Has democracy come to an end?

William Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, a professor in the department of political science and the College, and the director of the Center for Effective Government. He has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on President Barack Obama's education initiatives, distributive politics, and the normative foundations of executive power. Howell is the author, most recently, of Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (Basic Books, 2016), with Terry M. Moe.

Rachel Augustine Potter, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the hidden politics of procedure and process in American political institutions, with a particular focus on bureaucracy and regulation. Her book Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) received the American Political Science Association's Theodore Lowi Award for the best first book in any field of political science, APSA's Richard Neustadt Award for the best book on executive politics, and the National Academy of Public Administration's Louis Brownlow Award for the best book on public administration.