Overview

The Miller Center's fall 2025 Conference on the American Presidency began with three demonstrable facts and three questions. The facts are that across American history, and particularly in the past three decades, presidents have grown more powerful, more partisan, and less popular. The questions are: Why? Do we have the institutions we need or want? What can or should we do about it?

To explore these facts and questions, our conference engaged leading scholars and journalists, along with former senior White House practitioners and other government officials drawn evenly from past Democratic and Republican administrations. We hosted six roundtable discussions and two signature panels on presidential leadership. In the months after the conference, we conducted a listening tour of participants and other stakeholders.

Not surprisingly, none of the three original questions yielded simple or consensus answers. Still, practitioners and experts across the philosophical and political spectrum pointed to three areas worth prioritizing: the president’s use of emergency powers, Congress’s struggles to perform its most basic functions, and how presidential performance and failure tie to public trust and distrust.

These areas reinforce one another, each leading to a stronger, more partisan, and less popular presidency. Public disapproval of incumbents leads the public to elect and empower new unilateral presidents, who further erode the norms of deliberative democracy. As Faculty Senior Fellow Allan Stam wrote in his conference essay, this “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.” We will prioritize these three topics in the coming two years of research and discussion, culminating in our next Conference on the American Presidency, which will be held in 2027.

Project structure

The project's three action areas, which overlap, are emergency powers, congressional dysfunction, and presidential performance.

Plan of action

In each area, we will explore and engage, integrating and building on the Miller Center’s ongoing oral history, presidential recordings, and policy research projects. We will examine public awareness of each problem and a range of possible solutions. We will combine academic rigor with practical recommendations to improve our democracy.