“‘Do This! Do That!’ and Nothing Will Happen”

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14534062
• Author: Joshua B. Kennedy
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2015, Vol. 43(1) 59 –82

© The Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14534062

apr.sagepub.com

Article

“‘Do This! Do That!’

and Nothing Will

Happen”: Executive

Orders and Bureaucratic

Responsiveness

Joshua B. Kennedy1

Abstract

How effective is unilateral presidential power? Recent developments have

shifted presidential scholarship in the direction of a more institutional

approach, and one of the most important tenets of this work holds that

the president has the ability to make policy on his own. However, there

is significant anecdotal evidence suggesting that agency responsiveness to

executive orders is not at all guaranteed. This study leverages a unique data

set tracing the implementation of executive orders across 10 government

agencies, and the results indicate that despite conventional wisdom,

presidential directives are not universally implemented, and a host of factors

come to bear on an agency’s decision as to whether they will respond. This

project represents among the first quantitative empirical assessments of the

utility of unilateral power and suggests that the field may benefit most from

shifting toward a bargaining-based model similar to those used in legislative

scholarship.

Keywords

presidency, bureaucracy, executive orders, unilateral powers

1University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joshua B. Kennedy, Department of Political Science, Georgia Southern University, P.O. Box

8101, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA.

Email: joshuakennedy@georgiasouthern.edu

534062APRXXX10.1177/1532673X14534062American Politics ResearchKennedy

research-article2014

60 American Politics Research 43(1)

Introduction

In the early summer of 2013, President Barack Obama offered stern words1

for those who would resist new initiatives to address climate change: “We

don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” the president said.

“Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going

to protect you from the coming storm.” Several months earlier, in the first

State of the Union Address of his second term, Obama (2013) made clear that

he was not reluctant to take executive action:

. . . if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct

my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the

future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of

climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

These were not empty words; in June, the Obama Administration unveiled

The President’s Climate Action Plan,2 a multi-faceted document that includes

various steps, among them, unilateral executive action, to deal with climate

change.

The story is not an unfamiliar one; a president, facing a stubborn Congress,

decides to use the powers of the executive to affect change that legislators are

apparently unwilling to accept. Richard Nixon (1978), as “the first President

in 120 years to begin his term with both houses of Congress controlled by the

opposition party” (p. 414), took extensive steps to establish greater control of

the bureaucratic process to push his agenda, although with decidedly mixed

results (e.g., Campbell, 2005; Lewis, 2008). Facing serious opposition to his

approach to apartheid in South Africa, Ronald Reagan circumvented Congress

with an executive order designed to outflank legislative attempts at more

drastic sanctions against that nation (e.g., Howell, 2003). When Republicans

claimed control of Congress during Democrat Bill Clinton’s tenure, one of

Clinton’s advisors, Paul Begala, indicated that the president was more than

willing to take action on his own: “‘Stroke of the Pen . . . Law of the Land.

Kind of cool’” (as cited in Mayer, 2001, p. 7), Begala said. The picture

painted is often the same: a bold leader taking decisive action in the face of

an obstructionist, non-responsive Congress. The exercise of unilateral power

has led to a dramatic increase in the study of the institutional capacities of the

presidency, and may signal a shift in the study of executive politics.

But the increased attention paid to the politics of the unilateral presidency

rests on a central foundation that, to this point, presidential scholars have not

adequately established. The concern about unilateral power is self-evident:

Should one individual have the ability to essentially direct the bureaucracy at

his or her command? Numerous scholars have waded into this normative