The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic – By Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule

Mobilizing the Public Against the President: Congress and the Political Costs of Unilateral Action

“…We examine one of the most important potential checks on presidential unilateral overreach-public opinion (Christenson and Kriner 2015;Posner and Vermeule 2010). Until recently, scholars have paid scant attention to how the public assesses unilateral action.…”

Democratic values and support for executive power

“…The perspectives above highlight the theoretical and normative stakes of understanding how citizens view executive power and suggest two hypotheses about the sources of these attitudes. We build upon previous research in American politics (Christenson & Kriner, 2020; Posner & Vermeule, 2010; Reeves & Rogowski, 2018) by identifying contextual and individual‐level sources of attitudes toward executive power in comparative context. In doing so, we take a broader approach than is typically found in the study of executive politics.…”

“…The additional breadth allows us to examine the nature of public opinion across regions with distinct contemporary and historical experiences with executive power (for an overview, see Prempeh, 2008). Our cross‐country approach also allows us to contextualize previous research on Americans' orientations toward executive power within the range of opinions held by citizens of other countries and to evaluate whether attitudes toward unilateral power in the United States are “a culturally specific phenomenon” (Posner & Vermeule, 2010, p. 188). Finally, our investigation relates attitudes about executive power to more fundamental questions about support for democratic governance.…”

“…As a starting point, we highlight the relative place of the United States. While survey research shows that Americans dislike unilateral presidential power and penalize policies that are undertaken without legislative consent (Reeves & Rogowski, 2018), Posner and Vermeule (2010, p. 188) suggest that resistance to unilateral power “might be a culturally specific phenomenon, unique to the United States.” Yet Americans' opposition to unilateral power might also reflect a commitment to democracy such that if the aggregate distribution of Americans' support for the rule of law were different, we would observe different patterns in aggregate attitudes toward presidential power.…”

Executive politics in an era of democratic crisis

“…Rebecca Brown and Lee Epstein focus more squarely on the strength of the judicial check itself and empirically examine the Court's willingness to rule against the president over time. Although the conventional wisdom has long held that the judicial check on executive aggrandizement is weak (Posner & Vermeule, 2010), Brown and Epstein show that the Roberts Court has ruled against the president more frequently than any of its predecessors. While this superficially suggests that the judicial check has strengthened in response to recent assertions of expansive executive power, Brown and Epstein identify an important caveat: judges' partisan orientation toward the incumbent president is a stronger predictor of their voting behavior on such cases today than ever before.…”