal approach to integrating the power and authority of the President and Congress. Wilson's informal program--which was neither a simple call for party government nor for a rhetorical presidency, as some have suggested--proved to be remarkably effective during Wilson's first term of office. In this period, Wilson and the Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, working together in a manner consistent with his program, passed an unprecedented set of domestic reforms. Yet the separation of powers, and the party system and political culture inextricably bound up with it, were ultimately resistant to Wilson's program, not least because the program contained unrealistic assumptions and contradictions that he had to incorporate into his informal approach to constitutional change. These problems came increasingly to the fore, and eventually hastened Wilson's political self-destruction, amidst the controversial issues surrounding American participation in World War One and the subsequent peace. Wilson's experience in applying his program indicates that the problem of governance, as he and other reformers, political scientists, and politicians since have defined it, is both intractable and, in certain respects, perhaps not a problem after all. Insofar as there is a problem of governance that political leaders have to cope with in the United States, the varying results that Wilson's program met with suggest decidedly better and worse ways of doing so.