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THEORY-911: Of 853 national states of emergency declared from 1949 to 2017, 115 were reported as unlawful in declaration, conduct or duration; 97 of those followed political turmoil and 14 natural disasters, democracies were less likely than autocracies to run one, and those so coded lasted 321 days on average against 115, a gap the coding of overlong emergencies as unlawful builds in part

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Properties6
StatusActive
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance
SourceLIT-1473 — Unconstitutional States of Emergency
SupportsCLAIM-445 — A protective regime, in a person, an institution or a system of states, becomes self-maintaining when the interventions it authorizes shift the evidence used to judge its necessity, the authority and resources of those who judge it, the capacities of its constituents or the threat environment itself in ways that favour its continuation; this can happen when the original threat was real and the first protection apt, and it is a failure only where the regime has become less responsive to evidence that it is no longer needed
Cited as “extends” byTHEORY-1198 — Unlawful states of emergency, in declaration, conduct or duration, follow political turmoil far more often than natural disasters, are rarer in democracies than in autocracies, and last much longer than lawful ones

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Source

Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali, LIT-1473, read in full in NOTE-1125 from ILE Working Paper No. 51 (August 2021): pp. 12–25 and Tables 1–6 and A1. The version of record (JLS 51(2), 2022) was not read.

What was actually shown

  • The counts. 853 national SOEs, 1949–2017; 115 coded unlawful. By regime and cause (Table 1): democracies 8 of 271 after natural disasters and 41 of 241 after domestic turmoil; autocracies 6 of 68 and 56 of 245.
  • The phase. Unlawful conduct during the emergency is commonest (65), then prolongation (37–39), then declaration (19), overlapping (Table 2, p. 22).
  • Duration. “Lawful SOEs last 115 days on average while the average duration of unlawful SOEs is 321 days” (p. 22). 66 per cent of unlawful SOEs ran past their constitutional expiry; 63 per cent of lawful ones ended exactly at it.
  • Regime. Democracy has a negative coefficient in every full-sample and domestic-events logit (Tables 4–5).

What could have come out otherwise: unlawful emergencies could have clustered after disasters, where a well-meaning government is surprised by the scale of the crisis, as the authors allowed (p. 8). Only 14 of 115 did.

What this does not say

  • That emergency measures outlast emergencies. The authors name that phase and have “no data on this aspect” (p. 6, fn. 2).
  • That the threat had passed. No measure of threat decline; turmoil is partly caused by the government itself, as the authors stress.
  • That one in seven is the rate. Coding by English-language press and NGO reports; the authors expect undercounting, especially in the global south and before 1990.
  • Its causes. The logits are weak (pseudo-R² at most 0.07). The abstract’s recession and grounds-for-emergency findings are simple differences, and its populism finding is an insignificant coefficient.
  • That the duration gap is independent of the coding. Overlong SOEs with no recorded lawful extension are coded unlawful, which builds part of the gap in.

Connections

  • CLAIM-445. Supports its political-institutional feedback in one place, prolongation: emergencies that escape their legal limits run much longer. The authors’ untested hypothesis, that executives prolong an SOE to postpone review of their emergency conduct (p. 11), is the claim’s mechanism stated for emergencies. It does not reach the claim’s test, which needs threat decline measured.

Note of 2026-10-30: narrowed and promoted

Promoted as a report of the paper’s counts (ADR-065). The version of record was not read, and no discrepancy with it is named; NOTE-1125 says which copy was read. The abstract’s thesis, that unlawful emergencies follow turmoil and last longer, is THEORY-1198, Proposed, which extends this entry and waits on an independent coding of lawfulness.

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