Since 2020, Hamilton College’s Associate Professor of Government Erica De Bruin and University of Maryland, College Park’s Calvert Jones have been conducting research about the factors that lead Americans to condone or support presidential power grabs. On Friday, Oct. 4, students, faculty and community members gathered as De Bruin presented the research findings and methods. Lunch was catered for participants by Parkhurst.
De Bruin explained that research included a lot of concerns about the potential for leaders to take advantage of a crisis situation and try to consolidate their own power. She brought up the COVID-19 pandemic and the contested election as crises in which concerns were raised around leaders attempting power grabs. Therefore, the research aimed to look at the conditions under which power grabs are more likely to be supported.
“We’re particularly interested in this research and trying to understand what types of presidential power grabs are most likely to be tolerated,” De Bruin said. “There’s a whole range of different ways in which leaders can respond in certain moments of crisis. They can try to undermine other bodies of government, they can delay elections, they can restrict civil liberties. They can go in a lot different directions.”
Sponsored by Hamilton College’s Levitt Center, De Bruin and Jones conducted a series of survey experiments with a nationally-representative sample of 4,192 American adults to understand more about the tolerance of presidential power grabs. The survey presented respondents with a series of hypothetical future scenarios and asked them to evaluate the extent to which they approve of the president’s response on a one to six scale, one being strongly disapprove and six being strongly approve. Additionally, the researchers asked follow-up questions about the crisis, the president’s response to the crisis, the respondent’s political opinions and other factors that may have affected the respondent’s answers.
This approach allowed the researchers to randomly vary and assess the effects of several variables at once, such as different crisis or non-crisis situations. If the respondent was presented with a hypothetical crisis situation, researchers distinguished crises into three categories: physical security crises, socio-economic crises and political crises. Security crises could have included situations such as terrorist attacks or crimes. Socio-economic crises could have included situations such as underemployment, strikes, rising prices or social unrest. Political crises could have included situations such as unprecedented congressional gridlock or voter suppression.
To set the scene, De Bruin explained three types of ways in which presidents and other executives are found accountable: horizontal, vertical and diagonal accountability. Horizontal accountability refers to accountability of the government or the executive to potential oversight bodies, vertical accountability refers to supporters and political parties and diagonal accountability refers to restrictions on civil liberties that allow both individual voters and other branches of government to do their job. In the research conducted, De Bruin and Jones asked respondents about several examples of each type of accountability.
The research found that Americans prefer fully democratic responses, such as the development of a task force, in both crisis and non-crisis situations, yet in a crisis situation the probability of an undemocratic action being approved increases by five percentage points. Additionally, in crisis situations, people strongly prefer responses that undermine horizontal accountability to those that undermine diagonal accountability to those that undermine vertical accountability.
After around four years of research, De Bruin and Jones found results to their question about when Americans condone or support presidential power grabs. De Bruin highlighted three key takeaways from her research. First, Americans are averse to undermining presidential accountability, but become more tolerant in times of crisis. Second, crises that threaten physical security, such as pandemics, terrorist attacks, or increases in climate change, were found to be most potent. Finally, accountability to different branches of government appears to be much more emotional to people than accountability to civil society or to voters. De Bruin ended her presentation by thanking the audience for listening and opening the floor to questions.
