Why The Presidency Is Key To Combating Populism

The dramatic rise of populism in America, embodied in President Trump, presents a real threat to democracy. Our very own professor William Howell argues that the root of the problem lies with ineffective government and that the solution may be to give the President agenda setting power.

We delve into his new book “Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy” and explore how giving president’s agenda setting power could break government gridlock and lead us to a more effective government.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript:

William Howell:                 

I'm Will Howell.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:          

I am Anthony Fowler. And this is Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Today, we have a slightly different episode. We are going to interview our own Will Howell about his upcoming book called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. Will wrote this book with Terry Moe from Stanford University, and we're super excited to grill him today on what it is that he's claiming in this book.

Anthony Fowler:          

Okay. Let's just get right into it. Will, we're happy to put you on the hot seat today. Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, that's the title. Did you have any particular president in mind when you wrote this book, or this is just about presidents in general?

William Howell:                 

Well, I think this is a story that speaks to presidents in general, but it certainly has somebody in mind, which is trying to make sense of the Trump presidency. It's not a book about Trump, it's a book about the institution of the presidency, the rise of populism, and threats to democracy that Terry and I see, and that we're trying to make sense of.

Anthony Fowler:          

Before we get into the details of the book, I think it might be useful for our listeners to get a little bit of the backdrop, a little bit of an intellectual backdrop. You and Terry Moe have written another book, which is related to this. It's related, at least there's a narrative here. There's a reason that you've written this book. Do you want to tell us, briefly, about the previous book that you wrote with Terry Moe, back in 2016?

William Howell:                 

That was called Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. In the lead up to the 2016 election, where in the world made a bit more sense, that seemed like a reasonable argument, and the sub-subtitle was deliberately intended to be provocative. The argument, though, is clearly incomplete. We have a lot more to say. We have a lot more to say about the institutional design of the presidency, and a lot more to say about the role of ineffective government, which was the driving force, the key theme, of that book, and that plays a central role in this book, as well. It's something that political scientists haven't taken adequate account of, and we want to say it's very much at the center of, not just a lot of the problems that we as a country face, but that goes a long ways towards explaining the rise of Trump.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

If I remember correctly, you got quite a bit of heat for this book because a lot of people who are unhappy with the outcome of 2016 election said, "Will, shouldn't we want to have a president who has actually very little power, given that we end up having presidents who are not the people that we want to entrust with power?" Why would you argue we want to give more power to presidents? If our elections are so full of power, that we end up electing someone who you might call it a populist, shouldn't we just try to take away the powers from this person?

William Howell:                 

The origins of this book are in many ways intended to respond to precisely this critique. This notion that presidents can do harm, and look at all the harm that Trump is doing, therefore, our best interest is to shut the presidency down, and any reference to an expansion of presidential power is foolish. My dog is weighing in.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Your dog is making a cameo, again.

William Howell:                 

That argument doesn't pay adequate attention to why Trump got elected in the first place. At the center of his campaign was her critique of the capacity of the government to solve problems. Our government is rigged. It's broken. That there is a swamp in DC, and nothing gets done that attends to the interests of average Americans. As soon as you see that, and this is true of populists generally. As soon as one recognizes this linkage between the rise of demagoguery, the rise of populism, and the failures of government, that then you need to ask yourself, what does a successful government look like? What does effective government look like? Here we want to say, we do say, that presidents play an important role.

Anthony Fowler:          

The argument is, that we get populists because of ineffective government And we should come back to that claim, later on. The solution is, if only we had more effective government we could avoid some of these problems that lead to populists like Trump. Give us maybe a quick rundown of your favorite proposals in the book for a more effective government.

William Howell:                 

In terms of expanding presidential powers, what we want to do is to give the president agenda setting authority in the legislative process. We want to allow the president to propose legislation that legislatures, in turn, will be forced to vote on within a set period of time. They've got to vote on, on an up or down basis. They're free to vote it down, but they can't simply take a pass, and thereby, avoid the discomfort of coming down for or against certain bills. They've got to take a stand, and if they don't take a stand, the bill becomes law.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

This is interesting. The way I read your book is that you worry that we have ineffective governments, and by empowering the president a little bit more than what we have right now, we are making the government more effective, or at least we aren't giving the government tools to become more effective. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you think giving the president agenda setting power is such an important tool, such a powerful tool, in achieving this goal?

William Howell:                 

There are a class of really complex national, if not international, interconnected challenges that we as a country face, that demand leadership by somebody who is attentive to national long-term concerns. A clear case of this, to my mind, is to think about climate change. The idea that we're going to get the leadership that we need to address that issue, from within Congress, that Congress as a collective decision making body, where it consists of 535 voting members, each of whom are paying attention at every turn to their local district, or state, is going to make sense of what national policy ought to look like in order to meet this global challenge, is falling. That isn't to say that all Presidents are going to take it on, or that even though subset who do want to take it on, are going to get it right.

I think perspective that President's lend to this particular issue, offer a leadership that we need, that to set the terms for what public debate and legitimate public debate is going to take moving forward, so that the debate isn't structured around all of the protections that need to be given to your powerful interest back home, traded off against all the protections that I need to have for my powerful interest back home. That is what structures the whole conversation moving forward on something like climate change. But that Presidents ought to be included among the agenda setters, in setting the terms for what a debate is going to look like.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

And you think they are not? Nowadays, they have the power of the pulpit. They talk to the leaders in Congress. There's the sense that they are driving the agenda, no? When they run for office they actually put forward their agenda, and then it's very frequent that subsequently we are talking about the issues that they put forward.

William Howell:                 

That's right.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Why is it that you think that they don't have enough agenda power right now, and they will if we implemented your proposal?

Will Howell:                 

The key difference between what you've described, or what we're advocating for, is that whereas now Presidents can argue on behalf of particular policies, they depend upon legislators within Congress to actually introduce them, and then to force a vote. In Obama's second term in office, he introduced comprehensive immigration reform. He was arguing on behalf of it. It had passed the Senate, but he couldn't get a vote within the House, even though a majority of the House, which included Republican legislators, would have voted in favor of it. He couldn't get a vote for it because it was going to split the Republican party and Boehner, following Hester's rule, didn't recognize that this was going to be problematic for the party's brand. He wouldn't bring it forward. The power that we're arguing on behalf of, would have forced them to cast a vote. In the same way you could think about this in terms of appointments to the court, too, if you wanted to take it a step further. Obama could have forced the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland, and they could have put him down, but they couldn't simply just table the proposal. In that sense, it's really significant.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Can I ask you to elaborate on one issue that you just mentioned? You mentioned that Presidents have different interests than Senators or members of the House. I want to ask a question about this because, in principle one might say, the government is only as dysfunctional as the people that we elect to be in the government. After all, for the first two years of many presidencies, the power was concentrated in the hands of one party. It doesn't really matter that the President has proposal power or a little bit more executive power. Why don't we get policies passed if most of the power's in the hands of the same party?

William Howell:                 

I think you're asking a variety of things here that are in play. Let me try to tick some of them off. One is that Presidential leadership looks very different from Congressional representation. There's also a temporal component, which is that Presidents tend to pay attention to the long-term. They care about their legacy, in ways that legislators are much more oriented towards short term electoral goals. They're single-minded seekers of reelection make you famously tow the poll, or that they're running scared, whereas Presidents like their Constitution, or pay attention to their roles in history, their place in history. It isn't enough to simply say that, once we have Democrats in control of both branches of government we can then expect to see convergence, or once we have Republicans holding both branches of government, we can expect to see convergence. There still will be this residual tension and different arguments being put forward, different policies being put forward, because Presidents evaluate policy in very different ways than do legislators. It isn't just about the Democrats and Republicans, Liberals, and Conservatives. It's also that legislators and Presidents are different. We need to think about those differences when we want to imagine a new, what institutional reforms might lead to a more effective government. Do you buy that?

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I do. That makes me think about what other reform that we can propose, which is getting rid of the electoral college. We all know the arguments put forward for this reform, but what you said made me think of the following. If we elect the President in popular election, then indeed it's in his or her interest to propose policies that benefit the society as a whole. In the US, given that we are using the electoral college, and given how Republicans and Democrats are differentially distributed among different states, at the end of the day it boils down to very few states, and you might end up having a President whose interests are not nationwide. He or she does not necessarily care about maximizing our national interest, but addressing the interest of this narrow group of society that lives in those states.

William Howell:                 

I think that's a fair point. The argument that we're making is an argument about differences in degree, not a kind. Isn't that Presidents perfectly represent the interests of our country as a whole, they decidedly do not. In part because of the electoral college, it may also be because they have personal biases, which train their attention on one segment of the country, rather than another. They also have a set of partisan concerns that they aren't unalloyed stewards of national interests. It also is the case that there are some legislators, that despite where they sit in our politics, nonetheless, rise above their kind of parochial interests and speak to a more national constituency. That's all true. I also think that it would be a very good thing to get rid of the electoral college and in so doing, national interests that President's channel would be enhanced, and that would be to the good. Again, this is an argument about differences in degree, not of kind. In the main, on the whole, Presidents pay more attention to national long-term concerns than does any other elected official.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Yes. Okay.

William Howell:

Okay. We've got you. We've got you a little bit on board. I like this. I bring you guys along, but I feel like I'm about to hit a pothole at some point. Anthony is laying in wait.

Anthony Fowler:          

Maybe this is a good time, actually. Maybe this is a good time to give Will a bit of a hard time. I'm struggling a little bit with where to start—

William Howell:                 

Because there's so many opportunities.

Anthony Fowler:          

There are lots of things to say. We can think about different problems that may have led to populism, or may have led to Trump. And certainly one class of problems that you discuss in the book are technological changes, and changes to the economies. There's been automation, there's been outsourcing of jobs, there's been immigration. Those strike me as very complicated problems to solve. This idea that if only we had a President who had more authority to just go and implement their own policies that we could have solved these problems, and we could make everybody happy, that seems overly optimistic. Then there's another factor that relates to populism and relates to Trump's success, which is that some people just have views that we find objectionable. Some people think that the United States should be mostly white Christians, and many of us disagree very strongly with that.

We just have different views about what the country should look like. That seems almost untenable. We are at odds, we're at an impasse. A small minority, it's not a lot of people, but maybe it's 10% of America completely think differently than the rest of us do, and they feel very strongly and they're going to vote for a candidate who champions those views. That also seems like something that you can't solve with more effective government. It's not as if we just gave President more agenda setting power we could all of a sudden make people who are xenophobic no longer xenophobia. There is a sense in which I just feel like I'm not convinced that the problems that led to Trump, and the problems that led to populism, are as solvable as you suggest.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Can I jump on that?

William Howell:                 

Yeah.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I would like to add one more thing to the list that Anthony just put forward. I think I completely agree with you that there exist groups of people who are disfranchised, poorer, and they have been harmed by globalization and so on. But I also wonder whether the reason why we haven't had those groups is because the government is ineffective, or because it's not in the interest of the government, or the elites, or the median voter, to actually solve these problems. At the end of the day, the median voter, the person who is deciding the elections, the let's call them elites, those are people who probably benefit from the fact that we have cheap labor, that we have immigration, and as a result we have cheap labor. They want to preserve the status quo, and they might be liberal, they might walk around and say, “I dislike this inequality, and I would like to change it”. At the end of the day, those people who actually have power, don't benefit from that. I wonder whether it's a matter of this dysfunctional government, or it's a matter of just the median voter having preferences in preserving status quo.

William Howell:                 

Look, it depends... All of these things matter in our politics. Race clearly matters in our politics, the policy preferences of the median voter clearly matters in our politics. I think what we want to argue, and we want to peel out is that there are persistent problems that pluralities, super majorities, of the American public, recognize it's the legitimate subject of public action. That in the aftermath of our debates about what government should be in the business of doing, and what good policy might be, that we nonetheless see institutional breakdown. If you look around what's going on right now amidst this pandemic, I don't think there's anybody who wants to argue that we're doing a particularly good job of meeting this disease.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I've heard that being argued on TV. There's this one person I can point to arguing about it.

William Howell:                 

Yeah. There's one person who's making the claim. That's right. That's right. This is objectively catastrophe. And it speaks to the failure of our institutions. When you think about rising globalization automation, I quite agree that these are, we quite agree, these are profound challenges to democratic states. The disruptions, the structural economic shifts that they entail, and the disruptions that they present to governments are profoundly difficult to deal with. We're not arguing that, give the President a little power and it'll all be good. That's not it. It's that there are things that could have been done, that weren't done. That trade assistance authority under the federal government has been a joke for the last 40 years. That there were efforts that could have been taken to attend to those people who are most effected by rising levels of globalization, that weren't done. And they weren't done systematically. There were lots of piecemeal programs that were rolled out, but there was nothing done systematically to attend to them.

You see this, again and again, in all policy domains. You see it in immigration policy, where we have this incoherent system. I don't know who that median voter is, who would say our immigration system is great, I'm going to just sign up for it. There's actually widespread anger with the current state of place. There's wider disagreement about what constitutes a solution, for sure. But there also is a failure of our government to structure that debate in a meaningful way, that leads to the possibility of the adoption of a policy that actually makes sense, that's coherent, that attends to the problem at hand. Tax policy. Nobody would build our tax policy from first principles. Our tax policy is born of all special interests lobbying. What we get is this unbelievably complex mess that makes very little sense.

Our suggestion, Terry and my suggestion, is that we can think about recalibrating the relationship between the President in the service of improving the chances that coherent policy is adopted. It's only about improving the chances, though. We're not arguing that if you give the President agenda setting authority that magically we're going to solve climate change. Clearly not. There's widespread disagreement about whether or not that even constitutes a problem, much less what a solution would look like. But we do think that if the President had agenda setting authority in this space, there's a chance we would have a more constructive, serious minded public debate about the problem as it's constituted, because right now, as long as the agenda setters are all within Congress, parochial considerations rein.

Anthony Fowler:          

I'm curious to talk a little bit more about some of the tradeoffs that we have to keep in mind when we're thinking about institutional reform. You and Terry are fairly critical of the Constitution and the framers in both of these recent books. They would probably be the first to admit that they didn't design the perfect system, they designed a system that was feasible. They had to get lots of different people with different interests to agree, to all come together and form a country. They came up with some imperfect compromises. As we think about giving more power to the President, or changing the extent of checks and balances, and so forth, there are obviously lots of tradeoffs to consider.

Presumably, we can all think of benefits of having checks and balances. It's probably a good thing that there is somebody from Montana in the room when they're writing up the tax policy, because that one person, although Montanans are a relatively small share of the country, that one person might know something that nobody else knows, and they can look out for someone's interest and they can say, “hey, wait a minute”. Obviously, that's partly why we get these very complicated tax laws that maybe we think there's some dysfunction there. But on the other hand, it's good that Montana is being looked out for in the legislature. Similarly, there are Presidents who would be tempted to abuse their power, obviously, and we're seeing some of that. There's lots of discussion of that in the book, and it's probably a good thing that there are checks and balances, and there are lots of members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, and lots of other people who were tempering that, to some extent.

If you were having this fight with James Madison about where do we draw the line, how much checks and balances do we want versus how much do we want to empower the President to solve problems? How do you know that the benefits are greater than the costs, shifting that line?

William Howell:                 

Our beef has less to do with James Madison, and more with all the subsequent generations of local institutionalists who followed. It's that subsequent generations of politicians failed to update James Madison's handiwork, and the rest of the founders, their handiwork. I would also say, I quite agree that there is a need for a representation of local short term interests in our national politics. We're not talking about shutting down Congress, and we're not talking about reconstituting Congress, so that for instance, you could imagine them having at-large elections in the legislature, and then national concern would come through more clearly in the legislature, and wouldn't that be to the good. There's a reason to have somebody representing Montana. International politics. What isn't clear to us is that the only agenda setters in the legislative process should consist of committee chairs and party leaders within Congress, where in these parochial short term considerations run wild.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Let me try an anecdote on you. In your book you mentioned that there were a lot of failures, and for example, a lack of comprehensive healthcare reform, or healthcare provision of healthcare system failures, is one of these failures. I think it's actually a pretty interesting example because it was Obama who tried to address this issue. He met with a lot of opposition from the Republican party. When the elections came along, it's the Republican party who became the winners. Actually, Trump got elected running on the platform of dismantling Obamacare. How should we think about this in light of your theory? Or is this one of these nuances that you just mentioned second ago, that completes this and we should put it aside?

William Howell:                 

We, in Relic, have a long discussion about healthcare policy and how successive generations of Presidents try to rationalize the system, and fail, again and again. What Obama does, is he certainly expands the benefits associated with national healthcare, and state healthcare systems, and he increases coverage, but he fails to rationalize it. He's working in a system that's stacked against him, and the idea that he's going to deliver, when the system is constituted as it is, the idea that he's going to deliver the ideal policy is naive. What Trump does is he exploits that persistent failure, and then takes it two or three steps further. He doesn't step in and offer a structural fix, after offering this deep institutional critique. He just kicks up the dust all the more. He doesn't replace the healthcare system and set it all right. That isn't the stuff of constructive debate that allows us to sort through our differences in a meaningful way, and figure out what good policy ought to look like. It's just counterproductive, no?

Anthony Fowler:          

My thoughts on this, we're talking about healthcare, and I think healthcare is a great example of an immensely complicated policy area where nobody knows what the right thing to do is. Most Americans would like to have whatever healthcare they want, whenever they want it, and not have to pay for it, not have to think about it. Any elective surgery they want, any doctor they want, pay 10 million dollars to keep Grandma alive for another month. Yet, nobody wants healthcare costs to be 90% of GDP. Nobody knows what the right answer is, and it's incredibly complicated, and whatever you do you're going to upset some very large segment of America. This seems to me to be a good example against some of what you and Terry are saying, which is sometimes policy is just so complicated that even with the most effective government, we're still going to have a lot of people upset. Maybe that makes them susceptible to populist appeals, maybe that means that the government is just doing incredibly hard things that there's no obvious solution to it.

William Howell:                 

I agree. I don't think that healthcare policy is obviously more complex than immigration policy, or education policy, or climate change. I think they're all incredibly complex. Part of what political leadership is in the business of doing, responsible political leadership is in the business of doing, is structuring those debates that pay attention to the relevant tradeoffs, in ways that allow for meaningful citizen engagement, and allow for the possibility of policy that makes sense, eventually being enacted. That isn't to say that some people aren't going to be ticked off, but look, the mark of our healthcare policy, to our minds, is not that some people are upset with it. It's that in important ways, is underperforming relative to other systems that we see in other countries. Just like the mark of our tax policy isn't necessarily complex because it doesn't have to look this way. It looks this way in no small part because of the lobbying efforts of special interests that are each looking out for themselves, one at a time. The product is this unbelievably bloated complex monstrosity. We can have better policy, objectively better policy, policy that you and I might disagree about whether or not the government should be in the business of adopting it, or whether or not that's the right policy from an ideological standpoint. Better in terms of it just being coherent, and so much a policy that we see enacted by Congress, in particular, is just a mess, no?

Anthony Fowler:          

There are tradeoffs. You have to admit that there are tradeoffs that we have to consider. And one trade off that we haven't talked about very much is that, although our system is biased toward the status quo, it's a sticky system, it's hard to make reforms, and in some ways we think that's unfortunate because it means we're not ready to solve a current crisis that comes about. There are advantages to that, as well. Our parochial example of that may be is that we at the Harris School had four different Deans in five years, at one point. It was a wild ride, even though all of the Deans, they had good ideas. It's a crazy thing to change the goal of the Dean every year. Presumably, you could make the same case for healthcare policy, or for climate policy, or for anything else. We don't want every new President to come in with their own agenda and completely change course. How do we trade off those considerations, as well? What are the downsides of letting every new President come in and completely redraw our policies?

William Howell:                 

I think policy stability can be a feature of effective policy. If what you do is give unfettered discretion to a President to unilaterally advance whatever his or her policy objectives are, that what you can then introduce is all instability. Notice though, that we're not arguing on behalf of an expansion of the President's unilateral powers that would allow for this thing. We are saying the President ought to have this agenda setting authority. I don't know of evidence that suggests an expansion of agenda setting authority given to a president leads to greater instability within a policy domain. Again, if you look at under the Trade Act, the granting of fast track authority to the President, didn't lead to with every passing President US international trade being upended, and recreated, and new, and introducing deep instabilities.

Again, this is a case though, where I would say, we stand to learn about what... There's a role for experimentation in this space. As best we can tell, the evidence suggests that this would be salutary. This would be... This wouldn't introduce deep insecurities to a system, and it would enhance the attention paid to national long-term concerns. If it were adopted, I would hope that 10, 15 years hence, we would reevaluate.

Anthony Fowler:          

What's the next book going to be about?

William Howell:                 

I don't know. I don't know. This book is just about to come out. It's finally coming out. I don't know.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Just before the next election.

William Howell:                 

Right.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

To verify your claims, and then there will be another book. Some disaster will strike, and there will be need for another book.

William Howell:                 

One may be. What I fear is that what will happen, if I had to guess the most likely outcome, is that the Democrats will regain control of at least one chamber of Congress, and are likely to win the Presidency, as well. There will be a mad dash to take a set of Conservative policies and make them literal. And to verbally condemn Trump, and to re-establish certain norms, and re-establish certain relations with other countries. Fine, fine, fine, but that there won't be sustained attention to these institutional reforms. We're going to remain just as vulnerable, and we're going to fool ourselves into thinking, it was just a blip. We are okay, thank goodness Trump is over. This is the preconditions for persistent failure, and therefore the continued rise of populism will remain in place.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I guess you convinced me of one thing. If we—

William Howell:                 

Only one thing?

Wioletta Dziuda:          

The main thing. If we gave the President the agenda setting power, that would probably also change the voters expectations. We would expect that the President who gets elected, indeed opens an envelope and puts forward a policy after policy after policy proposal. I wouldn't because we don't have this expectation, because any way Joe Biden knows that it is going to be very hard to pass any legislation through, and it's really unlikely that the Democrats capture all the points of power. He feels this pressure to come up with all this policy solutions. We might end up with Democrats in power, but they might not be ready. I think changing the expectations, this consequences of your reform proposal, might have actually extremely good consequences.

William Howell:                 

You could say the book grapples with lots of issues, and lots of components to the argument. For you all, having had a chance to read the book, what's your bottom line?

Wioletta Dziuda:          

I think I completely agree with this argument that we should carefully think about institutional reforms. There's definitely something wrong with the system that generates so much gridlock, whether this is what led to populism, a side I expressed earlier, I have some reservations but it did not lead to good things. It definitely lead to a situation in which we have outdated policies, we have immigration system that doesn't make sense, and we have global warming and we are not even trying to tackle it. I'm completely on board with your argument that we should think about institutional reforms. I think you make very good arguments in favor of the reform that you're proposing, in favor of giving the President agenda setting power. I have my reservation against empowering the President too much, but I think giving him the agenda setting power does not really bring a lot of drawbacks. Here, I'm assigning the petition.

William Howell:                 

All right.

Anthony Fowler:          

I find myself agreeing with most of your recommended reforms. I think we should, of course, spend a lot of time thinking about institutional reforms. Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi in their day to day lives don't, because they're thinking about other things. We, political scientists, should spend a lot of time stepping back and thinking about how could we improve the political system and make it function better, and so on. I agree with the spirit that motivated you to work on this project. I come out agreeing with most of the actual recommendations.

The thing that I am less sure of is whether or not these institutional reforms could actually have prevented populism, prevented Trump, prevented the problems that led to Trump. I just think the problems are really complex, and deep, and not so easily solvable. There is some sense in which I think you guys are actually making the same mistake that you're accusing Trump of making, which is you're trying to convince people that these are simple, solvable problems, and they're not. I think if anything, if we are to combat populism, the way to combat populism is probably to make the case that in fact, these are incredibly complex problems that no one strong man can come in and alleviate for us. I'm on board with thinking about institutional design, I'm on board with the actual policy reforms, but I don't think they're going to be a cure all. I think there are obvious tradeoffs that we need to think about, as well. One of those obvious tradeoffs is, we could easily get another Trump who maybe we don't trust to have increased agenda setting powder, for example, or increase authority to make regulatory changes and so on. I'm left unsure about the solutions to some of these deep problems that we've been talking about but I want to continue the conversation, and I want to think seriously about institutional reform.

William Howell:                 

Thanks, guys, for reading the book, and talking to me about it. These are hard issues, and I really appreciate the exchange.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Thank you and congratulations. The book is coming out soon.

William Howell:                 

Soon. Electronic version is out now, paperback a couple weeks from now.

Anthony Fowler:          

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:          

Our show you the podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy, and it's produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.