Emergency governance, we are often told, is executive governance. Only the executive has the information, decisiveness, and speed to respond to crises, and so the executive is not capable of being effectively constrained by other branches. Ordinary checks and balances, then, are believed to effectively disappear during a crisis. Referring to the classic theorist of emergency rule, conventional accounts describe crisis governance as “Schmittian” and “post-Madisonian,” characterized by an unbound executive that faces few, if any, legal constraints. This article interrogates these propositions using evidence from how countries responded to the 2020 global pandemic during the critical first few months. It presents data from an original and global survey of over one hundred countries to evaluate the nature of emergency powers during the pandemic. This article finds that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, courts, legislatures, and subnational governments have played important roles in constraining national executives. Courts have insisted on procedural integrity of invocations of emergency, engaged in substantive review of rights restrictions, and in some cases demanded that government take affirmative steps to combat the COVID-19 virus and its effects. Legislatures have played a role in providing oversight and, in many cases, in producing new legislation that responds to the current crisis. Subnational governments, too, have pushed back against central authorities, engaging in valuable checks and balances that shaped the response. Taken together, these findings suggest that, during COVID, emergency governance has been closer to the Madisonian ideal of strong checks and balances than to Schmittian accounts of an unbound executive. This article considers the implications of these findings for theories of emergency governance, arguing that the conventional theories are based on one particular type of crisis—a national security crisis—and therefore their insights may be ill-suited to other kinds of emergencies, such as a pandemic.

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受约束的行政人员：大流行期间的紧急权力

我们经常被告知，应急治理是行政治理。只有执行者有信息、果断和应对危机的速度，所以执行者无法受到其他部门的有效约束。因此，普通的制衡被认为在危机期间会有效地消失。参考紧急规则的经典理论家，传统账户将危机治理描述为“施密特式”和“后麦迪逊式”，其特点是不受约束的行政人员几乎没有（如果有的话）法律约束。本文利用各国在关键的前几个月如何应对 2020 年全球大流行病的证据来审视这些命题。它提供了来自对一百多个国家的原始全球调查的数据，以评估大流行期间紧急权力的性质。本文发现，与传统观念相反，法院、立法机关和地方政府在约束国家行政人员方面发挥了重要作用。法院坚持援引紧急情况的程序完整性，对权利限制进行实质性审查，并在某些情况下要求政府采取积极措施来对抗 COVID-19 病毒及其影响。立法机构在提供监督方面发挥了作用，并且在许多情况下，在制定应对当前危机的新立法方面发挥了作用。地方政府也对中央当局进行了反击，参与了形成应对措施的宝贵制衡。综上所述，这些发现表明，在 COVID 期间，紧急治理更接近麦迪逊式的强有力的制衡理想，而不是施密特对不受约束的高管的描述。本文考虑了这些发现对应急治理理论的影响，认为传统理论基于一种特定类型的危机——国家安全危机——因此他们的见解可能不适用于其他类型的紧急情况，例如大流行。