| Summary: | Presidents have two major assets at their disposal when seeking to alter policy:
executive orders and legislative action. There are certain advantages and disadvantages
to each course. Although presidency scholars have focused extensively on presidential
efforts in the legislative arena, little attention has been paid to how a president affects
policy through direct action. Because executive orders have been under-researched, there
has been a dearth of theory development that adequately explains when presidents will
act unilaterally through executive orders and when they will instead seek legislative
avenues to policy change.
This project develops a parsimonious theory grounded in the transaction costs
framework that explains how a president chooses between seeking congressional action
versus acting unilaterally through executive orders to accomplish policy change. The
theory holds that when presidents desire policy change, they balance the transaction costs
executive orders and legislative action present, selecting the course that presents the
greatest benefit after accounting for the transaction costs present.
After outlining the theory, I test my predictions using an original data set. Each
executive order from 1946 to 2004 was read and examined for policy content. Unlike
most prior studies of presidential use of executive orders, this study only includes orders that affect policy in the data analyses. The series of empirical tests provide support for
my theory: Presidents consider the transaction costs that executive orders and the pursuit
of legislation pose and take the action that maximizes their utility when seeking policy
change
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