—Maksym Mykhailenko, independent researcher, Dresden, Germany
Where substantial executive authority is concentrated in a single officeholder, the modern presidency rests on an increasingly implausible institutional assumption: that one person can exercise meaningful judgement across the entire range of executive government. In many contemporary presidential systems, presidents are expected to exercise or coordinate authority across foreign policy, defence, economic management, public administration, constitutional affairs, political communication and crisis response, often under severe time pressure. The precise distribution of authority varies between constitutional systems, but the underlying concentration remains: politically consequential and cross-departmental decisions frequently converge on a single officeholder. No individual can possess adequate expertise in all these fields, continuously evaluate the information produced by extensive bureaucracies and still deliberate carefully about every consequential decision. The problem is therefore not only that presidents may possess too much power. It is also that they may be assigned more decisional responsibility than one person can competently exercise. The singular presidency can become a cognitive bottleneck. This cognitive constraint provides a distinct constitutional argument for considering plural forms of executive authority.
An Office Beyond Individual Capacity
The classic debate over presidentialism has centred on the concentration of executive power, the competing democratic mandates of presidents and legislatures, fixed terms and the risk of institutional conflict or democratic breakdown. Subsequent comparative assessments have qualified some of these claims, while recent constitutional scholarship has renewed attention to chief-executive aggrandisement and the personalisation of political authority. These concerns remain important, but they primarily address how presidential power is acquired, constrained or abused. They pay less attention to whether the responsibilities concentrated in a singular presidency can be discharged adequately by any one person.
The attention a president can devote to consequential executive matters is necessarily scarce. Matters tend to reach the president because they are unusually consequential, urgent, disputed or cross-departmental. Each may require the officeholder to reconstruct a different factual context, assess evidence filtered through institutions with competing priorities, compare uncertain forecasts and determine which risks are acceptable. While one matter receives sustained attention, others must be postponed, delegated or decided through compressed briefing. Government departments can investigate and deliberate on many problems in parallel, but the matters referred to the president must pass through the largely serial attention and judgement of one person. The bottleneck therefore lies not simply in the quantity of presidential work, but in the convergence of multiple decision-making processes upon a single, cognitively bounded officeholder.
This is an institutional rather than a personal criticism. Exceptional intelligence, experience and diligence may extend the range of matters a president can understand, but they cannot remove finite limits on time, attention, memory and domain-specific expertise. Research on bounded rationality has long rejected the assumption that organisational decisions are made by fully informed actors with unlimited powers of calculation. Experimental research also shows that switching between tasks produces measurable costs, particularly as the relevant rules become more complex. Presidential government does not become defective only when an incompetent person occupies the office. The mismatch persists even under an unusually capable president.
The growth and centralisation of executive administration have made that mismatch more consequential. The United States provides a particularly clear example: scholarship on presidential administration has documented the increasing direction of administrative and regulatory activity from the president and the Executive Office. Institutional arrangements differ elsewhere, but the same problem arises wherever expanding executive functions are coordinated through a single final office. Governments may enlarge the machinery surrounding the president without correspondingly enlarging the constitutional capacity of the person at its apex.
Why Delegation Is Not Enough
Presidents do not, of course, govern alone. Ministers, civil servants, military officials, scientific advisers and administrative agencies possess specialised knowledge and make many routine decisions. This division of labour is indispensable. It does not, however, eliminate the bottleneck.
The most politically sensitive, contested or consequential matters are precisely those most likely to be referred upwards. The president must still determine priorities and adjudicate between recommendations that may reflect different departmental jurisdictions, professional cultures, evidential standards, policy commitments and assessments of risk. Interdepartmental disputes are therefore not incidental to presidential decision-making. They are among the matters that require presidential resolution. Decisions that cross institutional boundaries create an additional burden because no single department can settle them independently. The president must ultimately decide which risks are acceptable and publicly explain and defend the resulting policy.
Delegation therefore increases the amount of expertise available to the presidency without proportionately increasing the president’s capacity to assess and integrate it. A larger advisory organisation may reproduce the bottleneck in a more elaborate form. More experts can broaden the analysis and preserve competing perspectives, but they also produce more evidence, more recommendations and more disagreement for the president to reconcile. Scholarship on presidential decision-making has long treated the organised presentation of competing views as a safeguard against poorly grounded decisions. More recent research on 2,685 foreign-policy deliberations involving United States presidents nevertheless shows that advisers’ dispositions affect both the counsel presidents receive and the decisions they make. The president must therefore decide not only between policy options, but also which information deserves attention, which adviser is reliable and which assumptions should guide the final judgement.
Advisers also operate within a hierarchy. Their influence ultimately depends on access to the president, while their recommendations may be shaped by institutional interests, political considerations and expectations about presidential preferences. Scholarship on presidential advisory systems has therefore emphasised the importance of preserving multiple channels of advice and preventing any one adviser or office from monopolising the presentation of alternatives. These arrangements can reduce the risks of filtered information and premature consensus, but they do not remove the underlying bottleneck. The system still ends with a single person choosing among competing recommendations.
The distinction is therefore between delegated assistance and distributed authority. Delegation allows others to inform or act on behalf of the president. A plural executive would instead give several officeholders independent constitutional responsibility for executive judgement.
The Cost of Concentrated Attention
Presidential attention is not merely a personal resource. Where final executive authority is concentrated in one office, it becomes a constitutional resource whose allocation affects which problems receive scrutiny, which disputes are resolved and which policies acquire momentum. Research on political attention begins from the premise that officeholders face a continuous supply of information but possess limited capacity to process it and must therefore prioritise among competing problems. The distribution of attention is consequently part of the exercise of political power.
This scarcity has several institutional effects. When many consequential matters compete for presidential consideration, briefings must be compressed, decisions may be delayed and greater weight falls on the advisers who select, frame and order the information presented. Matters that receive little presidential attention may still be decided through delegation, but then the claim that singular authority ensures presidential control becomes increasingly formal. The president remains publicly responsible for an extensive range of decisions without necessarily possessing the time or domain-specific understanding required to supervise each of them meaningfully.
This complicates the familiar defence of singular executives as especially accountable. The concentration of responsibility may make it easier to identify whom the public should blame, but identifiable responsibility is not the same as informed control. The assumption that presidential control necessarily strengthens accountability has itself been questioned, while scholarship on the unbundled executive argues that distributing executive authority can sometimes improve rather than obscure accountability. A constitutional structure should therefore be judged not only by whether responsibility appears concentrated, but also by whether the responsible officeholder can exercise sustained and informed judgement over the matters attributed to them.
The Case for Executive Plurality
Recent arguments for plural executives have emphasised the concentration of political power, chief-executive aggrandisement and the role of strongman leaders in democratic backsliding. The cognitive argument is complementary. Even a constitutionally restrained, conscientious and exceptionally capable president remains subject to finite limits on attention, expertise and deliberation. Executive singularity therefore presents a structural problem even when presidential power is neither abused nor expanded beyond its lawful boundaries.
Executive authority could instead be divided collegially, with several coequal officeholders sharing responsibility for major decisions, or functionally, with final authority over different policy domains distributed among separately authorised officials. The latter possibility has been developed in scholarship on the unbundled executive. The Swiss Federal Council provides the clearest existing example of the collegial form. Its seven members are of equal standing, each heads a federal department, and governmental decisions are taken collectively. The annually rotating president chairs the Council and performs representative functions but possesses no special authority over the other councillors.
Collegial and functionally divided executives differ substantially, but both prevent executive judgement from converging entirely upon one person. They allow several officeholders to maintain sustained attention to different areas of government and preserve partially independent channels of analysis. The case for plurality is therefore not only that it may restrain presidential power, but that it may distribute the cognitive burdens created by modern executive government.
Design Not Destiny
The familiar objections to executive plurality often mistake risks of particular designs for necessary features of plurality. In a functionally divided executive, clear jurisdiction can sharpen accountability because each officeholder bears final responsibility within a defined domain. In a collegial executive, collective decisions can entail collective responsibility, while portfolio administration remains attributable to individual councillors. Neither accountability nor effectiveness is inherently secured by singularity, and functional unbundling can preserve unitary authority within each assigned field.
Coordination likewise depends on institutional architecture. Verfassungsblog’s analysis of the European Commission attributes incoherence to overlapping portfolios and confused reporting lines, rather than to collegiality itself. Urgent action does not require a single officeholder either: the Swiss Federal Council exercised emergency powers collectively during the COVID-19 pandemic. The relevant objections therefore concern how plurality is designed, not whether plural executives can govern.
Beyond the Singular Executive
The central question is not whether plural executives are universally superior, but whether singularity should remain the constitutional default under conditions of modern governmental complexity. Concentrating final authority in one office may simplify hierarchy, yet it also concentrates finite attention, expertise and judgement. Delegation cannot remove that constraint where consequential disputes still converge on the president. Executive plurality deserves consideration not only as a safeguard against personal domination, but as a means of distributing the cognitive burdens of government. Constitutional design should therefore treat executive capacity, no less than power and accountability, as a central criterion.
Suggested citation: Maksym Mykhailenko, The Presidency Bottleneck: A Cognitive Case for Executive Plurality, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Sept. 3, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-presidency-bottleneck-a-cognitive-case-for-executive-plurality/