Presidential Action Research Articles

Persistent unilateral action

Abstract Many believe that weaker legal constraints make unilateral action easier to reverse than legislation. Yet in some cases, unilateralism survives a successor's determined opposition. I argue that legislative persistence and unilateral transience may arise not only from differences in legal status but also from a selection effect: unilateralism and subsequent rescission can both stem from weak underlying policy-demanding groups. But if unilateralism itself alters the landscape of group power through policy feedback effects, it can survive a purportedly opposed new president. An example is the Trump Administration's failure to depart from the Obama Justice Department's lax stance on cannabis. Weak constituents’ policy demands may thus need to rely on a sympathetic president's unilateral action to begin a feedback loop, subsequently softening opposition. This paper therefore identifies unilateral action as a key tool for shifting policy in an enduring way, explaining its success or failure in terms of interest group power.

Campur Tangan Presiden Dalam Pemilihan Umum Presiden 2024 Dalam Editorial Tempo

The 2024 Indonesian presidential election becomes a contest to choose new presidential and vice-presidential candidates for the 2024-2029 period. Various methods are employed by each candidate pair to occupy the presidential seat in Indonesia. As known, media coverage of this presidential election has given rise to a discourse with multiple interpretations. The aim of this research is to analyze a discourse within critical discourse analysis to examine the construction built by Tempo media in depicting the president's image according to Norman Fairlough's critical discourse. This research employs a qualitative approach with content analysis method. The research findings indicate that Description: The news title reflects the President's role as a supporter of Prabowo Subianto. Interpretation: The President's actions indicate significant interference in the electoral process. Explanation: This discourse reproduces power structures and influences public perception of democracy. In conclusion, the importance of understanding discourse construction in news and its impact on public perception of the political process becomes evident, with emphasis on the need for the independence and neutrality of electoral institutions becoming more prominent.

Updating Presidential Leverage: Comparing Measures of Leverage from Kennedy to Trump

This article seeks to accomplish two things. First, I update the Index of Presidential Leverage (IPL) published in Presidential Leverage (Ponder 2018), which analyzed presidential action from Kennedy to the end of Obama’s first term. This article brings the analysis through the end of the Trump administration and replicates the book’s analysis of executive orders to determine if that measure still exhibits explanatory capacity. Second, I consider two alternative measures of presidential leverage that tap the same idea of the IPL, which is presidential approval in an institutional context (namely, public approval of Congress and public trust in Congress). The article employs these alternative measures in a preliminary attempt to determine the efficacy of the concept of presidential leverage across different measures. I find that the concept of presidential leverage operationalized in these various ways is not only robust, but as was the case in the original analysis, outperforms analyses using raw presidential approval in isolation. Thus, the concept of presidential leverage is shown to be applicable across various measurement strategies. The robustness of the presidential leverage measure is important because it undergirds the idea that presidential approval in context, rather than simply as a stand-alone indicator, provides nuance and explanatory power to the study of presidential action that may be missed otherwise.

Executive action that lasts

AbstractUnilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

Divided Government, Strategic Substitution, and Presidential Unilateralism

AbstractPresidents select from a range of instruments when creating new policies through executive action. We study strategic substitution in this context and argue that presidents use less visible means of unilateral instruments when Congress is likely to scrutinize presidential action. Using data on unilateral orders issued between 1946 and 2020, we report two main findings. First, analyzing presidents’ choice of instruments, we show that presidents are more likely to substitute memoranda and other less visible instruments for executive orders and proclamations during periods of divided government. Second, after accounting for the substitution of executive orders with other instruments, we find that presidents issue greater numbers of directives during divided government than during unified government. These findings provide new evidence about the limitations of the separation of powers as a constraint on presidential unilateralism and highlight the importance of accounting for the variety of instruments through which presidents create unilateral policies.

The Genocide Convention and Presidential Priorities, 1948–1988

From 1948 to 1988, the United States failed to ratify and implement the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention). In total, seven presidential administrations neglected to expend the necessary political capital to secure the Genocide Convention's passage. This article is the first comprehensive study of the presidential actions—and, more aptly, inactions—on the long road to ratification. Ultimately, of the seven presidents who failed to procure the Convention's ratification by the Senate, only three even sought the Senate's advice and consent on the important international accord, and in all cases, the presidents did so while working to ensure the act did not harm their broader legislative and foreign policy agendas. Ultimately, President Ronald Reagan oversaw the Convention's ratification, though he did so in response to the threat of a public relations disaster that his administration believed the ratification would help avert. Studying the motivations of these eight presidents deepens our understanding of why it took the United States 40 years to finally adopt the Genocide Convention.

Features of the discursive dominants in the political communication

The article considers the discursive dominants represented in the political Internet discourse and official political discourse. Subjective (characteristic and axiological), actional and spatial dominants are analyzed. The patterns of foregrounding certain situation components are established. The aim of the present study is to analyze foregrounding of certain discursive dominants depending on the political communication type. The authors set the following tasks to achieve this goal: to study the subject-related theoretical material, to analyze the frequency of the discursive dominants in the political communication, to identify the realization features of the speaker's intention in the political Internet discourse and in the official political discourse.The material for the analysis were the US Presidents utterances in the social network, as well as official documents of the Presidential Actions, posted on the website of the US Government. The authors of the article use various methods, including observation and description, comparative method, contextual analysis, discourse analysis. The study scientific novelty lies in the comparison of two different spheres of the political communication. In the process of discourse interaction certain discursive dominants appear. Politicians statements in social networks often contain an actualized subjective dominant, which allows to affect the information perception by the recipient. At the same time, in the texts of official documents, the actional dominant is brought to the forefront, which is directly related to the participants actions.

Pretext, Reality, and Verisimilitude: Truth-Seeking in the Supreme Court

The assault on truth in recent public discourse makes it especially important that judicial decisions about Executive actions reflect the world as it is. Judges should not assume some idealized reality where good faith prevails, the motives of public officials are above reproach, and administrative processes are presumptively regular. Unfortunately, however, the Supreme Court has acted on naïve or counterfactual assumptions that limit judicial review of administrative or Presidential action. Such intentional judicial blindness or suspension of justified disbelief—such lack of verisimilitude—can sow doubt regarding the Court’s candor and impartiality. In analyzing the Court’s fealty to objective reality in its review of Executive actions, this Article focuses primarily on two Supreme Court decisions: the Travel Ban Case and the Census Case. These decisions illustrate how the mode of judicial review can influence verisimilitude. In the Travel Ban Case, the Court refused to look behind an implausible explanation of the government’s actions, a paradigm judicial departure from verisimilitude inimical to the legitimacy of the Court. The Census Case is a less direct assault on objective reality, as the Court ultimately did examine the truthfulness of the government’s justifications. But it did so in a manner that does not manifest a vital commitment to truth. This Article will also touch upon a third case: U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal. (the DACA Case). The DACA Case did not challenge objective reality but on the contrary insisted that agencies provide the actual reasoning behind their decisions rather than justifications they thought of later, even if those justifications were otherwise valid. The case thus reinforces the importance of candor and accuracy. A key lesson from these cases is that to preserve its legitimacy, the Court should abandon or modify doctrines that cede judicial review of national security issues, limit consideration of `pretext, decline to assess the intent of government actors, and indulge a presumption of regularity for administrative determinations. These reforms are achievable without a major overhaul of administrative law standards.

Congress and the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from international arms control agreements (2002-2020)

The article examines four cases of the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from international arms control agreements in the first two decades of the 21st century from the legislative branch perspective. Each of the four precedents is analyzed through the resolutions, which were submitted by legislators, in order to determine the difference in the approaches of Democrats and Republicans to arms control issues. Also, the paper discusses the constitutionality of presidential action and the exercise of congressional constitutional authority in the circumstances of the U.S. withdrawals from international agreements.

Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism

Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism

An Examination of the Presidential Power to Veto or Assent to Bills in Nigeria

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the prerogative given the executive arm of the government to give assent to Bills passed by the legislature along with its corollary power to veto Bills passed by the legislature. This executive prerogative is expressly provided for in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, as amended, which established the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the government. This prerogative of assent or veto is exercisable by the President of the Federation in respect of Bills passed by the National Assembly or by the Governor of a State with respect to a Bill passed by the State House of Assembly or even by the Chairman of a Local Government Area involving a bill for a by-law passed by the Local Government Councilors. This paper examines various illustrations of the dynamic relationships and actions when Bills passed by the National Assembly have been presented for Presidential action. The above prerogative in the field of law-making, which field is constitutionally vested in the legislative arm of the government is without prejudice to the hallowed principle of separation of powers. It only strengthens the desired checks and balances against abuses and arbitrariness by the legislative arm of the government. Thus, the Constitution requires that a bill duly passed by the National Assembly, that is to say, by both the Senate and the Federal House of Representatives, shall be presented to the President for his assent or as a corollary, for his veto. The President must either assent or withhold his assent within thirty days of the presentment of a Bill passed by the National Assembly. There is no explicit third option of conditional assent or conditional veto. Notwithstanding the above, to demonstrate that the National Assembly retains the final discretion in the field of law-making, the Constitution vests in the legislature the power to override the veto of the President, or, when the President simply fails to act regarding a Bill within the thirty-day period. The manner in which the above law-making powers have been exercised in Nigeria has created controversies especially with regard to which are the arguably correct procedures in three situations – (i) whether there is an agreed process and time for an override by the National Assembly of a Presidential veto, (ii) whether the President may give merely conditional or partial assent to a Bill, and (iii) whether it is necessary for a President to assent to a proposed Act intended to amend the Constitution. This paper examines these controversies along the following outline: i. The Constitutional Requirement for the Executive to Assent to Bills enacted by the National Assembly ii. The Essence of an Assent or Veto by the President to Bills iii. Whether the President is vested with the authority to Assent to a Bill Not Duly Passed by the National Assembly iv. The Assent of the Executive to Bills for an Act for the Amendment of the Constitution v. The Procedure for the Override of the Veto of the President vi. The Interpretation of Section 58(5) of the 1999 Constitution This paper compares the way Nigeria practices its Constitutional system of government with the practices of similar federal tri-branch systems of government, especially the United States of America. This paper concludes that these controversies can only be resolved by the authoritative rulings of Nigeria’s apex court, the Supreme Court of Nigeria, or when there exist express provisions of the Constitution of Nigeria relevant to a controversy, by strictly enforcing those provisions.

The Exceptional Politics of Richard Nixon: Politicking, Sovereignty, or "High Crimes and Misdemeanors"?

The hubristic end to the Trump administration has brought the constitutionality of presidential actions once again into question. But is it sufficient to approach the "unconstitutional" acts of presidents merely in terms of criminality? We should ask whether or not the preoccupation with executive criminality among critical progressives ought to make way for a properly political view of those actions. The existentialist political writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben provide an entry point into the politicizations of authoritarian figures in a way that brings out both their radical quality and the disturbing vibration of legitimacy that attracts so many supporters. The argument is structured through a historical analysis of the Nixon presidency, in the context of the Watergate affair, so as implicitly to throw recent developments into a more effective critical relief.

Media Attention and Strategic Timing in Politics: Evidence from U.S. Presidential Executive Orders

AbstractDo politicians tend to adopt unpopular policies when the media and the public are distracted by other events? We examine this question by analyzing the timing of executive orders signed by U.S. presidents over the past four decades. We find robust evidence that executive orders are more likely to be signed on the eve of days when the news is dominated by other important stories that can crowd out coverage of executive orders. This relationship only holds in periods of divided government when unilateral presidential actions are more likely to be criticized by Congress. The effect is driven by executive orders that are more likely to make the news and to attract negative publicity, particularly those on topics on which president and Congress disagree. Finally, the timing of executive orders appears to be related to predictable news but not unpredictable ones, which suggests it results from a deliberate and forward‐looking PR strategy.

Editor's letter

Latin American Policy's (LAMP) second release for 2021 is particularly relevant, offering what can be called a double issue. In addition to bringing together a collection of seven articles on current topics that affect the region, it includes a thematic issue on the evolution of democratic practices in key Mexican states. LAMP is published twice yearly, yet the highly relevant research papers included in the thematic section make up a full issue on their own and deserve a space for publication. We are proud to present them this year as a double offering and to show that the journal boasts not only a growing audience but also a cadre of high-level researchers interested in publishing in our journal. Our first collection of works begins with Andrés Rivarola's article on regionalism and geopolitics, focusing on contributions from Latin America on the topic. Zdeněk Rod and Michal Himmer then consider the U.S. responses to a growing Chinese presence in Central America. Next, the COVID-19 pandemic is covered, through two articles that consider the regional response. Damasio Duval Rodrigues Neto analyzes the health policies Brazil adopted during the first 12 weeks of the crisis, and Luciano Ayala-Cantu, Federico Frattini, and Bruno Morando cover Mexicans' lockdown behavior as a reflection of the president's actions. Santiago L. Cunial shifts the focus to South America, covering the possible link between financing to develop solar energy in Colombian municipalities and the political alignment of these towns' mayors with the central government. On the hot topic of populism, Rubén Flores-González, Patricia Andrade del Cid, Alexia Raquel Ávalos-Rivera, and Mónica Torio-Hernández consider the Mexican president's daily speeches to draw a link between his empowerment as a leader and the populist discourse, which they say feeds and manages the anger of his constituency through communication, ideology, and strategy. Finally, Fernando Serrano and Jorge A. Schiavon argue that multiple individual and contextual factors, and what they call a perceived “Hispanic threat” in different states, have a significant effect on the attitudes of U.S. citizens toward immigration and the construction of the wall that Donald Trump promoted during his term in office. In the second section of this issue, Erika Estrada Ruiz, an electoral advisor with the Mexico City Electoral Institute, and Arturo Sánchez, a professor and researcher at the School of Government and Public Transformation of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, coordinated a thematic number entitled “Subnational Democratic Variation: A Comparative Overview of Strengths and Weaknesses of Democracy in the Mexican States.” This special issue includes 13 research papers, all of which underwent blind arbitration, on the different levels and types of advances that democratic practices have seen throughout the country. In the preamble that the coordinators have prepared for this special issue, they explain the context and history of this collection of works published here. I am deeply grateful for the professional effort they manifested in making this endeavor possible, and I thank them for having selected LAMP as the space to disseminate their research. Our readers will certainly find this thematic collection thought-provoking and useful.

The Rain Gods' Rebellion: The Cultural Basis of a Nahua Insurgency

The Rain Gods' Rebellion: The Cultural Basis of a Nahua Insurgency

Robert Jackson's Non-Delegation Doctrine

This Essay explores Robert Jackson's theory of the non-delegation doctrine, which he first articulated in a brief that he filed as Solicitor General in Currin v. Wallace. The Supreme Court decided Currin without addressing Jackson’s broader arguments and his brief was forgotten. But the Currin brief deserves careful scrutiny both for the quality of its reasoning and for its two conclusions on non-delegation. First, Jackson argued that there are no internal limits on Congress’s discretion to delegate authority to executive agencies or independent boards. Second, he thought that there were such limits on Congress’s discretion to delegate authority to the President himself. The first point confirms, albeit in Jackson’s inimitable prose style, the legal consensus since 1935. His second point, though, would transform separation-of-powers law by extending constitutional limits to the authority that Congress may confer on the President for domestic affairs rather than focusing on only what Congress may take away from the President. Jackson’s brief in Currin also clarifies his canonical concurrence in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer striking down President Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War. In setting forth the first of his three categories for judging the legality of a presidential act, Justice Jackson explained: “When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at his maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” This statement can be read to mean that a presidential action based on a congressional authorization is invalid only if the act is beyond the reach of the federal government. But that reading is wrong. Jackson qualified the phrase “all that Congress can delegate” with a footnote stating that executive action could be invalid because Congress cannot delegate authority to the President. Any ambiguities on that score are resolved by reading the Youngstown concurrence in conjunction with the Currin brief, where Solicitor General Jackson claimed that congressional delegations to the President could be unconstitutional. Embracing Jackson’s non-delegation doctrine would mean that federal statutes that delegate power over domestic affairs to the President would be subject to a constitutional attack on non-delegation grounds. The best example of such a vulnerable delegation is the National Emergencies Act, which gives the President unfettered discretion to declare an emergency and hence gain extraordinary powers. Under Jackson’s theory in the Currin brief and in Youngstown, a constitutional argument can be made against the parts of the National Emergencies Act involving domestic affairs. This non-delegation challenge would also draw from Justice Jackson’s discussion of emergency powers in Youngstown, which implied that an indefinite delegation of such broad authority by Congress to the President himself would be unlawful.

Setting priorities for people with intellectual disability/intellectual developmental disorders across the lifespan: a call to action by the World Psychiatric Association.

People with DSM-5 intellectual disability/intellectual developmental disorder (ID/IDD) or ICD-11 disorders of intellectual development (DID) have multiple healthcare needs, but in many countries these needs are neither recognised nor managed effectively. This paper discusses the negative impact that stigma, discrimination and social exclusion have on the identification and care of persons with ID/IDD in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It also reviews different models of care for children, adolescents and adults. In discussing some initiatives in LMICs the emphasis is on early diagnosis, with success in providing locally sourced care for affected people and their families. This is where the medical, social and rights-based models of care intersect and is a premise of the person-centred biopsychosocial framework of the World Psychiatric Association's Presidential Action Plan 2020-2023. The plan invites psychiatrists to take a lead in changing the culture of care, as well as medical education, clinical training and research, with a renewed emphasis on workforce integration and service development in terms of community-based rehabilitation strategies.

Presidential Home Style: Trump in the Era of COVID-19

Abstract In Homestyle: House Members in their Districts (1978) Richard Fenno argued that members of Congress utilize different “home styles” when communicating with various segments of their constituency. These tailored, face-to-face interactions help build trust, are essential to the reelection effort, and shape member behavior once in office. In this paper, we reconfigure and extend Fenno’s theory to help explain presidential (in)action in the digital age. By analyzing President Trump’s daily press briefings and social media presence during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that just as a representative’s home style carries over into governance, the same can be said for a president in what we have called “presidential home styles.” We find that the characteristics that made Trump a successful campaigner in the 2016 election are not conducive to effective governance, especially during a crisis.

Pandering, Priority or Political Weapon: Presidencies, Political Parties & the Freedom of Information Act

Politics have a profound influence on the design and administration of nearly all government laws and policies. And the executive branch, a highly political institution, is given significant latitude in shaping the primary mechanism for accessing government information, the Freedom of Information Act. This article explores the political nature of the FOIA by examining legislative history, party messaging, presidential actions and a quantitative analysis of FOIA use and implementation from 1975 until the present. The outcomes are both predictable — Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump having poor records — and surprising — President George W. Bush producing a relatively transparent record. The study’s findings suggest the failures of FOIA are likely less a consequence of presidencies and political parties than an indiscriminate symptom of contemporary U.S. governance.

Determinants of citizens’ attitude to the activities of the President of Ukraine (1994–2020)

The article analyzes the determinants of citizens’ assessment of the activity of the Presidents of Ukraine during 1994–2020. The institution of the Presidency in the mass consciousness of Ukrainians is a reflection of social stratification. Social groups, formed mainly by different identities, evaluate the President's activities through the prism of their own economic situation, ideological identification, ethno-cultural affiliations, ethno-political aspirations and geopolitical orientations. The attitudes of Ukrainians to the head of state are related to electoral cycles, when the most positive assessments of activity are observed in the first year after the election. Using the method of multiple linear regression, it was found that the socio-economic determinant of the financial situation of the family was less tied to the electoral cycles: regardless of the term of office of the President , wealthy citizens evaluate his activities more positively while the poor ones evaluate it more negatively. In the mid-1990s, the attitudes towards the President of Ukraine were also differentiated by a region of residence and a language of communication in the family. However, after 2004 the factor of language communication in the family has reduced its influence on the assessment of the President's actions in favor of the question of the expediency of the Russian language official status. The factor of regional polarization restored its influence during 2003–2013. At the same time, since the end of the 1990s, the factor of geopolitical orientations of citizens has been gaining influence and has become one of the key ones in the following years. The assessment of the activities of Viktor Yushchenko, Viktor Yanukovych and Petro Poroshenko is characterized by clear geopolitical orientations. Instead, the attitudes to the activities of President Volodymyr Zelenskyi in the second year of his term are characterized by a negative attitude of respondents with both left and right ideological views.