The Determinants of Unilateral Action: Proclamations, Memos and Executive Orders

• In Event: The Unilateral Presidency

Abstract

Existing studies on the determinants of unilateral action tend to focus only on executive orders, while neglecting other prominent forms of unilateral action, most notably excluding presidential proclamations and memoranda. Such a serious omission can potentially mislead our inference about the employment of unilateral action, which typically accounts for the number of actions taken by the president within a period. I propose two steps to address this important gap in the existing literature. First, I systematically collect media coverage data on various forms of presidential directives issued from 1947 to 2018. This data set comprises more than 10,000 directives, including executive orders, presidential proclamations, and presidential memoranda, and employs a Bayesian item response theory (IRT) approach to estimate the significance of each directive in a common space. Second, with the inclusion of proclamations and memoranda as part of unilateral action and the measure of directive significance, I conduct empirical tests of previous competing unilateral action models, including those developed by Howell (2003) and Chiou and Rothenberg (2017), and obtain several interesting findings. Among these, which of the models receives the most empirical support depends on significance thresholds. While Howell’s and Chiou and Rothenberg’s empirical results remain robust for moderate thresholds used to determine significant directives, for low or high thresholds, their results do not hold any more. I explore what causes this change and how the empirical results vary across policy areas.

Author

• Fang-Yi Chiou, Academia Sinica