Congressional Sanctioning and Strategic Presidential Unilateralism

• In Event: Rethinking Conceptions of Presidential Power (Virtual Session)

Abstract

How do presidents choose between different bureaucratic directives? Existing political science literature focuses on executive order use in isolation. However, executive orders are not the only bureaucratic directive the president can use to alter policy implementation. This paper characterizes unilateral bureaucratic directives based on their visibility, whether their content is easily accessible to actors outside the executive branch, and their formality, how standardized the production, distribution, and structure of the directive is. Specifically, I theorize that as the risk of congressional sanctioning increases, presidents will use fewer high visibility directives, such as executive orders, and more low visibility directives, such as unpublished executive memoranda. To test this theory, I use an original dataset comprised of executive orders and published memoranda from the Federal Register and unpublished memoranda from the Public Papers of the President. While existing literature finds that presidents issue fewer unilateral actions during divided government, this paper demonstrates that presidents are still acting unilaterally during these periods, but are using less visible directives than during unified government.

Author

• Meredith McLain, Vanderbilt University