Presidential Unilateral Action as a Tool of Voter Mobilization

Abstract

I develop a formal model that investigates conditions under which the president acts unilaterally to establish a given policy. The key innovation is that unilateral action is considered a costly tool for voter mobilization. Presidential unilateral action activates voters' constitutional concerns, which increases the cost of voting and leads the president's supporters to abstain. However, it also provides extra expressive benefits of voting to the president's supporters who deeply care about the policy established by the unilateral action. Hence, the president acts unilaterally to establish the policy only if its mobilizing effects outweigh its demobilizing effects. This result implies that the president's unilateral action acquires popular support that can compensate for the lack of its constitutionality. I discuss the possibly benign effects of unilateral action that are conducive to an effective government and argue that it is necessary to account for these effects when making normative judgments about unilateral action.

Surges vs. Waves: Presidents, Popularity, and the Diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America

“…First, the overuse of unilateral powers evokes concerns about accountability (Mainwaring and Shugart 1997, 465; Negretto 2004, 556) and complaints from Congress (O’Donnell 1994, 66). Second, it can generate negative reactions from the public (Amorim Neto 2006, 420), so a policy enacted unilaterally must outweigh the popularity costs of decrees (Kang 2020). Presidents apply those unilateral powers to models that can provide immediate popularity boosts.…”

Between Two Fires: The Institutional and Public Constraints to Unilateral Policy Change

“…Seminal formal models of unilateral policymaking assume presidents set policy through unilateral actions, which remain in place until overturned by Congress or the courts (Chiou and Rothenberg 2017;Howell 2003); and such inter-branch reversals, in practice, happen infrequently (Howell 2003). More recent models explicitly allow presidents to subsequently change these status quos through new unilateral actions (Kang 2020;Foster 2020). Considerably few empirical studies, however, analyze presidents' decisions on unilateral alterations across time.…”

Presidential Unilateral Power

“…Howell & Wolton (2018) show that when aligned with the public, presidents have incentives to act aloneeven when that action may empower opponents in the future. In another model, Kang (2020) analyzes the differential effects that unilateral action may have on a president's electoral supporters and opponents. This framework posits that voters have constitutional concerns about presidential unilateralism, which will demobilize the president's supporters unless unilateral action addresses policies in which they are invested.…”