Abstract
AbstractPresidents' unilateral sway over policy is of global concern to scholars, practitioners and the general public. While pending actions provoke media speculation about how much authority presidents have to change policy without legislatures, scholarship has yet to systematically measure presidential discretion across areas of public policy. This study surveys an interdisciplinary panel of scholars, using discrete choice experiments to estimate the latent level of discretion that US presidents have in fifty-four policy areas. Consistent with models of delegation and unilateralism, these measures confirm that presidents have more discretion in foreign affairs, and that discretion promotes executive action. This approach presents the opportunity to examine differences in presidential discretion and public perceptions of presidential power, and can be applied beyond the US case.
Highlights
Discretion is at the core of executive power
To answer more basic questions about how much discretion the president has, journalists often report on expert opinions regarding presidential discretion – but these reports are limited to particular policies and are not systematic
We calculate and present estimates of presidential discretion over public policy in the United States derived from a survey of a panel of experts in the social sciences, humanities and law
Summary
Discretion in a political setting is the authority to decide whether or not to take policy action, and if so, which action or policy to choose. Though presidents are typically chief executives whose exercise of discretion has broad influence on policies and other political actors, presidential discretion has mostly escaped systematic empirical investigation Presidents derive their discretion from a variety of sources, including explicit grants of authority or useful ambiguities in constitutions, and most importantly, delegation from legislatures. In the US context, formal theories of unilateral action incorporate several key elements of this stylized narrative, with the president modeled as a first mover and Congress’s ability to respond limited by super-majoritarian requirements (for example, Chiou and Rothenberg 2014; Howell 2003). Most of this theoretical work focuses on comparative statics associated with changes in Congress and the president’s preferences. Because discretion is typically modeled as an exogenous parameter that determines the set of alternative policies available to a president, more discretion implies more opportunities for unilateral action.
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