The ‘Ratchet Effect’: Presidents, Emergency Powers, and the Crisis of Institutional Faith - The Miller Center

Title: The ‘Ratchet Effect’: Presidents, Emergency Powers, and the Crisis of Institutional Faith

Source: The Miller Center (a nonpartisan institution at the University of Virginia that explores how the American presidency meets national priorities and engages scholars with leading citizens to help solve major problems)

Date of Publication: September 10, 2025

Author: Allan C. Stam (Allan C. Stam is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, a University Professor, professor of public policy and politics, and former dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and professor of political science and senior research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Among other books, he is the author of The Behavioral Origins of War (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015).)

Introduction: An accelerating trend toward unilateral executive action has characterized the post-Cold War American presidency. Confronted with intense partisan polarization and the resulting legislative stalemate, presidents have increasingly resorted to the tools of direct authority—executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations—to bypass a gridlocked Congress and enact their policy agendas.

The most potent tool is the declaration of a national emergency. This action unlocks a litany of latent statutory powers, allowing a president to redirect funds, deploy military personnel, and regulate sectors of the economy with minimal immediate oversight. This practice represents a fundamental shift in the locus of policymaking, moving it from the deliberative, legislative sphere to the decisive, executive one. 

The expanding use of presidential emergency powers is an effect of the secular decline of public faith in the nation’s core democratic institutions. Decades of data indicate that citizens are losing confidence in our constitutional system of checks and balances to address pressing problems. This loss of confidence suggests that citizens become more amenable to leaders who promise to cut through procedural constraints, thereby rewarding unilateralism and further eroding the norms of deliberative democracy. It creates a self-perpetuating cycle of distrust and overreach, in which each unilateral act delegitimizes the bypassed institutions, reinforcing public cynicism and increasing the political demand for executive action.

The full article can be found here.