The Effects of Polarization on Ideological Certainty: An Application to Executive Order Issuance

Abstract

Standard models of political institutions often conceptualize decisions in terms of the constraints imposed by key decisionmakers. However, these models, and the empirical analyses they inspire, often implicitly assume that decisionmakers can infer the ideological locations and personal identities of these individuals without error. Here, we reveal the substantive importance of this assumption, showing via simulation that polarization due to partisan sorting reduces uncertainty about the ideological locations and identities of key individuals. Moreover, when we incorporate estimates of uncertainty into empirical models of veto overrides and executive order issuance, we find that lower levels of uncertainty (about both ideology and identity) are associated with higher rates of veto overrides and policy-relevant executive order issuance, though results are strongest when focusing on uncertainty over the identities of key individuals. These results have implications for the study of polarization and the use of models of institutions in political science.