Speaker:
John Woolley, Professor of Political Science

The most prominent research on presidential unilateral action has focused on executive orders and proclamations—readily available units of analysis. However, scholars need to consider that presidential “unilateral action” frequently involve two other kinds of significant activity: (1) discretionary executive branch action sought but not formally ordered in public communication by the President; and (2) formal presidential orders that are conveyed in public communications through documents not labeled as “executive orders” or “proclamations.” It is insufficient to study executive orders in isolation, despite the convenience of such a well-defined category. Creating a broader understanding of unilateral action is a challenging agenda. Here we report on research to identify presidential documents not titled as “executive orders” that nonetheless include presidential orders. There were over 1,600 such orders between 1977 and 2012. Further, we estimate event count models to indicate how the correlates of these “memo orders” contrast with executive orders.