What to Choose? President Selection over Executive Action Instruments

• In Event: The Use of Unilateral Powers

Abstract

In their efforts to understand how presidents move policy through executive action, scholars have increasingly moved beyond focusing on executive orders to studying the range of instruments that the chief executive has at their disposal. In doing so, efforts have been made to identify the universe of presidential actions, including both numbered and unnumbered executive orders, proclamations, and memoranda. This suggests that the number of presidential actions are far greater than previously enumerated (e.g., roughly 34,000 from 1946-2020 according to Kaufman and Rogowski (forthcoming)). However, several issues arise in accepting such enumerations. One is whether all such actions should be accepted as presidential actions, as some seem to be administrative actions issued by others such as agency heads without presidential approval. More intriguing, is ascertaining whether choice of the vehicle for presidential action is idiosyncratic or systematic. To deal with these concerns, we first propose a more consistent concept for unilateral action than previous works and identify those potential directives clearly associated with the president. Furthermore, we analyze the four forms of unilateral action in terms of their respective determinants and when a form is chosen, most notably finding that the president issues more numbered executive orders and less memoranda under unified government. This has important implications for presidential power and how unilateral action impacts policy changes.

Authors

• Fang-Yi Chiou, Academia Sinica

• Lawrence S. Rothenberg, University of Rochester