UC Berkeley

I argue that understanding executive action requires examining the conditions that precede and motivate that action. In a series of three papers, I explore those conditions. The first paper studies how Congressional anticipation of presidential unilateralism conditions the production of legislation. If members of Congress can anticipate unilateral action, their failure to legislate cannot be explained by ``gridlock intervals'' in a standard spatial model. I argue instead that they may willingly surrender authority to the president to head off potential attacks from voters or interest groups. This helps to explain the president's accumulation of authority over time. More broadly, I argue that just as a large literature has examined outside pressure on Congress in isolation, we should examine its influence in the presence of the president's unilateral powers.

The second paper examines credible political communication, which may include symbolic executive orders. I present a cheap talk model in which a politician (sender) is aligned with one of two opposed groups (receivers) and seeks to communicate her preferences to win support. An increase in the weaker group's capacity may enable credible communication by the opposed type of politician, ironically making the weaker group worse-off. I illustrate the model with the case of the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States, in which Donald Trump credibly communicated alignment with anti-immigration groups through harsh messaging against immigrants, whose power was increasing. More broadly, the model and case show how shifts in relative group power can enable politicians to use messaging to assemble novel political coalitions.

The third paper (coauthored with Joseph Warren) presents a novel explanation for the origins of bureaucratic agencies, which are an important venue for executive action. Early support for expert policymaking through administrative agencies was rooted in concerns over political power. We argue that potential policy feedback effects made an anti-business coalition between liberals and populists in the late 19th-century United States unachievable. However, agencies diminished feedback effects and facilitated a successful progressive-liberal coalition. The strategic dilemma created by a changing distribution of power thus explains the development of broad political support for bureaucratic agencies.