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The rise of the strongman presidency
Event Information
With Terry Moe, William Bennett Munro Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stanford University
Join us for this talk at BESI as Stanford political scientist Terry Moe discusses his recent book, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, coauthored with William Howell. The book focuses on a question of profound importance for understanding America’s ongoing crisis of democracy. How can it be that in a nation with such a long tradition of democratic self-governance, presidential power has expanded to the point that it presents a dire threat to democracy itself?
Moe and Howell show that presidents of both parties approached power in roughly the same ways throughout most of the nation’s history and largely stayed within democratic guardrails. However, starting about 50 years ago, this symmetry increasingly gave way to a dangerous asymmetry. The asymmetry was (and is) driven by the Republican Party’s heightened backlash against the progressive administrative state, along with new social forces that propelled its growing populism and extremism. All of this, the authors argue, motivated Republicans to seek a presidency of extraordinary power and, ultimately, a strongman presidency that governs unilaterally in defiance of democracy and the rule of law.
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies
About the speaker
Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stanford University and a former senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He has written extensively on the presidency and public bureaucracy, as well as American politics and political institutions more generally. His articles include “The New Economics of Organization,” “The Politicized Presidency,” “The Politics of Bureaucratic Structure,” “Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story,” “Presidents, Institutions, and Theory,” “The Presidential Power of Unilateral Action” (with William Howell), “Power and Political Institutions,” “Political Control and the Power of the Agent,.” “Vested Interests and Political Institutions,” “Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government” (with Sarah Anzia), and “Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public Sector Labor Laws” (with Sarah Anzia).
His most recent books are Relic (with William Howell, 2016), Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (with William Howell, 2020), and Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency (2025).