Victor Wu
Bio
Victor Wu is a PhD student in political science at Yale University. His dissertation, Democracy After the Executive Revolution: An Essay in Institutional Realism, develops a new political theory of modern democracy organized around the concept of political initiative.
The project proceeds in two parts. Part I diagnoses the rise and collapse of the legislative paradigm that has structured the political theory and institutional design of representative government since the late seventeenth century—a paradigm whose foundation, the legislation-execution distinction, was decisively undermined by the rise of the democratic executive across the transatlantic world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the “executive revolution”). This transformation was clearly recognized at the time but its significance was almost entirely forgotten in postwar democratic theory. Part I recovers the neglected transatlantic tradition of institutional realism from Alexander Hamilton, Walter Bagehot, Woodrow Wilson, Max Weber, and E. E. Schattschneider as a path not taken: descriptively more accurate and normatively more attractive than the alternatives that dominated in the postwar period. Part II systematically reconstructs democratic theory after the executive revolution. It argues that the logic of modern democratic politics is not legislative legislation versus executive execution but executive initiative versus legislative critique, and it defends a comprehensive framework of Responsible Competition—rule by public offices rather than private power, legible and general electoral competition, and contestation between qualitatively distinct claims of executives and legislatures to represent the people—as the best realization of traditional democratic and liberal ideals (collective agency, public accountability; individual freedom, moral equality) under twenty-first-century conditions. The project articulates, generalizes, and applies the method of institutional realism in political theory, grounding normative principles in historically and empirically identified features of political institutions rather than ahistorical moral premises or inherited but obsolete conceptual frameworks.
His article-length papers drawing from this larger project include: (1) an analytic reconstruction of the American Founding logic of legislative predominance in the Federalist Papers and the consequences of its historical collapse for contemporary originalist arguments in American constitutional theory; (2) a new theory of the modern separation of powers as executive initiative versus legislative critique, developed through a revisionist interpretation of Woodrow Wilson as the most important early theorist of democracy after the executive revolution; and (3) an intervention in contemporary debates over sortition, arguing that innovations like citizens’ assemblies (ad hoc bodies selected by lottery) should be understood not as steps toward post-electoral democracy (“lottocracy”) but rather as valuable institutional sites of citizen initiative and public critique.
Before starting at Yale, he received his AB in 2016 from Harvard College, worked as a research associate at Harvard Business School, served as an artillery officer in the United States Marine Corps, and received an MA in 2024 as a Yenching Scholar at Peking University.
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Education
- M.A. in China Studies, Peking University, 2024
- A.B. in Social Studies and Philosophy (magna cum laude), Harvard University, 2016
Awards
- 2025-2026 Adam Smith Fellowship (Mercatus Center at George Mason University)
- 2024 Gaus Memorial Essay Prize (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society)
Areas of Interest
- Political Theory
- Comparative Politics
- American Political Development